One American Looks at Nationalism – Alma Boykin

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*My apologies to Alma and everyone for being so late putting this up.  The reason is I was going to write a post today and save this one for this weekend, when I kidnap husband for Anniversary celebrations.  Unfortunately I REALLY need to go finish painting the porch and I got so late writing post for MGC — partly because husband and I had to talk about something else, while I was writing — and I want to get out there before it’s too hot to be outside and working.  Sorry Alma and everyone.  BUT otoh this post is apropos my post yesterday*

One American Looks at Nationalism – Alma Boykin

 

I don’t “get” nationalism, not really. I grew up in the United States, and we don’t “do” nationalism. We do patriotism, much to the dismay and occasional despair of the Anointed, those who dream of one world government, peace in our time, equalization of poverty, and a free-range organic soy chicken in every pot. (Or free pot for every chicken, depending on where they live.) There are some sectional differences that flare up, mostly as proxies for something else (modern economic situation, mostly). But that strange thing called “nationalism” doesn’t apply to Americans, and I suspect it doesn’t apply to Aussies, New Zealanders, or Canadians, either.

Why not? Because the U.S. is a state (political) without nations in it (excluding American Indians, for reasons you’ll see). A state based on an idea and not on past glories and victimhood.

As I learned in college, a nation and a state can be totally separate animals. And since 1800, nations within states tended to generate uneasy politics, often because of economics as well as claims of cultural supremacy. Until the Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914), states often contained multiple nations. “Nation” meant a group of people from the same region who often spoke the same language and may have claimed a single ancestor or ancestral group, like the Bohemians and Princess Libuse, or the Magyars who descended from a princess impregnated by an eagle. But the states, like what became France, or the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (as opposed to Charlemagne’s version), or the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania, or Spain, contained multiple nations, all of who paid taxes and service to the monarch. The state included nations, but most nations did not have their own state.

Then along came a couple of philosophers, Napoleon, and the Romantics, and trouble ensued. Trouble, that is, if you were a monarchy or republic with unhappy nations inside your borders; or if you belonged to a nation that wanted its own state, or at least official recognition as being co-equal with other nations in the state, because “Glorious ancestors! Our noble patrimony! A majority share of the national budget!” The early ideal of universal brotherhood shifted during the 1830s into the desire for recognition of these magical nations—and their “ancient” (occasionally mythical) borders.

During that long century, nationalists in Europe dug for evidence that could tie their ancestors, mythical or otherwise, to a large chunk of territory. The Romanians, for example, claimed descent from the Romans and looked back to the Roman Empire as well as later Slavic tribes in order to demand ownership of Transylvania, even though large numbers of German and Magyar-speaking peoples lived there for hundreds of years, and the Magyar/Hungarians had controlled the region for centuries. “Doesn’t matter, the Romans were there first, so it should be Romanian.” Farther into the Balkans, the Albanians and others claim descent from the Illyrians, a pre-Roman tribe, and assert that their presence dates back thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. You can see that this might not end well.

This came to mind because I’ve been giving myself headaches trying to understand Eastern and Central Europe recently, a topic I tend to approach from an American’s view. As a result, I read about the plight of the poor, oppressed Hungarian nobility and gentry and my mental eyebrows started to rise. The mental monologue goes something like this: “Let’s see, you beat up the peasants, you abandoned your king at the first battle of Mohaçs so you could go loot the churches and run his Habsburg wife out of the country while the Turks took over a third of Great Hungary, you played all sides against each other, you beat up on the Slavs around you and tried to eradicate their culture after 1850 while shutting them out of the government, but you are the victims. Riiiight. While bragging about how great you were before 1444, and of the glories of the magnificent Hungarian kingdom. Pardon me if I have some trouble taking all this at face value.”

You see, I’d read much of this twenty years ago, but with different names. Rebecca West’s book, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon is a history of the Serbs as victims. Their last czar, after a vision from the Lord, chose a heavenly kingdom over an Earthly one and got himself and his troops slaughtered at the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds (Kosovo Polje) in 1389. As West described it, the Serbs, the last defenders of Christendom, suffered as martyrs under the Turks and the Habsburgs for centuries after that, and so on and so forth. The book is well written and very persuasive—if you don’t know much about the area, especially if you forget what happened in the Balkans between 1989 and the rise of Wahabism there. I suspect if I went looking, especially in foreign-language sources, I’d find works written in a similar spirit about the Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Bohemians. And do not get me started on Stanislav Kirschbaum’s A History of Slovakia. He writes well, but his bias shows in neon lights with sparklers around it.

To an outsider from a country that doesn’t have a sense of nationalism, all this sounds a little silly. You can’t claim borders or rest on achievements that vanished centuries ago. OK, so his ancestors spoke Bohemian and hers spoke German. Big whoop. Have your ethnic parties, like Americans of Irish ancestry have in March or the folks down in Fredericksburg do every October, and get on with life. Except the burden of history (and Marxist economics) weighs too heavily for that.

Americans don’t have that history. We don’t have 1500-year-old castles and monasteries. Neither do we have fights over slices of the economic pie disguised as claims of ancient ancestors. Because that’s what a lot of nationalism since 1848 has become: demands for chunks of what generations of Marxists have declared are limited government resources (because all comes from the government) based on borders and people that disappeared 1000 years ago. Add in the desire to avenge wrongs committed 500 years ago and rediscovered or reemphasized and turned into rallying points by politicians (see the Battle of Kosovo, above), and a couple of Marxists claiming that since your ancestors were oppressed, you should get an extra share of the “pie” and be allowed, if not encouraged, to pay back old economic wrongs by, oh, driving out the Saxons, Catholics, and/or Jews, and you get an unholy mess that leaves Americans wondering why the h-ll these people can’t take a deep breath and go get real lives.

