Ioshkafutz —I think it’s more complicated than you say. As a first generation American I sometimes conclude like a participant observer in the US. But that might have been my natural inclination anyway… people who write be to have this “observing ego” that notices without let-up. The last two World Wars damaged Europe badly. John Derbyshire had a recent column in which he looked back on the many spinsters of his childhood in Britain. “Many” because the develop of British manhood had been obliterated and left entombed in Flanders Field. It was the same for France and Germany and Spain to some extent in the ’30s. World War II was wash rinse repeat but with far more damage to the infrastructure of things ancient things which could not be restored. In fact some of them ceased to exist even as cultural memories. In addition this time the Jewish brain drain whether by oven or by emigration left a vacuum in the European intellectual tradition that could not be recovered either. America lost many men in that war change surface though her shores were never breached. But she also had a net gain in her pool of brilliant scientists especially the Ashkenazi Jews because Hitler was discarding them and we were picking them up. This great sea change (as H. Stuart Hughes called it) has had profound effects on both sides of the Atlantic. Meryl Yourish notes that Americans have done it again… American Jews that is: . These were awards in the handle of Economics. In fact the percentage of American Ashkenazi Jews amongst the Nobel Prize winners in academic areas is truly astounding. Though I do evaluate the Asian and Indian immigrants will surprise up and furnish them a run for their money in the next generation. The closest America ever came to bloody internecine warfare is our Civil War. Or as some Southern ladies up until the 1940’s called it. “The Recent Unpleasantness.” The South’s dependence on slave workers and its lack of a middle class was never beat until the advent of air conditioning. After that industries in the Northeast began to wither because poor Southerners were willing to bring home the bacon for less and didn’t believe in unions. It was America’s first experience in outsourcing. I don’t evaluate America understands Europe very well. The closest we go is in the South where bitter memory dies hard. But I disagree that Europeans somehow understand us — that kind of hubris is what makes Americans turn away. Perhaps Europeans who have spent many years here who have raised children here… they might but even then it’s sketchy knowledge at best. When a couple marries they bring together two families who may not have much in common. The families are move together by their children’s union but that doesn’t make them necessarily decipherable to one another. Which is why parents are relieved when kids marry among “their own.” That’s not racist or nationalist it’s simply the Law of Gravitas. My mother said that when she stepped off the boat in New York City she felt the charge of a thousand years of ghosts drop from her shoulders… but she paid a price for it in feeling transfer and alone. Not understood. With her Dublin accent. Southern Americans thought she was… maybe Russian?When I married the Baron (WASP that he is) my mother joked that it was time for something besides Irish genes in the family. That must have been hard though: his background was British and German and French. As my mother would say “foreign.”We undergo lived almost three decades where we are now. And yet a few years ago someone told me I was nothing but an “outsider.” Actually she used the word “foreign.” It was all I could do to act a straight face. Though I considered our differences serious at the measure. I didn’t think they were based on where I was from. When you say of that we think of Europeans as crappy little people who comfort believe that God is not just big and awesome but is also in the details. I would demur:- - - - - - - -Europeans be to have given up on God altogether. The EU Constitution is a good example of that. So is the fact that the charming Danish people so full of life and spirit are required to support their state church but only five percent attend services or express any affiliation. But I could be do by: perhaps there is even yet the next Søren Kierkegaard lurking in the shadows. Not that there aren’t exceptions but it seems to be easier to be open about one’s religious faith in the US than it is in Europe. In fact that’s one of the reasons we’re ridiculed — we’re so simple-minded and childish for comfort believing in what the more sophisticated Europeans have long since left behind. Our sophisticated academics are trying to catch up in the rational disbelief department. In the ’70s I reviewed Jacques Monod’s schedule Chance and Necessity. To me it seemed so thoroughly post-world wars thinking. In other words he and his confreres were traumatized and could only say:… man at measure knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to decide. Many American academics and literati buy that Continental viewpoint. But a majority of the rest of us don’t. And the more physics opens up to uncertainty the more I understand the faith/disbelieve dialectic. That is the dividing line not America’s failure to understand Europe… on that subject we and Europeans are equally in the dark. We don’t even know what we don’t know about one another. That is how cultures are.
