Some people "get" America, says Kathleen Parker, and some "people" don't. It's not clear whether "getting" it means understanding it, or owning and running it by divine right. A little of both, probably.
Blackhearted gossoons like yours truly have sometimes hinted that the Right's idea of patriotism relies a little too heavily on dime-a-dozen stage props like the Stars and Stripes. Parker, to her credit, agrees:
Who "gets" America? And who doesn't?These symbols are inadequate because anyone can buy them and flaunt them, from the wogs down the street to the coons next door to the chinks across the way. Real Americanism is deeper than that. It's more...integral, if you follow my meaning. It's more personal, if you catch my drift. It's one of those black and white issues, nudge nudge.
The answer has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin, which Obama donned for a campaign swing through West Virginia, or even military service, though that helps. It's also not about flagpoles in front yards or magnetic ribbons stuck on tailgates.
It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots....Oh, absolutely. One only has to read John Derbyshire or Mark Steyn or Dinesh D'Souza to appreciate the essential justice of this...this...this weltanschauung. It takes time, at the very least, to become a "full-blooded American." Indeed, I'd venture to say that some unfortunate people may never quite manage it. As Charles Bargone pointed out, "the climate, so quick to change a man's skin, takes years to change his blood, and centuries to modify the neurones!"
We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants -- and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.
Anyhow, White America has been put on the defensive for too long, according to Parker, and its legendary patience is at last wearing thin.
What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.This "remodeling" is what Parker elsewhere presents as "the dash to diversity," as though it were some drastic and purposeful deviation from the normal course of things. Acknowledging everyday reality amounts to special pleading, y'see, while aggrieved believers in the crackpot phantasmagoria that Parker calls "once-upon-a-time America" are merely keepin' it real...just as they were when they portrayed the Irish and the Italians and the Chinese and the Jews as an unassimilable horde of subhumans with a marrow-deep affinity for vice, vermin and filth.
I agree that this heritage shouldn't be swept under the carpet; it should be swept off the face of the earth. Any American life not spent in explicit or implicit repudiation of it is flawed at best. Parker talks sanctimoniously of forefathers who "fought and died" for America, as though the best of them hadn't fought and died precisely so that boots like Parker's might one day be lifted from the necks of minorities, women and the poor. (And God knows I'm not necessarily talking about soldiers here.)
Parker's sympathy, I suspect, lies more with that crowd of geniuses who saw Walt Whitman as a fag and George Herriman as a nigger and Emma Goldman as a kike whore, and couldn't look at the American wilderness without estimating how much it was worth per foot, and sneered at every native artistic production that didn't cater to their bottomless appetite for unearned praise and entrepreneurial platitudes. Which is to say, her sympathy lies with power, regardless of how confidently she struts around in the borrowed plumes of white working-class resentment.
Just in case you haven't had enough mawkish celebration of the Herrenvolk for one day, the intrepid Michael Medved checks in with an article on "American DNA":
The radical notion that our national character stems from genetics as well as culture has always inspired angry controversy; many observers scoff at the whole idea of a unifying hereditary component in our multi-racial, multi-cultural society....Our stark differences in appearance, if nothing else, argue against the concept of common DNA connecting contemporary citizens of wildly divergent ancestry.Duly noted. But what these scoffers fail to reckon with is that we're a nation descended from traitors who deserted the Homeland when the going got rough:
In “American Mania,” Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. argues that even in grim epochs of starvation and persecution, only a small minority ever chooses to abandon its native land and to venture across forbidding oceans to pursue the elusive dream of a better life.In other words, it slowly but inexorably dawned on them that someone had moved their cheese. It's only natural that the descendants of these visionary malcontents should "possess a distinctive makeup of their 'dopamine receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.'"
Which explains why Medved screams for smelling salts and a vinegar poultice when movies fail to follow the path made holy by The Sound of Music, and why Obama's polite refusal of a morning cup of coffee turned the nation upside-down, and why Kathleen Parker has devoted so much energy and malice to explaining that "full-blooded Americans" don't nohow cotton to this here multicultural guff, any more than they did back in 19-ought-3.
Next week: Jonah Goldberg explains that "blood and soil" is actually quite a useful concept, once you abstract it from its unfortunate liberal-fascist historical context, and praises ranchers (but not dairy farmers) as the most precious blood-source of the American People.
(Illustration: "The Coming Man -- Uncle Sam Introduces Eastern Barbarism to Western Civilization." From Harper's Weekly, 1869.)
8 comments:
It's only natural that the descendants of these visionary malcontents should "possess a distinctive makeup of their 'dopamine receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.'"