To those of us who grew up in places and times without Marxist economic ideas draped in ethnic flags, the claims of nationalism sounds foolish at best and dangerously parochial at worst (see the anti-Semitic spasms of the Hungarian Jobbiks and the Russian National Unity Party, Pamyat). As a historian, I understand nationalism intellectually when I read about it, but I don’t “get” it. I don’t feel especially loyal to any of my ancestors’ birthplaces. There are cultures I identify with and some that I find repulsive, but I can’t imagine basing all my political and economic and cultural dreams on, oh, say, bringing back the days of King Brian Boru or Fredrik Barbarossa. As a fiction writer, I can imagine how some characters think about their volk, but it’s a prickly mental sensation, like wearing an itchy wool suit on a hot, humid day. It doesn’t fit and I just don’t get it.

 

228 thoughts on “One American Looks at Nationalism – Alma Boykin”

  2. One of the things I never understood about Norther Ireland was Marching Season. “Hey! Let’s have a parade to recognize some victory that happened hundreds of years ago and march through the neighborhoods of people who identify with the losing side. WHAT CAN GO WRONG?!?!”

    The fact that the left wants us to be nations within the country makes more sense now. It makes it easier to play the sides off against each other. I’m pretty sure none of my ancestors were slaves and you don’t hear me complaining about wanting reparation for the English treatment of the Irish. Just my $.02.

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    1. “Divide and Rule” has a long and storied history.

      And I’m pretty sure you *are* descended from slaves. It’s one of the oldest institutions there is, so likely everyone is. You’re probably also descended from kings.

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        1. The number of horrible things in history you have personally benefited from are without a doubt legion.

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      3. The one thing you can be sure of is that you are descended from survivors. Every one of your ancestors failed to die before reproducing.

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        1. “Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.”
          Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

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    2. “Hey! Let’s have a parade to recognize some victory that happened hundreds of years ago and march through the neighborhoods of people who identify with the losing side. WHAT CAN GO WRONG?!?!”

      How else are you supposed to keep grinding folks’ noses in “you lost”?

      What drives me nuts is the disconnect between “we will show them how beaten they are” and “they might decide to show us they’re not beaten.”

      See also, current “settled” politically explosive stuff.

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    3. I would understand your sentiment about anyone but the Irish, the Irish are known as the “Fighting Irish” for a reason though. In their view the biggest thing that could go wrong is the losing side doesn’t come out join in.

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      2. Irishman watches a bar fight commencing to begin. “Pardon me. Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in?”

        (My family tree’s branches include: Scots-Irish, Irish, German, French, American Indian, English, and Dutch.)

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        1. That’s a polite Irishman. One of my family names is “Brannigan”, which I’m told is Gaelic for “bar-room brawl”. Our family get togethers don’t have *quite* that much broken furniture, but they can be raucous and extremely loud.

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          1. If we didn’t marry so late, ours would be quite memorable. At the moment it’s more vigorous cane waving than flying Guiness bottles.

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  3. I think it’s a combination of factors playing out.
    1) There are a lot of different ancestral groups, so none have anything like a cultural dominance outside a limited area, and new ones keep getting added to the mix.
    2) Geographical and social mobility is high, mixing the melting pot even more thoroughly.
    3) Because of the above two, the culture has embraced adapting and learning the better part of other cultures (from the foods to the sports to the language).
    As long as Americans tend to keep the mix up and the culture from solidifying, American Nationalism (as opposed to patriotism) is kept from forming.

    Question for discussion: was the Southern secession that led to the Civil War either an attempt to establish or the result of a limited Southern nationalism?

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    1. At the time it was more prevalent to self-identify by state vs the US as a whole.

      Texans haven’t got out of that habit.

      ;)

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  4. Hmm, so the Progressives’ love of all things European might explain why they are trying so hard to segregate the US into victimized groups, all hot for redress.

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  5. The important thing to understand about the Balkans is that every ethnic group there sees itself as being an oppressed minority, and sees the others as being the oppressors – usually as the puppets of some more powerful outside force.

    The second important thing to understand about the Balkans is that they’re all right.

    The history of the Balkans is a history of various outside imperial forces using one ethnic faction or another as a tool to maintain control over the others. The Russians used the Serbs to oppress the Bosnians and the Croats, the Turks used the Bosnians to oppress the Serbs and the Croats, the Austrians used the Croats to oppress the Bosnians and the Serbs. (The Nazis, when their turn came, stepped right into the Austrian role and used the Croats to maintain order.)

    What’s hard for people who visualize themselves as victimized and oppressed is that everyone is victimized or oppressed. It’s the nature of reality.

    And the worst oppression always comes from people who can’t imagine that they might oppress anyone, because, after all, they’re oppressed themselves.

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    1. Rather like the school bully remembers himself as the victim, the one time he was forced to back down impressing itself on his memory.

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  6. Alma, New Braunfels does more Oktoberfest activities than Fredericksburg. Although, F’bg is very ethnocentric. It’s been said – truthfully – that 4th & 5th generation residents in Fredericksburg are still looked on as ‘newcomers’. Especially if they don’t speak the local German dialect
    We almost moved there; I’m so glad we didn’t.

