“Yesterday’s Americans”
To declare an interest, I should say that I have had some ancestors in this country, or more technically on this continent, for 370 years, one of whom helped found the town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and most of the families I am descended from have been here longer than the Republic has existed, so when I read Kathleen Parker’s column about “yesterday’s Americans” that has been discussed so frequently I could understand what she was talking about when she referred to “a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.” The “generations of sacrifice” bit may be a bit much, but it’s worth noting that Obama implicitly acknowledges the importance of this, which is why he never fails to mention that his grandfather fought under Patton in WWII. For what it’s worth he likely can trace his ancestry on his mother’s side back nearly as far as many others. It is unavoidable that someone who has ancestors in America who predated independence will think about America differently from how someone whose ancestors arrived more recently on these shores does. In my view, the latter tend not to have enough respect for the experience of the generations who inhabited this country before them. But this is one reason why I have never quite understood why so many of Obama’s enthusiasts have stressed his international ties, rather than his domestic roots, which he has in relative abundance. I have never quite understood why his supporters have spent more time talking about his Kenyan father than his Kansan mother, though I might guess, and this has struck me as remarkable not simply because it is politically disadvantageous to a candidate whom some of our friends here support so strongly, but because it almost true what Obama says when he says that his story is possible in no other country (there are other countries that elect the sons of foreigners to be President, such as France). It is remarkable that his supporters would be so caught up with the trivia of his foreign background when it is his American background that is so much more interesting, and not just to Americans. His father was a predictable, almost embarrassingly stereotypical anti-colonialist politician. His mother, on the other hand, was quite atypical and worthy of more attention than she has received.
Parker’s use of the phrase “yesterday’s Americans” was curious, since it seemed to concede that those whose ancestors had been here longest were necessarily representative of a previous era that was going to pass away, when the thrust of her column was fundamentally that it should not pass away. It seems to me that Parker’s column may be the product of someone who has been conditioned to believe in all of the “nation of immigrants” myths, but instinctively she cannot accept it when confronted with someone who would seem to be the personal embodiment of that idea. A “nation of immigrants” isn’t a nation, and indeed it becomes a nation only when it establishes some identity different from that of the immigrants’ former peoples.
Comments
It can’t be our identity to have no identity. It can’t be our national loyalty to have no national loyalty. It can’t be our community of values to have no community of values, but pro-diversity instead. When the contradictions-in-terms are as obvious as spelled out just above, it should be also clear that those who traffic in them, cannot have good motives. It would be that there are those who want Americans in particular, to have defective national loyalty, weak identity, and vanishing community of values. All those results would serve civil conflict and power-greed, and by no amazing coincidence, the power-greedy and the conflict-relishing sorts, are observably at the forefront of such promotions.
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Prof. Samuel Huntington stated that the European people who first came to this land were SETTLERS, not immigrants. They settled a mostly unpopulated wilderness and created not only a new nation, but a prosperous one. Immigrants (of which I am descended on both sides) came after the prosperity had been created to enjoy its benefits.
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re R. Johnson,
Contrary to your assertion, “The Europeans” did not “settle” a mostly “un-populated wilderness”. Regardless of anyone’s position on immigration, this idea that North America was an un-touched Eden with little or no human residents is a patent lie and the kind of self-satisfied thinking that continues to plunge the species into hells of their own making.
It is now known and accepted that the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony encountered a land that had been impacted by European disease first brought to the native population by Portuguese and English fisherman. The Pilgrims were used by local tribes in their own intertribal conflicts that had been inflamed by european disease.
William Johnson, the early Anglo-Irish Intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy left records of nighttime boat trips up the Hudson Valley , remarking in wonder how vast swaths of the landscape on both sides of the river between New York and Albany were aflame from Indian-managed landscape maintenance.
The explorer Block, and others, traversing Long Island Sound took note of what they called large “prairies” along the Connecticut and Rhode Island Shorelines , dotted with the fires of many villages.
The Spanish explorer DeSoto, cruising the Mississippi River country of Arkansas and Missisippi took note of large urban and agricultural complexes of Mound Building Peoples who were essentially gone several decades later, when La Salle descended the river from the north, leaving only their mounds as a record of their existence. Some assert that the huge herd of pigs DeSoto brought with him may have been an effective vector of European disease.
The Navajo, originally a northern Plains indian migrated to the southwest from Canada, supplanting the “vanished” Anazasi and impinging upon the Hopi.
The Americas were not a sparkling new Caddie picked up at a New Car Dealer of Fresh Continents by settlers from Europe. Regardless how one feels about immigration, this is a myth. In fact, the myth undermines and diminishes the position of many ethno-separatists who maintain that it is their right and obligation to protect the institutions built here by European culture.
Though perhaps not as crowded as today nor as peopled as was 16th century Europe, North American was a settled place with diverse cultures.
This notion that it was empty is as faulty as was the Zionist Notion that Palestine was something like an empty land for a persecuted people. Turkish and Egyptian landlords were as put out by this cant as were the Palestinian inhabitants. This fact, as with our own circumstances in no way diminishes the logic and sentiment of any people who have built something they wish to preserve. However, it does impinge upon the righteousness of those who claim to have been “native” or , who were graced by a benevolent God with a choice piece of real-estate with which to work their magic.
Then again, history supposedly ended. The neo-cons who yearn to write it now can publish all the fiction they like because this history-averse culture seems to lap it up.
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