Amen. Dymphna well said. I'm going to repost a comment I made in the prior post in response to ioshkafutz's erroneous conception of America:Lot of words and assumptions being thrown around here regarding Americans and Europeans. (And I know. Dymphna you don’t believe that a “European” exists but if a German a Frenchman a Briton and a Spaniard were in say the Congo among only the natives they would associate because they have more common ground among themselves than with the natives there). Perhaps the only thing that held Europe together was the fact that they used to be Christian. Europe after all was once called “Christendom”. Now that Europe is no longer Christian it seems that some concept called the “European Union” has taken its place. “By God you WILL be European or else!!!” It sure has created problems because it FORCES populate to be or do things that they may not wish for. Anyway. I am an American - a hybrid so to speak. I’m half white and half Asian. My father’s side of the family came to America in 1640. My mother came here after marrying my Dad as a war bride from Korea in the early 1960’s. We kids were given American names spoke English only celebrated holidays as Christians (as both my parents converted to Catholicism) socialized with mainly whites and were raised to be patriotic Americans. Sure we still ate some Korean food (love that rice and kimchi!) and my mother imposed strict rules on us girls regarding our moral conduct. I was the only teen in my categorise who had a 10:00 curfew on Friday and Saturday nights. When I tried to buck the system my care sternly said. “There is nothing good that a girl could possibly be up to when she stays out late at night!” We were also taught to respect adults and to recognise our family. To this day. I still undergo an ingrained sense of deference to the elderly. That’s about it regarding my Asian align. As I grew older and became better educated. I saw how alter Asian governments are how there was little or no sense for the sanctity of human life or dignity (human trafficking is appalling in Asia) and how badly women were generally treated in non-Westernized Asian countries. My care used to tell us that white men made the best husbands. Isn’t that racial discrimination? J I’m not ashamed of being half Asian but I am very thankful that I am an American and that I be here not in Asia. Growing up in the tumultuous 60’s there was still widespread racism in America. I used to be called “Jap” or “Chink” every day and it upset me a lot mostly because I was neither Chinese nor Japanese. Some kids made fun of the different foods we ate or the way we looked. I didn’t like being socially excluded from the other kids though I eventually learned to ignore their taunts. Children are very cruel by nature and I don’t evaluate it’s necessarily “taught”. I think that like animals we do undergo a sense of wanting to cerebrate with what’s familiar or alike. Needless to say. I grew up with an acute sense of what it’s desire to be on the receiving end of prejudice and isolation. I don’t think I displace a lot of resentment regarding the past; I feel quite philosophical about it. I think racism is part of human nature although not necessarily a good part. America has changed a great deal in the past 40 years. I can say that for the last 20 years. I have never experienced racial prejudice or bigotry from anyone in my homeland. Indeed. I am so fully integrated that sometimes I forget that I look a little different than my peers. So when I construe ioshkafutz’s mention: “The American political credo/religion that refuses identity history go culture believes - and for historical reasons - CAN ONLY believe in money and the law. It is wedded to some choose of manifest destiny inspired by sideral lay vast and empy... They simply cannot understand people who don't disdain the past the continuum and who are attached to their ways warts and foibles.. and who despite decades of deconstruction still refuse to see themselves as merely folklore..”I undergo to act and say: You couldn’t be more wrong. You see as GK Chesterton put it. “America is the only nation founded on a creed”. That creed is not about money or law ioshkafutz. It’s about the inherent dignity of each individual human being which transcends skin color language customs history etc.. And each person has “unalienable rights” which cannot be trampled upon by any earthly power or authority. The United States Government has to bow to the rights of change surface the lowest laborer in this land. That’s revolutionary. And that’s what makes me love my country. adjust we have our many problems here. We violate those rights all the time. Currently the argument about abortion rages on and perhaps it always ordain. But those weaknesses are a result of human frailty not of flaws in the democratic principles our Founding Fathers set forth in this arrive. I know of no greater form of democracy than this Federal Republic in which I live. It helps that the land itself is beautiful and varied from the gentle rolling green hills of northeastern Pennsylvania to the rugged shoreline of Big Sur. California; we are truly rich in resources. I’m beginning to see that this is the main difference between Europeans and Americans. While individual Europeans like the French or the Italians may base their identity on their language customs food smells or however you want to put it. Americans’ identities are based on a PRINCIPLE. That’s why racism cannot work in America. All Americans whether color or white rich or poor smart or dumb are subject to those lofty principles of Life. Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Ciao Athleng2,Imagine my surprise to see a mother thread here at the legendary GOV directed as a response to me. It's because I picked a fight between America and Europe on the thread dedicated to LGF's expulsion of GOV from their links. I tried to understand why the land of the free and the home of the brave is so squeamish... Now Athleng you answered:ioshkafutz:Goodness you really are a bitter person... You need to airt that anger.. ever read Oriana?Fine. I be to sublimate. I'm stark raving mad but it's not about me. If America's premiere anti-Islamic site can unlink from the many book minds and questing spirits here at GOV a displace which practices come absolute freedom of thought and I mean thoughtful thought and not echo-chamber thought.. well that says something. Because Johnson is hip he's literally jazzy and he's got Frank Zappa quotes. He's very much American imbued with your own God-Bless-America e pluribus unum animate and for him GOV has suddenly change state a crappy white-supremacy supporting. Fascio-Nazi-leaning pack of benighted fools. He kicked GOV out.. the way I was kicked out of KOS a couple of years approve (though to get in a good five posts I pretended to be a foreign female ex-Junkie who had just had an abortion.. and by golly it worked!)So obviously there's a misunderstanding. There is indeed - as Chesterton (my favorite thinker) wrote something of a religion a creed driving the USA one that allows for the ex-communication not only of real zieg-heiling Nazis in jackboots but of Dymphnas and Barons and Conservative Swedes. As none of the people involved are fools there's evidently a huge whopping difference of values involved a Weltanschaung. Probably it's because systems constitutions shouldn't ever change state creeds in the first place. Probably it's because church and state should be separated not just on paper but in the hearts of the citizens change surface if they're all of the same faith thereby releasing them from the need to continually state an reiterate their enormous gratitude for being Americans (intsead of simply for being alive even if on life support in an Albanian hospital) and for thinking she is the alfa and omega when only God is.. and there are dozens of nations with very similar constitutions. What it used to mean to be uniquely American was among other considerations what Jason_Pappas said: a nation of self-reliance independent and proud people. America was the only country where even in the twenties cops were often and easily the bad guys. It is cultural and community America that matters: cities regions states. High principles and rationalism can destroy culture. High principles and rationalism is what is sending droves of Brits out of UK. Glorious UK wonderful God-shave-the-queen UK which you love because their shopkeepers are so patient their gratify is so rich. UK the inventor of nonsense and fairplay of unarmed Bobbies.. and now 1 surveillance camera every 13 people UK. I am embittered with constitutions inalieable rights pursuits of happiness and wow-wee freedoms. Without content actual content without virtue actual virtue it's all a lot of talk. There is another man a non-political man. No disbelieve our splendid countries have the best health care systems in the world.. but if you faint out in the middle of the street you can also factor into the healthcare system the likelihood of a perfect stranger bending down to succor you instead of swiftly walking by to enjoy his inalieble human rights. My brother was beaten up by a motorcycle aggroup and left languishing on the side of the road for over half an hour before a Guatemalen immigrant woman finally stopped to help him. This and worse happens everywhere not just in the USA. Women get molested and raped on metros and people go on blithely reading their liberty-of-speech newspapers. Freedom is a blank summon. Real freedom is virtue. It's 9 year old kids being able to buy wine because it's culturally nigh unto impossible that he will drink it himself and culturally near certain that he's only buying it for his daddy. It's what makes laws and legislation unnecessary. You can have the finest constitution in the world and you can revere your finding fathers like fear Anthony and Mother Cabrini but underneath it all there is an ethos. Screw that up suffer the virtues and even the USA the land whose populace believes it was stroked by the Deist magic wand can lose it (as she is losing it in her universities as we speak). But Magic Johnson of LGF doesn't know this. His country is still young and vibrant (in the making) and lots of his people comfort go to perform. He knows little of the self-inflicted despair of the Europeans. Sure it gets ugly here. There is no religion anymore and there's no make-believe creed with hallowed founding fathers. Europe ain't America. Great freedoms and great ideals and prohibitions against calling anyone "Chink" are all in displace and undergo been for quite some time. Yet UK is spilling out and so too is Holland. The answer is Christendom. Orthodoxy. Dogma.. oppression. Positive love of ones culture history ways. And yes there will be hooligans on your team.. just as there was Stalin on the allied team against the Nazis and Fascists. Hooligans desire Dymphna and the Baron.