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    1. Interesting contrast between Fredericksburg and New Braunfels; Fredericksburg was largely Unionist in the Civil War and so caught the brunt of a Confederate crackdown … NewBraunfels was more accommodating to the Confederacy, although not particularly enthusiastic. Long story – I got into some of this in my Adelsverein Trilogy.
      The upshot of it was that the Hill Country Germans were incredibly clannish because of the Civil War experience and quite wary of outsiders.

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    2. Dough, I have yet to have a chance to get down to either New Braunfels or Fredericksburg for Oktoberfest, as hard as it may be to believe. (If only October didn’t fall during the school year . . .) My mother’s mom grew up near Fredericksburg and had some interesting tales about “the old Dutchmen” her father did business with. I was pulling a Texas-German town out of my memory. (As opposed to the Texas-Bohemians, or the Texas-Wends/Sorbs [of which there are almost more in Texas than in Germany, now]).

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      1. Main street has some nice touristy shops. I don’t walk well anymore, so I either stay home or park myself on a bench – of which they have lots, thankfully.
        They also have a local biermeister brewing up a specialty. I have yet to try it, either.

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  7. Ah; That’s why La Raza has the ‘reconquest’ because the original inhabitants were here first, never mind that North American Indians never became refugees in Mexico or Honduras and the other half of the ‘Race’ ancestry came from Spain; from a mixture of European and Middle Eastern past to boot. (I would love to watch them move en-mass into Baghdad and reclaim their heritage) Or the so called need to recognize the Black or Hispanic culture because of race ‘nationalism’ in anti-discrimination. We Irish, Poles, Czech, British love to look at our history and have the excuse for a party but, we don’t want to cling to the past. We’re Americans and proud (patriotic) of it. Cool, thanks for the clarification.

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    1. I got the mind-bending opportunity to hear a New Mexican historian lecturing Hispanos (people whose families can trace their arrival in the area to the period 1600-1820) about ignoring the plight of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans (Chicanos/as) and trying to rewrite the state’s history. Apparently claiming Spanish ancestry makes you an oppressor. *rolls eyes, lunges to grab them before cat can*

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      1. Not sure of percentages, but I had a great-aunt by marriage (in California) who considered her ancestry as Spanish not Mexican. (IIRC there was a “black sheep” who was non-Spanish European. [Wink])

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        1. Traditionally Mexicans were Spanish/Indian (mestizo) crosses, people of pure Spanish extraction were NOT Mexican, and were typically insulted to be considered so.

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      2. Not very many, actually – and their descendents are here and proud, still. I run into them all the time, mostly at book events.
        The last big historical influx of Mexican immigrants into Texas who stayed permanently was in the teens and twenties, after the death of Porfirio Diaz when Mexico had another civil war on its hands. (That makes about the forth or fifth civil war … first one was the Federalist-Centralist fight, in the 1830s, in which most of Texas, Anglo and Tejano alike took the side of the Federalists. Santa Anna was a Centralist – and he went to war to put down the rebelling Federalists. About half the Mexican states rebelled against him when he made himself dictator and abrogated the 1824 Constitution. Texas was about the only one who made it stick, permanently.

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        1. It’s been a long time since I toured the Alamo; but, if I remember correctly, there were a lot of Spanish names on the list of defenders that died there fighting Santa Anna’s forces. The present SJW do no favors to those Spanish surnames that fought Santa Anna, not Mexico. But, had to choose separation from a dictatorship in order to retain what Mexico had originally provided, for lack of a better word- democracy.

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          1. A good portion of the Alamo defenders were Tejano – local Bexarenos – who were rebelling against Santa Anna’s Centralist dictatorship right along side the Anglo-Texans. The commander of the Alamo might have been Juan Seguin, who was of a prominent local family – save that he was too valuable as a messenger (because he was local, he knew the territory). So – he was not caught in the siege and killed with the rest – instead, he and a company of Tejano scouts went east with Houston, guarding the rear of the Texan Army, and scouting and spying.

            There was a blog-post I read ages ago – the blogger wrote of the time where he/she had observed a young SJW of pallor watching a Hispanic father and his family touring the Alamo, and the father taking great pride in pointing out the various features and telling his children about the siege. Our SJW chided the father, telling him he should know better, that it was American imperialism and racism, and what-all. The father looked at him, and said scornfully, “Ay, bolillo (white bread), IT WAS OUR ALAMO, TOO!”

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            1. Thus demonstrating that SJWs know your history, values and goals better than do you yourself. It is their world and we are just taking up space.

              The burdens of false consciousness are great indeed. We must all strive to be the person they want us to be, for they are enlightened, empathetic and compassionate (especially with other peoples money and lives) while we are merely selfish, uncaring and sarcastic (or so I’m told; I’ve never actually learned the meaning of that last word, myself.)

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              2. I remember one haughty declaration that in burlesque, only blacks were entitled to do “barbarian” acts. Apparently never heard who Tacitus cast as history’s first Noble Savage.

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          2. I’m not going to bother double-checking, but from memory one of the things the Alamo movie got right was that there were enough “Mexican” looking guys fighting on the Alamo side that in the fight that followed they had to find a way to identify the ones on our side– in the movie, and in some traditions, it was putting playing cards in their hats.

