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Entry: Homo Americanus Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/homo_americanus#3502 Post contents: If fear that Mr. Sunic is guilty of what some New Englanders are guilty: Reading USA history, culture, and circumstances as New England’s writ large. Eric Hoffer said JFK had never been west of the Mississippi River. This is a mistaken liable. JFK was never west of the HUDSON River. And I wonder if Mr. Sunic, like Susan Sontag, has never been west of 5th Ave., NYC. What he says about America just ain’t so down here in Dixie. If he’s right about the rest of the country, then we in Dixie ain’t no “homo americus”. Lets count off the points: [1] “because we [Yankees] are hostile to European national identities, [2] because we [Yankees] have contributed to bringing to Central Europe Frankfurt School brain-laundering [3] because we [New England Yankees] try to substitute for concrete historical traditions such notions as propositional nationhood and the ideology of human rights. [4 because the USA is] “a righteous global empire seeking to implement its conception of rights everywhere [5. because] [i]t is the combination of [Yankee] consumption and [New England] rights talk which has produced “homo americanus” [6. because] it [i.e. Yankeedom] became secularized and corrupted." Well, NONE of this is true here in the Piedmont and Tidewater Carolinas. Indeed we in Dixie were the first to feel the effects of a “righteous global empire”. Mr. Sunic and Mr. Gottfried need to do two things: 1. Read Richard Gamble’s _War For Righteousness_ to understand the real causes of the present mess 2. Come down here, be our guests, have some Lexington BBQ, sweet tea, cornbread, Moon Pies, and live here a while before attempting to generalize about “America” By the way, it is true that Gringos don’t know much about Europe, and its is a matter of published record (e.g. Goldhagen), that Americans think Germans one and all to be cold blooded killers Having lived so time in Mitteleuropa, I found that the folk there have even weirder ideas about Gringoland. In the past 7 years in particular I’ve had to disabuse Europeans of the idea that we’re all a cowboy culture (forget that this genre’s been dead for 30 years). Mr. Sunic will have to do a lot to persuade me he’s not just as weird. Mr. Gottfried should know better. Sent at: 2008 10 12