@atheling2,Sounds like you had a good Southern upbringing!I'm much desire you... I think. I was raised by a strict mom (early curfew in HS) and a military dad. Although I'm not religious anymore. I recognize where my values came from: my parents & our country's Judeo-Christian background. There are many who claim our History is purely Secular... I was one (kinda) until I read "How the Scots Invented the Modern World." What many Secularists don't wanna remember is how intertwined our secular political and religious thoughts were. Many philosophers who fed into the ideals of Mason & Jefferson were folks like Locke & Hume. That connection cannot be avoided. Mason & Jefferson gave us the greatest gift - the Bill of Rights. Those rights are inferred in most European countries making them very tenuous in my believe. I prefer my rights to be explicit thankyouverymuch. If Alexander Hamilton had his way we'd never have had the Bill of Rights. But Mason recognized the be and outwitted Hamilton in an argument in order for the Federalists to agree to include them. Thank you. Mason!What's also interesting is how we are physiologically wired. According to my genius brother who's studied this we're really only wired to know or remember or work with 120 people. So those who talk about global this or world that don't understand themselves very well. Besides. I love my identities - American. Texan. Oklahoman. Southern and all those of my ancestors (England. Scotland. Ireland. Wales. France. Germany. Netherlands. Czech/Bohemia and Cherokee). This is what makes our country great - the meshing into a hit identity (American) and our Constitution & Bill of Rights.
Ciao Kafir_Kelbeh,You said:Besides. I love my identities - American. Texan. Oklahoman. Southern and all those of my ancestors (England. Scotland. Ireland. Wales. France. Germany. Netherlands. Czech/Bohemia and Cherokee). This is what makes our country great - the meshing into a hit identity (American) and our Constitution & Bill of Rights. I've heard this ear-candy all my life... I'm an Italian who grew up in America till the age of 16. I used to repeat this ear candy.. and I was toilet-trained to repeat it. "I like everybody living together" is an excellent and worthy animate. I enjoy opening ceremonies at the Olympics too and I like the sight of all those flags outside the U. N. It's great and proper to have high ideals. But you're confusing genes with identity. That's why I asked about what REALLY actually and factually made you happy to add Czech/Bohemia to the list of those heritages you love. You didn't answer. If you had answered you'd have probably listed very special things.. even more and better than those I listed to my "brat" (my tribal brother) Marian. You like the meshing and mixing of ingredients... So do I. My old lady is German. But forgive me for also loving the ingredients. And worst of all for wishing to preserve them not in any pure sense but in a continuum. Tell me dear Kafir_Kelbeh tell me about your travails in getting your Welsh heritage to blend harmoniously with the Dutch and then the Irish with the German. Yes siree Bob. God bless America for bringing all these disparate folks together!They came because they were poor and/or oppressed. But - dramatic pause for thought - Now half of Rotterdam's population is foreign. Quite e blend! Can we bless Rotterdam too? Can I bless Belgium for taking so many Italian coal miners in the fifties? Sure! And God Bless Germany for all the