By definition, of course, not possessed by the descendents of slaves. (Nor by "others" whose foreign-born fathers--as mothers don't count--decided not to stay.)
In the face of this danger to the world, sentimentality is out of place. It may be that some to not understand the importance of the Jewish Question, but that will not stop us. Ridding all Europe of Jewry is not a matter of morality, but rather a question of the international security. The Jew will always act consistently with his nature and racial instincts. He cannot do otherwise. Just like a potato beetle destroys potatoes, the Jew destroys nations and peoples. There is only one solution: to deal radically with the danger.
I agree with Kathleen Parker. Iroquois should be the national language and if people can't tell the emergency room from Oneida Lake, screw 'em.
My ancestors have been here for going on 400 years, which I think entitles me to a cup of coffee just about anywhere -- as long as I've got $2 or $3 to go with it.
Perhaps my "roots," such as they are, give me a bit more leeway to tell racist, crypto-fascist morons like Kathleen Parker to go stick their heads in an oven and turn on the gas.
But, even if it doesn't, I'm going to say it anyway.
To be quite scientific about it, I think the dopamine receptor thing is B.S. There are all kinds of reasons to leave one's country, besides some architectural difference in the neurons.
It's a pseudoscientific way of arguing for the idea of American exceptionalism in biological terms. We, they argue, have special dopamine pathways that make us more individualistic, more restless! In what way? Has there been a study confirming this, or is this just some wild ass guess based on self-satisfied speculation?
The easier explanation, given the complexity of the human brain, is that immigration to the United States became, for economic and social reasons, highly desireable, and that many different kinds of people came over for many different kinds of reasons, meaning that Americans likely have a rich diversity of genetic differences in their neurology, and that the difference in attitude is mainly cultural. After all, it is a well documented melieu we're talking about here.
The real fact of the matter is, even race breaks down as a consistent biological category when you look closer at it. Your biological resemblance to another person is determined more by where your ancestors live than what the color of your skin is. Thusly, a South African black or person of recent South African descent has more in common genetically with a black person from Namibia than they have with somebody from the Horn of Africa, and a Somali from there (or Kenyan, if we're speaking of Obama's parentage) has more in common with an Arab than with that Black South African.
Knowing this, what sense do these blood arguments make, especially with African Americans who have much in the way of intermixing with those of European descent in America? Genetic purity, much less cultural purity, is a pipe dream when cultures and genetics in real life become so interchangeable.
Like I said at eschaton, "blood in the face" is the term Parker is searching for.
But that's a little too blatantly racist, so "blood equity" works well, too. Also ignores the amount of labor done by slaves, Indian as well as African, and by non-whites, upon which Ms. Parker's comfort rests.
While Ms. Parker's paen to "full blooded" Americans was an admirable tract, I was left wanting a photo of the young man whose beliefs she portrayed. I've been down this road before, falling for some perfect manisfestation of what makes us better than everyone else, only to be disappointed by reality. Michelle Malkin. She was(I thought) the epitome of a Real American, willing to fight the "yellow Peril" by enforced relocation, and to see those methods applied to the brown Peril, to speak out against Our enemies. I was in love. Then I saw her photo. I was, like "what the f--k?" I can't let that happen again. I am too emotionally fragile.
The Holocaust is a falsifiable fact just like the theory of gravity or thermodynamics.
If you actually believe in science you would believe that data could, in fact, be found to falsify the holocaust.
And this is the tremendous irony of AGW folks calling skeptics "deniers" because by making the allusion that the Holocaust cannot be falsified they reveal a truly stunning ignorance of the scientific method.
That's an interesting argument. Completely wrong, but interesting.
First, the term "denialist," which I often use, has nothing to do with Holocaust denial. It refers simply to denying AGW, and would be perfectly applicable even if the Holocaust had never happened.
Second, it's quite true that the Holocaust is falsifiable in principle, along with everything else we believe.
Regardless, in the absence of any such falsification, and in the presence of overwhelming evidence for the Holocaust, we treat Holocaust deniers as liars or lunatics, because to do otherwise would be to embrace an impossibly radical skepticism (the foundation of which is, ironically enough, a radical credulity as to the possibility of an 80-year conspiracy to create the mere appearance of an official effort to exterminate the Jews).
Putting aside the fact that you don't actually seem to understand falsifiability in the scientific sense, the claim of AGW proponents versus denialists is not that AGW can't be falsified, now or ever, in theory or in practice, but that the current evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of AGW, and either missing or already falsified on the skeptic's side, and that the stakes are high enough that it's best to err on the side of caution, instead of waiting for a falsification that may never come.
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