The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(07-22-2020, 12:59 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(07-21-2020, 05:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-21-2020, 09:40 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(07-20-2020, 11:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-20-2020, 11:33 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Dude, there are no ex Confederates alive to defend these days. True, the Confederates weren't technically Americans during the Civil War years. You'll find that out and learn what it was like to be one of them soon enough as well. Like it or not, you are on the modern day version of the Confederate side today.

You admire the people who re-created the Confederate myth 105 years ago. That is when the Confederate statues started going up, fifty years after the end of the Civil War as the soldiers embarrassed and shamed by defeat were no longer around in large enough numbers to say no. 

1915 is also the year in which the second Ku Klux Klan was formed and when D. W. Griffith brought forth the movie spectacle The Birth of a Nation, the second half of which was a celebration of the eventual suppression of the Freedmen who had just been liberated from slavery and did what most Americans do when given a chance -- voting, running for public office, starting businesses, and getting formal education. Had Reconstruction succeeded the South might instead have become a rich land in which commerce and industry might have well served the agricultural economy. Blacks who had recently been slaves were forming banks and stores... which is about what most immigrant groups do. But free blacks had immigrated, so to speak, from enslavement to freedom and from feudal exploitation to capitalism. 

Let's not fool ourselves about the Second Klan. It had many of the characteristics -- violence, bigotry, cultural intolerance, and of course gaudy symbolism -- characteristic of fascist groups (including Mussolini's Blackshirts that would form later before such groups as the Nazi Party in Germany and Austria (and in German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia), the Ustase in Croatia, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, and the Iron Guard in Romania. Those groups were ugly in different ways, but -- yes, all politically monstrous. 

Unlike the others, the second KKK failed before it could become a national power. This said, the Klan was far closer to achieving national power in America than the Nazis were in Germany in the mid-1920's. Not for export? There were Klan groups in Canada, and had the Klan taken over in America the word for Anschluss  would be undeniably Anglo-Saxon in origin. There was a short-lived Klan group that formed in Germany in the late 1920's, and it disbanded; its members chose to become Nazis. 

We will never know what a Klan-dominated America would be like... but I have contemplated a novel about an Axis victory in which Germany remains a democracy and Japan's early steps toward democracy fulfilled themselves. A hint on such a world: "Alaska" becomes "Arasuka" Prefecture in 1959, and Churchill and Adenauer basically switch roles in history. Fascistic leaders start wars but usually end up losing them. 

...at one point I saw America becoming rifted like Spain in the 1930's, with the more liberal parts of Spain being about as progressive as New England at the time and parts holding a nostalgia for a medieval and feudal ethos. Or maybe Yugoslavia in the 1990's along regional lines that reflect quasi-national divides. A hint: Boston has more in common with San Francisco than with central Pennsylvania. 

That opportunity for rending America in a civil war is almost certainly over. Your side lost the cultural struggle.

Well, I see the bulk of the country remaining together as a few Democratic states (mainly cities) fight it out so to speak. We are seeing some signs of the cultural struggle that's occurring now. Your side of the Democratic spectrum appears be losing the cultural struggle. The Republican side hasn't committed and  isn't directly involved yet and remains idle for the most part. By the way, the KKK failed because the northern Klan's viewed it more as social fraternity which were popular at the time than a political action group and they stopped being members when they found out what the Klan was doing to blacks in the South.

My take on what it means to be an American is that there are many different ways in which to be an American. There is no single American culture, and there has never been one since the first people came to America through the (now-inundated)  Bering land bridge during the glacial maximum and spread from Alaska to the south and east and broke into tribes. 

The recent cultural struggle has been an attempt to meld cultures of two regional zones of America -- the Mountain South (Appalachia and the Ozarks after that culture developed a Fundamentalist-Evangelical bloc highly reactionary in its values) and the relatively-homogeneous culture of white people of the Deep South. Both cultures are anti-intellectual and racist and see anything different -- that is, cosmopolitan -- as suspect. About fifty years ago Southern whites were beginning to recognize that they had something in common in culture with Southern blacks, basically that one of those cultures cannot survive well if the other struggles just to thrive... but that came to an end. 

Most Americans have begun to recognize that "Us" and "Them" is good only for dividing people and diverting them from their real needs, including dignity in the workforce. Different as the black bourgeoisie, Jews, Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans (as if Asian Indians have much in common with Filipinos or Koreans), and middle-class Hispanics are in culture they seem to vote alike even if their stomachs turn if they had to eat much of the same cuisine. America's model minorities are basically on the liberal side of the political spectrum even if they are arch-conservatives on culture. 

Add to this, many white people despise the attempt of the Hard Right to impress upon them an anti-intellectual culture that can only doom them to poverty. I am one of those. 

...as for the extreme, fascistic Right -- it includes people who have merged Klan and Nazi ideology. The (second) 1915 Klan and the German Nazi Party shared the same racism and Jew-hatred. The problem for bringing the KKK and the Nazis together was that as long as the Nazis were decidedly German they were too 'exotic' for Kluxers who thought themselves "100% American".  

OK, J S Bach isn't American. Neither is Fyodor Dostoevsky. If I had the money I would surround myself with Japanese prints. Put those together and not one of those is American. Put those together in some syncresis -- and that is very American. 

Consider some kid's birthday party. Pizza is the main course, and perhaps the kids smash a pinata to unleash the goodies. The pizza is Italian, and the pinata is Mexican. Kid with an Italian-American parent and a Mexican-American parent? Maybe. That is American itself. The child might go by the name of Linda Schmidt... and the surname suggests the ancestry that you might expect. 