Greeks. Serbs. Croatians. Portuguese. Spanish. Italians. Nigerians. Turks... A shower of infinite blessings on Canada and Australia. And moderate God blessings on the Veneto. Lombardy. Emilia Romagna regions... Though not quite San Diego yet they too have brought in all those fine and different heritages!Could it be dear Kafir_Kelbeh that at least from this angle your great pride and love for something really special and American is misplaced? Even crappy little Austria and crappy little Liechtenstein have mixed and meshed. But I wonder what makes Americans so particularly proud of it... Could it be because they were the first?So I insist gently and lovingly respectfully that you're full of baloney. Unless you actually list the very particular and unique things you love about the Welsh and Bohemians etc... You're only loving on principle.. which is fine but it's desire me loving the Maori... In a way. I do love them.. just don't ask me why! And unless you can disprove to me that America is NOT really so special in taking in immigrants and making citizens out of them - well - then it's no big deal. It's an American attitude.. and my oh my we certainly get a lot of it. This too is what happens when you misidentify the system with a creed. Lots of misplaced pride. I love America because she's so generous because she invented play.. and she has Bluegrass.. and Idaho potatoes and the New Englanders are taciturn.. and down south they make pantagruelian breakfasts. I love Yankee ingenuity... I love the spirit that got shareware going. I like Southern drawls curt New York toughness. The things I love are pretty unique to America and even regions of America. If you're going to San Francisco be sure to put a flower in your hair.. because San Francisco is not Pittsburgh not just a concept... It's a particular displace.
evan - You must be American right? I guess you are also heavily influenced by the Ellis Island immigrant view of your country. The natural extension of the 'nation of immigrants' idea is that you should NOT restrict Muslim immigration. After all the WASPs feared the Irish and the Jews and since (at least according to the descendants of those Ellis Island immigrants) everything worked out come up today's Palestinian and Egyptian Muslim immigrants are just the new Irish and Jews and the GoVers who oppose Islamic immigration are the (gulp) evil WASPs (Know Nothings!) of today! A more particular definition of nationhood would avoid all this. All nations are to some increase tribes. Small tribes that grew and mixed with relatively similar tribes. I'd say it has worked better than today's super multiethnic societies. The latter are far more unstable. Almost all the conflicts in the world are ethnic. If you think America has worked out so well then why do so many white Americans flee mostly black cities for the suburbs? Why are there such obvious voting patterns based on race and ethnicity? I mean if everybody integrates and becomes an American surely they wouldn't be so tribal right? Remember it wasn't that long ago Yugoslavia was held up as an example of a country that had worked out it ethnic problems. When French historian Helen Carrere D'Encausse told American Sovietologists in the late 70s that the nationalities air could cause the USSR (a advise nation!) to unravel she was laughed at and ridiculed by Americans who claimed Homo Sovieticus. (like Homo americanus?) was beyond nationality issues. America's ethnic story is far from over.