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            1. Correct – Houston initially wanted to keep Seguin’s company out of the line at San Jacinto for fear that in the confusion they’d be killed by their own side. Seguin was furious – they’d earned a right to be in that fight, they couldn’t go home until it was won, just like the others in Houston’s army, and he demanded a place for them in the fight. So, they put playing cards in their hat-bands. Reference to this in Hardin’s history of the very brief war, “Texian Illiad”.

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              1. Reminds me, I really need to get the old History songs I grew up with on an MP3 stick for the kids.

                I knew more than anybody else about The Alamo because of that Jimmy… H something, Horton?… song. “Back in 1836, Huston said to Travis: get some volunteers and go, for to fight the Alamo….”

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              2. Alright, it was Marty Robbins who did the Alamo:

                And JOHNNY Horton who did the historical ballads, like “Sink the Bismark.”

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                1. Most states have an interesting collection of local and local-interest ballads from back in the day, and many of them are about historical events in the state. This isn’t something that kids are likely to get in school, alas.

                  Here in Ohio, pretty much five minutes after pioneer days, you had kids and adults memorizing pieces glorifying their honorable enemies, like Chief Logan’s speech or the stuff about Tecumseh stopping the Massacre on the River Raisin. I don’t know how that fits into nationalism or patriotism! But Americans used to be very big on memorizing short speeches and then giving them before audiences as a party piece or for kids to show off their skills. All that seems to be funneled (or imprisoned) into Speech classes and competitions now, and otherwise we aren’t much on oratory for anybody. (Maybe sermons.)

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                2. Johnny Horton was perhaps most famous for “The Battle of New Orleans.” Written by James Corbitt Morris, aka Jimmy Driftwood, it won the 1960 Grammy for Best Country and Western song and the Grammy Hall of Fame award.

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                  1. The Battle of New Orleans, Sink the Bismark, Johnny Freedom, Johnny Reb, Comanche (the brave horse), North to Alaska, Jim Bridger, he was well known for singing patriotic and historical songs. I also thought he sang an Alamo song, but I could be wrong, he did sing one about the Green Berets, but it was not well known, and I don’t believe was ever a single.

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                    1. Wasn’t the Green Beret by Barry Sadler? The fellow who wrote the unarmed combat column for Soldier of Fortune.

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                    2. Yep, Sadler did “The Ballad of the Green Beret.” He also wrote a series of men’s adventure books under the arc title “Casca-The Eternal Mercenary,” premise being that Casca was one of the legionaires at the crusifiction and so doomed to spend eternity fighting war after war. Interesting hook, and he was a good storyteller.

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                    3. Available for free from Amazon via KindleUnlimited. I’ve just downloaded the first two (there’s like 34 volumes available!).

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                    4. don’t forget Johnny Horton’s “Springtime in Alaska” I heard that, and North to Alaska, so many times as a kid that I went up there to live for 25 years. it was the best part of my life,.

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                    5. I have Ballad of the Green Berets on my computer, it says Johnny Horton, but it was a download off of one of those music share sites, so it is entirely possible that it is somebody else.

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                    6. Ayuh. I were in Jr High when that hit the radio.

                      Definitely Barry Sadler; although I notice a linked version by Dolly Parton I suspect hers is merely a cover and that she never served.

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      1. Which reminds me of something satiric I read on an email going around a couple of years ago and saved because it was cruelly apt – if a little historically questionable:

        Do you know what happened way back in 1850 – a hundred and fifty-nine years ago this fall? California became a state!!

        The people had no electricity…
        The state government had no money…
        Nearly everyone spoke Spanish…
        And there were often gunfights in the streets.

        So, basically nothing has changed. Except that the women had real tits and the men didn’t hold hands.

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        2. But even back then it wasn’t unusual to see bears roped and hogtied in the streets of San Francisco.

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          1. I am given to understand that it is still quite common in San Francisco to witness “bears roped and hogtied in the streets,” often wearing leather hoods and ball gags.

            How did LibProgs light their houses before candles?
            With electricity.

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      2. Get rid of the politicians and those who agree with them, and I’d agree, but I was born in Cali– it’s a good place. Just the highly populated areas have a LOT of idiots.

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        1. If we can fix it, CA has great real estate and lots of natural resources. It just needs to be fixed.

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          1. With the point that ‘La Raza’ isn’t Mexico. It’s Hispanic Native North Americans. Interestingly enough, I have/had a copy of the 1850 US Census. I would have a job finding it since, it’s been many computers ago and before I began archiving. But it was less than four years after the US Mexican war which brought the territories into the US. If memory serves, there were only about 1200 Hispanic names in California. Mexico was selling land grants to Europeans and NW Europeans like Irish were well represented as well as those who just immigrated without bothering with grants. New Mexico was part of the Louisiana Purchase and Texas had 46,000 Northern Europeans and I think 60,000 Hispanic surnames. Arizona was a little more European than Hispanic I think. Mexico considered the territories as territories as much as the US.

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            1. Ah, most of New Mexico was outside the Louisiana Purchase, because the border was the Arkansas River. The argument came when the Republic of Texas claimed the Rio Grande watershed, which would have included a chunk of NM. An attempt to capture Santa Fe in 1840-41 ended poorly (for the Texans).

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          2. Hah! They don’t want Texas. They may think they want Texas, but you best believe they do. not. want. Texas.

