Confession: a nun slapped me once

I was in the first grade and a bunch of us boys — you know, 6-year-olds — were noisily goofing off in the boys’ bathroom. Then this big ol’ nun comes barging through the door and slaps me right across the face. It’s about the only thing I remember from first grade (except the time I wet my pants because another nun wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom).

These, of course, were important preparations for a life peppered with indignity, injustice and downright meanness. I was lucky: I got out after the first grade. My darling wife, bless her heart, endured eight years of it.

So I have some context on Pat Oliphant’s hilarious cartoon depicting a ruler-wielding nun who sets the grammar-school Mel Gibson on a path that ends in “The Passion of the Christ.” Seems it was so funny that it moved a few Catholics to tears. And so funny that the editorial page editor felt moved to express regret over the ruffled feelings of people with warm, misty memories of their favorite nuns.

All this caught the attention of William Powers of the National Journal, moving him to expose the nefarious forces on the loose in newspaperland.

We are living in The Age of the Ombudsman, a deeply earnest and practical time when it all comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. “The point” of any piece of work is weighed against “the cost,” i.e., the number of people it offends. The implications of this approach are enormous, but nobody seems to care.

Powers implies that if papers were more wicked, they’d be more popular. A dicey proposition in a time when people are tuning out all news in droves. Still, Powers makes one point we ought to put in the first paragraph of our Newsroom Mission Statements: There is never a need to apologize to people who can’t take a joke.