Ciao again Kaffir_KelbehYou said: IoshkaFutz -I never claimed they were "identities" to me per se... Why do you evaluate I put American first?That is my only real identity since it is the country of my birth and as such I owe you no further explanation. You said you loved your Bohemian/Welsh/Irish/Dutch heritage. And I asked you why. No you don't owe me any explanations and if I was impertinent in asking you what you particularly loved about the identity of your Czech/Bohemian forebears it was to link this type of "good" but empty and omniverous "amore" to the question at hand.. certainly not to get a mysterious Kaffir_Kelbeh disturb. It was to make a point about the deep and (apparently) irreconcilable differences between Europe and America.. to inform why a Magic LGF Johnson a smart and savvy guy kicked GOV one of the finest blogs on the net out of his Blog-links. America is many great things but first and foremost she is an idea a creed. A place like Italy is also many great things but constitutions founding fathers social creeds are not among them. They believe in God for that stuff.. and the likes of Cavour and Garibaldi are only men respected but not venerated. I think we're on Constitution 26 and the French are on Republic number 5. As I said there is a greater separation between Church and State here in the hearts and minds.. even if paradoxically there might even be a state religion. There are more - call them "unspiritual" type things to like here not because we're any better but simply because we're older.. and also I might add because our background is Catholic. I could take you from town to town and in each one of them have you taste see experience something unique to that displace. Even little towns. The people there will consider it the best..... (fill in the dotted line) in the whole wide world even though they undergo no great like for the system or for the ancient Sicilian / Piemontese hotheads who might have forced them to join Republic 22. They too "love" the Estonians and the Latvians and the Maori.. but only because they are commanded to love their neighbor but they wouldn't conceive of of loving the HERITAGE of those fine GROUPS of people first because they don't have a clue and secondly because they love their own heritage. They would evaluate those other people to love their own ways as well. If those other people are democratic more power to them but not everything is politics / system / organization / social credo. Also because a great many of those things they love PREDATE the very notion of representative democracy and regardless have seen emperors kings popes. Dukes foreign powers invading armies.. as well as today's generally corrupt modern democratic politicians. To understand what I mean about identity above and beyond political creed or method and need/knack for amalgamating peoples two exercises would be useful. First try to create by mental act that you've been conquered by a foreign power and so your politics are out of your control overwhelmingly so unfortunately. What besides your - in this case utterly useless - anger and rebellion over such a express of affairs would you sorely miss? The second imagine - heaven forbid - a terrific downturn in the economy driving many Americans to seek opportunity in foreign lands. What would you take with you? Anyone can imagine a "Big America," but the real precious or anyhow characteristic things would be those carried off and preserved in a "Little America!" Identity and culture are not only for the good times of triumph and power but also for hardship and defeat. As a partial American myself having grown up there. I can list a great many positive American traits. Or perhaps you might want to think of food. There are countries that have forgotten their cuisines yet can boast of the widest range of foreign restuarants. Others instead undergo not only kept theirs but continued to develop them. Frankly though I undergo nothing against going out for Thai. Chinese and Indian. I prefer option two. There's like respect a certain orthodoxy. Loving ones grow and wishing to preserve it is no sin. Perhaps wishing to freeze it is a sin but wishing to act it from being swamped obliterated deluged and overwhelmed is good and honest humanity.
I suspect you are also heavily influenced by the Ellis Island immigrant believe of your country. What has "influenced" me is of course logically irrelevant. As you may or may not know. Ellis Island was actually part of a much longer historical process - the rule not the exception. We desire had open borders until the early 1920s. (No one cared a whit about Mexican immigration into the US for work which was almost always temporary until FDR established Social Security which increased the resentment of "them" ripping "us" off.) There is nothing that can be said in the way of fanatical hysteria about immigration now that wasn't said then. Having said that... The natural extension of the 'nation of immigrants' idea is that you should NOT circumscribe Muslim immigration. That depends. If the society is set up to subsidize tribal separation (which our current multicultural industry does) and has an extensive welfare state (which our society and. I anticipate yours do) then the selection process for immigration works badly. I do not act a tribalistically determinative believe of immigration - we can only allow in our kind and not the riffraff. But I freely concede that immigration into America here and now is not problem-free - not because of genetic reasons but because of political decisions taken. And I also freely concede that in a probabilistic sense certain kinds of immigrants are more likely to bring in certain sorts of undesirable behaviors. But other knowledge about the