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  8. This can be one of those fun tripwires in the Middle East, though we can probably get away with calling it tribalism over nationalism. And it’s way more insidious than Sunni/Shi’ite religious schisms.

    It can certainly leave you blinking when you’re drilling down on why dudes one and two were scuffling in the market and you finally click to the fact that the stolen camel in question died a couple years before the birth of Islam.

    Claims and counterclaims revolving around clans and allegiances sliding back through history as far as the oral historian wants to justify. It all most assuredly informs the politics of the region.

    And it’s all terribly opaque for the average American.

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                1. I think WP just had a case of heartburn or something. I got a Notification T.L. Knighton replied to your comment on “Blessed Are The Children” shown as from 7 hours ago …
                  the post and his reply are from April…
                  yeah

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                  1. I’ve been getting odd delays in comment delivery (22hrs and such) on a few comments and have had at least 2 comments floating out of the past from a month or so ago. I was dating it from around the time of the Gravatar change, figuring WP was fighting with itself.

                    It’s weird, whatever the origins.

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    2. What Your Timmy did to Our Jimmy, with Tim and Jim not needfully being verified as ever having existed….

      Gads. Humans are jacked up.

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  9. Humans are natural tribal, and when any imposed order dissolves, we revert to the closest tribal community possible. No kidding, I attended a dinner party in Boston, attended by a bunch of elites and intellectuals, and an argument broke out about who was right and wrong in the Murder of Glencoe (1692). Emotions ran high, as sides were taken based on genealogy, family history, and a smattering of reason. It was almost surreal to watch it unfold.

    At this same party, I told the friend who invited me that everyone who found out I was from Utah would ask if I was Mormon. He said, “That’s ridiculous. This is Boston, and we don’t care about things like a person’s religion.” And yet sure enough, everyone wanted to know not only if I was Mormon, but if I practiced polygamy.

    We have to know how to categorize both the friend and the stranger. But the mindset of the left somehow always interprets the category as the ideology, and if your ideology does not match theirs, you are seen as an enemy. So all you have to do is say, “I’m a Texan”, and they know exactly what you believe–and feel free to dismiss you as not just wrong, but unimportant (and most likely uneducated, uncouth, and uncultured).

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    1. Now see, I would have asked if you had separate houses for each wife or if you kept them all under one roof.

      ::KIDDING! I’m just kidding!::

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    2. And yet sure enough, everyone wanted to know not only if I was Mormon, but if I practiced polygamy.

      Did you start saying “No, I’m not from the inner city?”
      (look up the old common law marriage laws… other than instances of folks deliberately avoiding invoking them, polygamy is definitely practiced to a great extent; also some trailer parks and other low-income places)

      I can kind of defend the question AND the “nobody here cares about religion” thing– from a very odd place, motherhood.
      People say a lot of really dumb things they don’t really mean when they’re trying to make small talk. (I keep trying to make myself believe that in the “wow, three kids under five– are those two twins?” conversations.)

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    3. You should have told them you don’t need to practice: you’ve got it down pat. And Jen. And Alice. And… (runs. Fast.)

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  10. I noticed that ossified is a good word to describe nationalism. We used to live in Germany around Rodenbach. Our landlord’s son started to date a girl from the other side of Kaiserslautern and who was of the academic class. His family was surprised and dismayed that their son wasn’t more interested in the girls in their working class neighborhood. They had always been working class and would always remain working class. The son was extremely intelligent and an American view of class, which was so unusual –even now.

    Even the town was divided Catholic and Protestant (we lived on the Catholic side). Each side had their own festivals and their own shops.In the evening you would hear competing bells. The only thing either side had in common was the soccer team. We think a hundred years ago is a long time– they were thinking in 500 hundred years ago or a thousand years ago.

    The flexibility of American thought comes from our ability to absorb new ideas, words, and make them totally our own. Once we ossify, we’ll become a stagnant nation — with a stratified class system.

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    1. “In North America, a hundred years ago is a ridiculously long time. In Europe, a hundred miles away is a ridiculously long distance.”

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        1. when describing the affected area after Katrina I got a lot of “Wait. How Big is it???” as folks over there could not comprehend the damaged area was the size of Great Britain. Though when I told one lady that (she had asked why the trucks took so long to get into N.O.) she realized it was like a storm hitting her and waiting for the relief to come from Northern Scotland (she lived in Penzance) and then I told her they only had two roads they could use to get there and they were flooded and damaged.
          They also tend to freak a bit when I mention driving or riding my motorcycle 1900 miles to get home for vacation (or even the shorter 1300 mile route).

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          1. yea – our landlord and his family went to Alabama to visit an uncle. They thought that they could take a bus to Florida. lol When they came home, they were wide-eyed with disbelief at how BIG the US is.

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            1. heard a few stories about the Great Lakes that were similar… There is a website that has a map of the U.S. and a floating map of the U.K. so one can drag it around the U.S. to get a frame of reference for those folks.

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              1. It was mind-boggling to them that they needed a car to buy milk and bread. They were used to walking a couple of blocks to a dairy and bakery. ;-) Plus those maps don’t help– they just don’t have a mind-reference.

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                1. yeah, a “bit of a trip” for us in Texas is several borders crossed for most folks there. it’s what , a little under 700 miles drive from St. Ives to Aberdeen Scotland. That won’t get you from Amarillo to Harlingen.