You can call people like me "rootless cosmopolites" if you wish (a warning: Josef Stalin used that term to describe Jews when he started to sour on them) ... but you cannot define what it means to be an American. I don't try. This said, it is un-American to promote terrorist violence or to seek  to divide us into "us" and "them".

Dude, we're not on the same page. Who do all Americans have in common? What is it that makes us all Americans? I have American heritage. Guess what, the American Indians are part of our American Heritage and the Confederates who lost the Civil War are part of our American Heritage too. Liberal culture does not recognize American Heritage or place value on it. You're on the side who is fucking with a nasty giant dude. If you aren't intellectual enough to see it. In short, America is team with a common heritage, common history, common flag and a Constitution that has stood for over two hundred years. So, as far as I'm concerned, you can either stay with the team and try your luck with the other team because this is going to boil down to Liberal Culture vs American Culture. So, what are the Democrats going do about all the new racists with darker skin on it's side. I mean, when you are into gutter politics that's the kind of shit that gutter politics attract. You seem like a decent level headed guy at times.

So what distinguishes us Americans from other peoples?

We do not all have one culture. We accept that there are other cultures and do not expect people from those other cultures to make the same assumptions. So it is with cuisine. Not so long ago a sign of assimilation into American culture was that people went for bland cuisine. Evidence that one was 'low' was that strong 'ethnic' scents emanated from the kitchen. The norm was to fit WASP values in using few spices, over-cooking food, and to relying upon foods calculated to be bland in the extreme. Thus something so awful as meat loaf and mashed potatoes. So it was for the GI Generation, whose eating habits are well known... and much abandoned. 

Now just to feel sophisticated -- or to make eating an experience  -- we eschew blandness. Many of us like to make excursions into  the exotic. Maybe I can explain a few things: add dairy to Chinese cuisine and you have basically Italian cuisine. This may not seem obvious, but just think about it for a while; Marco Polo did bring some peculiar habits back to Italy. So Italian cuisine is really an offshoot of Chinese cuisine? You may have seen that here. 

OK, so some of our celebrations cross ethnic lines. The Fourth of July may mean Independence Day in the United States and the Philippines (not a coincidence)... but it means nothing in  many other days. The Fourth of July has no significance in Canada, and Canada Day means nothing in America. Double-Seven means much in the Far East, but to me it is only the day that my mother died.  So much for "lucky double-seven". 

So -- Irish-Americans dye many urban rivers green on Saint Patrick's Day. The Irish are a big part of American life, the first large group of non-English settlers who didn't pretend to be English. Capitalizing upon an ethnic heritage is often good business, as has well been shown.  Mexican-Americans can in no way pretend to be "English"... but they can make much of a celebration of overthrowing a puppet regime of Emperor Maximilian.    

So is there really a "liberal" culture and an "American" culture? I concede that Rush Limbaugh (whom I have derided as "Rash Libel") is undeniably American... but he can no more define what is American than can Barbra Streisand.  Exploiting an ancestral culture is quite American. 
.......

OK, so you fear the attacks of darker-skinned people upon American culture. One aspect of American life that has never gone away is the color line... and it may no longer be quite the bar to full enjoyment of American life as it used to be, it is safe to assume that any visible African ancestry defines one as black. Fine. The definition may be different in America than in, for example, Brazil -- but this person

     

is considered black even though she basically looks like a white person dyed brown. A genetic test shows that she is 44% of European origin. Even though she won the Miss America contest, she is still considered black. 

From Wikipedia:

Quote:  Vanessa Lynn Williams was born in The Bronx, New York,[1] with a birth announcement that read: "Here she is: Miss America."[2][3] Later in life, she participated in a DNA test with the following results: 23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% from Togo, 6% from Benin, 5% from Senegal, and 4% Portuguese.[4]


Her paternal great-great grandfather was William A. Feilds, an African-American legislator in the Tennessee House of Representatives.[5][6] Her mother Helen Tinch met her father Milton Augustine Williams Jr. (1935–2006) while both were music education students at Fredonia State Teachers College in the late 1950s.[7] They both became elementary school music teachers after marriage, though their teaching positions were in separate districts.[7] Milton also served as the assistant principal of his school for an extended period of time.[8]

Williams was raised Roman Catholic, the religion of her father. Her mother, who had been raised Baptist, converted to Catholicism when she got married. Williams was baptized at Our Lady of Grace Church in the Bronx. Her mother played the organ at St. Theresa's Church in Briarcliff Manor for weddings and at mass, and Williams used to assist her mother by turning the pages of sheet music.[2]

Williams and her younger brother Chris (who would later become an actor) grew up in Westchester County, a predominantly white middle- to upper-class suburb of New York City.[3] Williams believes she may have been the first African-American student to go from the first grade to the 12th grade in the Chappaqua Central School District.[6]

A child of music teachers, Williams grew up in a musical household, studying classical and jazz dance, French horn, piano, and violin.[1][2] She was offered the Presidential Scholarship for Drama to attend Carnegie Mellon University during the college application period, (one of 12 students to receive it) but decided instead to attend Syracuse University[1] on a different scholarship.[9] Thus, in 1981, Williams joined Syracuse's College of Visual and Performing Arts, Department of Drama as a musical theater major.[9][10] She stayed at Syracuse through her second year until she was crowned Miss America 1984 in September 1983

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Williams#cite_note-syrconv-10][/url]
What could be more American than this? I rest my case. There are many ways in which to be American. Most of us establish what we are by picking and choosing aspects of our identity from things that may not be American in origin.  

No achievement makes one "white" -- not even being President of the United States and being very good at it.