immigrants. I think is often far more informative than mere tribal identity. To focus only on a historically evanescent notion of tribal identity in thinking about immigration is a rather poor exercise in information theory. If the immigration process works against the historical self-selection that meant that the people who came here were the people who wanted to be in America the way it was that's a problem. But that's a political question not a genetic/cultural one. I'd say it has worked better than today's super multiethnic societies. The latter are far more unstable. Almost all the conflicts in the world are ethnic. If you think America has worked out so well then why do so many white Americans flee mostly black cities for the suburbs? Why are there such obvious voting patterns based on race and ethnicity?I'd say you're wrong. I generally have sympathy to your sort of sociobiological approach to when people do or don't get along but you don't take it as far as you should. Tribal identity is infinitely flexible; what looks to you like an ethnically pure society looks to the people who live in it like something very different. People always find ways to differentiate themselves in ways that outsiders find mystifying. Sunni vs. Shiite. Protestant vs. Catholic. Japanese vs. Koreans. Scotch vs. English all these differences are important to people in these societies and baffling to the foreign observer. So if the outsider's notion of tribal differences do not exist in a particular society the people who actually live in it will invent new ones. That is how we are. This suggests that the tendency to partition ourselves into tribes is universal but how we displace the lines is arbitrary. You obsess about certain tribal identities associated with lines on a map or arbitrary racial types and suppose that they are determinative. They are not. The task at hand is not taking this arbitrary notion of where the tribal lines are and writing them into law. No matter how nostalgic people are for the good old mono-ethnic days lines will be drawn even if we go approve to them. The key assign rather is to figure out ways to make people cooperate instead of fight across these lines. We do that by and large in this country. If you think America has worked out so well then why do so many white Americans flee mostly black cities for the suburbs? Why are there such obvious voting patterns based on race and ethnicity? I mean if everybody integrates and becomes an American surely they wouldn't be so tribal alter? First. I think America is working out so well because I pay attention and compare what we have to what I see elsewhere - measuring such things as the level of economic and social integration of immigrants (especially in the back up generation) the lack of public backlash (illegal immigration aside) to them (no candidate has won a national election in my lifetime with an anti-immigrant platform) its continued attractiveness to high-skilled people who might if your nightmarish draw is correct expect nothing but discrimination hostility etc. These folks can create verbally their own ticket but keep coming here. (America draws about 50% of the world's skilled immigrants the EU about 5%. EU immigration tilts heavily unskilled.)The unknowing outsider casts the furnish as half empty. But I think it is half beat. Americans live apart (although much less than they used to as you would know if you knew us well) but they work together productively on the job intermarry do all kinds of the sort of crazy cultural intermingling that seems to trouble you so. Suburbs are often not exclusively white; they contain Hindus. Hispanics mixed Chinese-white couples and all kinds of other surprising residents. All sorts of people flee the cities for the suburbs when they become parents because the suburbs furnish you more space have better public schools and have a host of other attractive characteristics. Many of them (including - gasp! - whites) move back to the city when the nest is empty. I don't mean to be a Pollyanna; my head is not in the sand about ethnic conflict which I have spent years researching. But your dire predictions are not matched by the reality. And the kind of tribal determinism you be to subscribe to is the kind of thing that hastens ethnoreligious contrast not prevents it. Why are there such obvious voting patterns based on race and ethnicity?I dunno. Why are there such obvious voting patterns based on income or occupation or the number of children a person has? A better question is why you cerebrate only on this particular kind of voting difference. People get along here. Not without exception and not as well as they could in an ideal world. But they get along in ways the outsider simply cannot fathom even though the current tide of immigration in conjunction with the welfare state and modern multiculturalism undoubtedly raises issues of concern. All nations are to some extend tribes. This is just false. Migration cultural intermingling intermarriage and the like are actually the norm whenever transportation technology has allowed it (sometimes via conquest). There is hardly a large nation or empire in history that was not multiethnic and/or multireligious. No sooner did Europeans establish their empires than the subjects and the colonizers alike began to mix both at home and in the hinterlands. Your take is a very foreign (and historically cramped) view of things thus proving the basic point I originally sought to alter before the conversation got sidetracked which is that many foreigners (and Europeans in particular) simply do not get America.
Related article:
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/10/transatlantic-mystery.html
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