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                  1. Tell me about it. I have to drive from the Amarillo area down to Corpus and back next March for a meeting. My back hurts just thinking about it.

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                  3. Actually, it’s 555 miles from Truro to Land’s End in the UK. That goes from the northernmost city in Scotland to the farthest southwestern edge of the UK. People wouldn’t believe me when I said it was 806 miles from El Paso to Orange, Texas, on the Louisiana border. I used to comment that it was 1200 miles from my home in Colorado to my brother’s house in Texas, and I only drove through three states. People would accuse me of confusing miles with kilometers, until they learned I not only knew the conversion factor (0.62 miles/kilometer), but could practically do the conversion in my head while driving (I lived 12 years in Europe — I learned!).

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                    1. There is a reason people west of the Mississippi measure distance in hours, not miles.

                      I once had a German who was bragging about his country incoherent with rage, by simply pointing out that that little spot on the map he called home was simply what I would call a county (slight hyperbole, Germany is state sized) and that all of Europe is roughly the same size as the USA. We look at all those little so-called countries arguing and fighting amongst themselves and it is like watching a bunch of ill mannered children having a food fight.

                      Not sure if it was referring to them as ‘so-called countries’, glorified counties, comparing them to children, or saying that they needed their backside tanned; but the colors his face turned while he spluttered were quite interesting.

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                2. Met an Italian foreign exchange student once. Parents came over for graduation and told us that they were going to drive down to Florida to visit Disney, then to Texas to see the Alamo, then to San Diego up to San Francisco, then to Seattle, across to the great lakes, then up to DC, finishing up in NYC where they’d catch their flight home. In five days. They didn’t believe us when we told them how long it was going to take to get to Florida alone.

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                  1. And you know, I think a lot of people HERE don’t realize how close together the locations of so many historical events are geographically over there. We have historical sites separated by, in many cases, hundreds of miles, while some of them in Europe may be just on the next hill.

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                    2. I do all the time.
                      Oh, wait, that’s why they’ve actually told me at the airport that they don’t want me back. (Followed by me saying “You couldn’t drag me back.”) My dad says he usually knows I’ve landed because he hears my euphonious accents from passport/customs control saying something like “And I shook the DUST off my sandals.”

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                    5. In some cases it might be “I’d forgotten it was that small. It’s always bigger in my memories…”

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            2. No doubt you could if you choose the right location in Alabama and the right destination in Florida.

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              2. Florida is closer to Texas than El Paso, TX is to Orange, TX … heck, Pensacola about the same (less than 20 miles difference iirc) to get to Dallas.

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    2. I knew my grandparents and in one case, great grandparent. I remember a few stories they told me, and have a general vague idea of ancestory (Irish on one side, Dutch, Indian and uhh, on the other) but that is all I know and am interested in knowing. This is typical of Americans (if they even have that much of an idea of their pre-American ancestory) and unthinkable for most other cultures.

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      1. Oh at a certain age most people start looking for roots. After they find three or four generations they are satisfied. So yea, it isn’t like other countries–
        Of course I am the anomaly because I have done a lot of research on our ancestry, except the DNA tests tell me that some of that paperwork is wrong.

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        1. Of course I am the anomaly because I have done a lot of research on our ancestry, except the DNA tests tell me that some of that paperwork is wrong.

          There’s also the problem that their labeling theories could be wrong– DNA isn’t as simple as ancestry, and unless you are dealing with a first generation crossing of two very pure strains it’s going to be much more random than neat and tidy.

          It is theoretically possible for, say, two half-elves to have three kids, one of whom looks pure Elvish, one who looks pure Human, and one who looks like mom and dad, although unless “elvish” is a single chunk it’s more likely they’ll all cluster around the middle of “about half elf.”

          Human genetics are fascinating– it’s entirely possible for who Irish looking folks who have known black ancestry to have a kid who “looks black.” (one neighbor’s daughter is a nurse– she thought her doctor was pulling a fast one to ask folks about this and warn them, and then a sandy-brown haired pale couple did have a “black” baby; yes, they did check)
          There’s also the traditional evidence of Vikings discovering America, the Indian kids with blue eyes or blond hair.

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  11. My Lithuanian husband has a strong interest in (and desire to tell me about) the great Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth and its glory days (from the Baltic to the Black Sea). Americans know next to nothing about the history of eastern Europe.

    I’m amused to see its reflection in your Elizabeth books.

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    1. Thanks. It’s been fun to play with. “Blackbird” will probably come the closest to the “straight story,” and even then I opted to omit some of the Habsburg complications to focus on the Hunyadi-Corvinus storyline. Otherwise I fear the book would be up there with GRRM as far as length and complexity. :)

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  12. “But that strange thing called “nationalism” doesn’t apply to Americans, and I suspect it doesn’t apply to Aussies, New Zealanders, or Canadians, either.”

    For certain values of “apply”, it can; look at the popularity of the “hyphenated” identifier: Polish-American, Dutch-American, African-American (though that’s a continent and not a nation), Scottish-Canadian (that’s me!), French-Canadian, Cajun-American, Greek-Australian, Irish-American, etc. etc. etc…. Most people who have any sense of heritage at all in the Colonial Nations have something similar, I think.

    The important thing is that for most of our history the “nation” modifier was just a bit of colour; the “state” identifier was far more important.

