Enlightenment Reactionary

Diversity sucks. There, I said it so you won’t have to. In a de facto Orwellian bizarro world where you can’t speak the truth because it’s the truth, the world in general and the United States in particular is desperately in need of a cadre of people who aren’t afraid to stand up and be disliked and reviled. In other words, we need people who are willing to be the bastard. People who are willing to step on toes, nay, stomp on them when necessary. People who can be counted upon to say the damn emperor is stark raving naked. We need these people to show by example that criticism won’t kill you and to bully our so-called leadership into doing what they were elected to do. This is something we can all do. If you don’t think you can find the time, put a bullet through your television set. You’ll be amazed.

The first order of business needs to be to rehabilitate any number of beliefs, traditions, and concepts that formed part of the core of our national psyche. I believe there has been a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater throughout our short history and sometimes I suspect that the dirty bathwater was just a cover for eliminating the baby. The so-called Progressives, or whatever cover name they called themselves at any given time, have been chiseling away at the underpinnings of our country since before the ink was dry on the Constitution.

So why do we have trouble now? Because Americans’ have an Achilles Heel. The average American is physically hardworking, but intellectually lazy. Now, before you start clicking frantically on the comments link, allow me to explain. I’m not saying that Americans are stupid, there’s no need to say that because the Europeans don’t need any help. Americans are just as smart as anyone else, but culturally we have a tendency to apply that intelligence towards things that have an immediate practical explanation. Furthermore, we tend to admire and respect the people who do just that.

Americans who show intelligence and interest in more abstract realms are eyed suspiciously at best and regarded as weird and dangerous at worst. Unfortunately, abstract ideas drive what occurs in the physical world and affect everyone eventually, whether they’re pragmatists or not. If you don’t deal with ideas directly they’ll sneak in the backdoor. Just a few days ago, I was at my Anatomy and Physiology class and the professor was talking about the nervous system, which lead to neurotoxins, which lead to chemical weapons, which led to the war in Iraq, which led to 20 minutes of valuable class time being wasted on the professor’s irrelevant political ideas. I’m a 45 year-old cynic, so I was safe, but I wondered about the kids that were sitting all around me.

So, let’s start of with a shocker/ American Exceptionalism is more than a concept. It is a reality that we live in this country every day and it is awesome. The intelligentsia would much rather you believe not only that it’s a just a myth, but also that it would be really horrible if it wasn’t. When you tally up the pros and cons, the United States has done far more good in the world than bad.

The highest good we have provided is by providing an example for how the rest of the world can get what we have. It isn’t our fault that most of the rest of the world would rather gouge their own eyes out than see what is there for everyone to see. Even during recessions the average American citizen has a standard of living that is unprecedented throughout history. People whose ancestors have been at each other’s throats for centuries live in peace together here. So how does such a miracle happen? Easy, you chuck all that crap from the old country when you move here and assimilate into the distinctive American culture, thereby transcending whatever you were before and becoming an American. If you continued the feud from the old world you would be fighting with your own.

To that end, assimilation needs to be rehabilitated as a positive concept. The Left pushes as hard as they can to stigmatize assimilation in general, and interest groups do a pretty good job of stigmatizing assimilators. Failing to fail in school equating to “acting white” is a common example. Americans tend to be fairly comfortable with assimilation, otherwise all that civil rights legislation would never have passed (over liberal Democratic objection). But strangely, after a brief move toward integrating our society, the demand became, not integration, but separate facilities. At colleges we find the outrages of separate dining facilities, dormitories, and even separate graduations. Not at the instigation of some evil WASP conspiracy, but at the demand of the affected minorities themselves.

So, combine that with white supremacists demanding a “homeland” in the Northwest, the president of Mexico claiming that the territory of Mexico extends beyond its current borders (and a Mexican Consulate who stated matter-of-factly that the US-Mexico border is in Arkansas now), the small but vocal group of die-hards in the deep south wanting to resecede from the union, and so on, and we now have the beginnings of American Balkanization.

Just in case you don’t know, my dictionary defines Balkanization as the process of breaking up a group, nation, etc. into smaller and usually mutually hostile units. Just FYI, this is considered a bad thing. If you listen to the news, or even ABC, CBS, and NBC, you learn quickly that not a lot of good news comes out of the Balkans. The take home lesson here is that it would be idiotic to even think of doing something here. I think it is highly unlikely that we would ever do such a thing, on purpose that is. I don’t know what things are like in your part of the country, but I get a fair amount of interaction with people from other countries and I get to watch how they interact with each other. If you think of racism, or any other –ism as a white vs. “other” thing, you are sadly mistaken. I have seen hostility between different minority groups that would make your blood run cold. Individually, certain members of these groups seem to have made their peace with the majority, but many don’t extend that courtesy to each other.

The only thing worse than becoming Balkanized nightmare would be to become a polyglot Balkanized nightmare. I’m definitely not discouraging anyone from become multilingual. I have always believed that one of the most valid criticisms of Americans was their stubborn insistence on not learning another language. I’m talking about the phenomenon of people moving somewhere and not bothering to learn the native language. The end result being groups of people who not only can’t talk to us, but can’t talk to each other. There’s a formula for misunderstanding.
A certain amount of hypocrisy exists in this. I once asked a Mexican co-worker why he didn’t show more consideration for me and speak English when I was present. He became furious and shouted at me, “I learned your God damned language, now you learn mine!” Well, I was a little more timid and leftist in my thinking back then, so I took it as a well-deserved criticism. However, a few months later, I heard the same fellow talking to a black co-worker about some Vietnamese people that had been hired. The “Yeller” was complaining bitterly about the new guys speaking Vietnamese to each other. As I recall, he said, “I don’t like it when they talk that shit.” To which the other fellow replied, “Yeah, [the boss] should make ‘em stop.” Some people have said that a common language is one of the few unifying characteristics that we have in the United States; I’m inclined to believe it
(More to come)