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    1. Having a nation is not the same thing as nationalism. By (adoptive) ancestry, I am primarily Scottish on one side, Costa Rican mestizo on the other; but I regard Scotland today as a festering cesspool of nanny-statist fools, and the total extent of my devotion to Costa Rica can be summed up in the fact that I felt mildly tickled when they made the quarter-finals in the World Cup. (But I didn’t bother to watch any of the matches.)

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    2. My first impulse was the same, but… Yeah, I consider myself Irish, but it’s not on the matters level– it’s just something that’s kind of cool. It’d work for small talk, but if someone tried to appeal to my “heritage” to get me to favor them over even an equally qualified person– let alone a MORE qualified one– I’d probably break down laughing.

      If we try to take the “Polish American” thing as a model for “nationalism” as Mrs. Boykin (?– guessing, Miss if not or Ms if she’s got Views, I’ll try to remember if corrected but I’m just not Southern enough to call everyone “Miss”) is talking about, we’re going to have disastrously bad results.

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      1. “Miss”, and yes. We think Polish like the folks with the great all-parish sausage party, and the rest of the world thinks “Polish – we once owned all of eastern Europe” or “Polish – perfidious former serfs”.

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        1. FWIW, I think “Polish– hey, that Pope looked a lot like my uncles in that old camping photo, they’re probably cool.”

          And noted, I’ll try to remember. :D

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          1. No worries. I tell the students that I’m Miss or Dr. They still forget and call me Mrs., at least when they’re not sinking down into their chairs thinking “ooohhh, it’s THAT sub. We’re doooooommmmmed.”

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            1. real conversation
              Sister: ” We had Fisher for a sub today!”
              Grandma: “When we had him as a substitute we thought he was Soooo Cute!”
              Sis: “Are you sure it was the same Fisher?”
              Grandma: “Conan Fisher, Right?”
              It was the same guy
              Grandma was about 70 then

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            1. In the upper Midwest I heard them as Polak if I was in MN or WI, and German or Scandinavian in IA. And Finn in southern MN. The IA-MN border was referred to as the Lutefisk Line.

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              1. I grew up in the U.P. of Michigan, and there is still a Finnish speaking TV show on Sundays up there, and when I was a kid, an organisation that gave out awards for having the proper amount of Sisu.

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            2. Interesting, the only Europeans I heard jokes about were Pollocks, the occasional Irish or English joke, and French; only most people weren’t joking about the French*. In the circles I’ve been around somebody might refer to someone as a ‘big Swede’ or possibly a ‘big dumb Swede’ (usually not the latter to their face, unless they were good friends) but I don’t think anyone would recognize a Finn as being Finnish, and all most know about Finn’s is that Finland is where Sako’s and now Tikka’s are made.

              *The French are viewed with more contempt and only slightly less distaste than Muslims.

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              1. A qualification– MODERN French.

                The various groups that came from France before the revolution– or, as some folks put it, “trying to kill off everybody who was smart or brave”– get respect, but they also tend not to identify as “French” so much as some form of Cajun or Creole or various fur trapping groups, or Scarlet Pumpernickel (joke, JOKE!!!!) type stuff.

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              2. My cousin used to tell his sister when she was having issues with her kids “The problem is they are half Finn … and it’s the top half!” (there was a goodly amount of Swede in my uncles background)
                Most of the Finn and Swede jokes (and the occasional Norwegian tossed in there too) Came from one or the other bashing the “Dumb Swede”, or the “Hard Headed Finn” (Or Hard Headed Norwegan as well). Sorta like Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes are for Cajuns with all the bite of the Polack jokes.

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      2. If we try to take the “Polish American” thing as a model for “nationalism” as [Alma] is talking about, we’re going to have disastrously bad results.

        Some people WANT disastrously bad results. Either they hate America enough to want to smash it into pieces or it suits their short term interests. Like people who reveal classified info at a party to show how important they are–even if it might get someone killed, or ruin years of work.

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    3. Tat “Hyphenated-American” thing gets a lot of push from the left, for some reason. They don’t like the whole “Melting Pot: idea any more.

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      1. They’d rather see it as a salad bowl of varied ingredients.

        A melting pot produces strong steel. What comes out of a salad bowl doesn’t have much cohesion and is pretty shoddy stuff when it comes to structural integrity.

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        1. Strong steel is (to some people) “boring” while salad might be “hip”. Appearance is everything.

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        2. The “tossed salad” vs. the “melting pot” was actually a very popular metaphor for comparing Canadian vs. American attitudes towards immigrants; there has historically been far less pressure in Canada on our immigrants to culturally assimilate the same way as there was in America for a while. (The official Tourism Canada term was “cultural mosaic”.)

          Part of the reason we could get away with that was that we are much smaller (a tenth the size of the U.S. by population), and historically were a chosen emigration destination for far fewer people from the developing world, most of whom have tended to concentrate in just three cities (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver). This in turn made it easier for our governments to filter the useful from the burdensome and the needy from the corrupt, although volume has picked up recently and bureaucratic arteriosclerosis is increasing, as ever. A tossed salad can rebound under pressure as long as everything in it is fresh and crisp; it’s when the rotten stuff sneaks in under cover of the fresh that things go bad. (We are seeing some of that with the unfortunate rise in gang violence in Toronto in recent years, mostly due to some criminal elements among our Jamaican immigrants.)

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          1. We used it to indicate a sick vegetarian, although salad-shooter was the more commonly used term.

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      2. I was musing at work the other day. I call myself Gringo because the Spanish term is hard to say (Estadounidiense – who has time to say that much?) but I was looking up translations of rather arcane words.

        I’ve informed all my co-workers that I am now officially a Septentrional-American. (it earned me two “huhs?” three “whatever, Bobs” and one shriek of laughter.)

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        1. so…Septentional comes from the medieval theory that the world is divided into 7 climes, the northernmost is the 7th, or Septentrional. It is a word worthy of deeply meaningful and weighty studies into, say, Roman management of Iberian mineral resources.

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          1. Not to be a party pooper, but Septentriones was actually the Latin name of the Big Dipper. Comes from septem ‘seven’ + triones ‘plough-oxen’, as to the Romans (and a lot of others) that constellation looked like a plough.

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            1. Well hell. You know, I pulled that definition partially out of Mandeville’s Travels. My fault for basing things on 14th century writers.

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          1. I get pissed off at those forms. They never list Caucasian. I used to put “C” in the ones that just ask for a letter to describe race.

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            1. If they ever compile the different ones I have filled out, they will be confused. I can recall at different times checking, Caucasian, Native American, White, Other, and on those with a blank spot to fill in using Human, None of your Business, or Unknown, although I commonly used simply American.

              I suspect people like me are why you seldom see such forms with a fill-in-the-blank space, now.

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            2. Except for thinking about putting in Native American (because hey, I was born here), I’ve always written ‘C’ in the box, because I presumed that’s what I was supposed to do.

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    4. Heinz-American.

      Fifty-seven varieties. 0:)

      Irish, French, Italian, German. . . there are a few women who appear out of nowhere in Acadia on their wedding days, as far as the records can tell us.

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    5. Heh, Classic American Mutt here. My ancestry goes back to Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, France, probably a couple of places I haven’t found out about yet, plus Natives. Which is why I don’t get it. I may identify with my Scot ancestors, but I don’t consider myself Scots-American, or Irish-American. I am American, plain and simple.

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      1. I may identify with my Scot ancestors, but I don’t consider myself Scots-American, or Irish-American. I am American, plain and simple.

        Amen.

        If I am trying to be precise as possible, I’m Irish-Scottish-English-Indian-andwhatevertheymarriedbeforewehavepictures, assumingthat”Patrick”wasactuallyIrish.

        But the Irish have better songs, and the home town with the best Independence Day parties is 95% County Cork. (For the birth place of the folks or parents of those living there, as of when my mom was about… 9 or so. ST. Pat’s was big, but not as big as the 4th.)

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        2. “It takes the Village People”? Or, “It takes a Viking to raze the Village People”? Or, “It takes the Village People to raise a child”? I’m confused.

          :-)

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          1. But trolls don’t have anything to pillage, no one wants to touch them, and they don’t burn that well.

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            1. Great. Now I have a mental image of a bunch of older folks with double-headed axes, sword-canes, and pikes and torches affixed to their wheelchairs and walkers storming the halls of County Medical Plaza. Sort of like when the Stainless Steel Rat got admitted to the super-criminals’ nursing home.

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              2. I want to start putting Propane engines on those powered mobility scooters, instead of the electric ones. Soup those suckers up so they can chase people with ’em.

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                    2. Seriously, IIRC you don’t as long as you don’t drive it on public streets or roads.

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                    4. Somewhere I’ve seen photos of an older lady on a scooter, in RenFest garb, who had either a pony or goat (fake) mounted to the front of her scooter, with trim on the scoot so it looked like the kind of small cart I’d call a pony trap. She blended in to the Faire but could still get around.

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    7. Well, some of my ancestors were CAREFULLY kicked out of Scotland around 1735, some were driven out of Ireland by the Potato Famine of 1840(ish), others were part of the Wind Clan of the southern Creek Nation, others were Caddo (another Native American nation), and others from France, Germany, and Scandinavia were picked up here and there. That makes me 100% American — product of the melting pot.

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  13. Most of my ancestral places are either totally unknown, totally in ruins, or mostly in ruins. And we got the heck out of there, anyway.

    But I do like knowing stuff about the ancestors, because it provides sure and certain proof that the apples do not fall far from the tree, and that we’ve always been weird and argumentative. Also, in today’s world, you can look at lots of local photos and Google Maps of townlands, which makes genealogy a lot more fun to read about, not to mention providing one with wallpaper of pebbly Scottish lochsides. :)

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    1. Ah, the old “it was like that when we got there/can’t prove anything” excuse ;-) (*MY* Scottish ancestors were mentioned as follows–“As long as the Criminal Register exists, the name of Elliot will always be remembered.” The Sassenach were just mad that they paid ’em to guard the border. Which they did, because that meant there was more stuff for THEM to steal. Just can’t please some people….)

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      1. Heh, Part of my Scots were Beatties. Hi, Borderer.
        I am reminded of the story of the parson who came through a village and cried, “Are there no Christians in this place?” and was told, “no, mostly Elliots and Armstrongs.”

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            1. Up until James I the Scots-English border marches were controlled by a series of families that were supposed to control the border but wound up raiding across it regularly. These were also known as the border reivers and tended to also be the families appointed as representatives of the various crowns as Wardens. The Wardens and their supporters, in between keeping the peace and chasing down malefactors, tended to be involved to some degree in cattle rustling, theft, robbery, extortion and kidnapping, the very things they were supposed to be protecting against. Usually they raided across the border, but not always. Going on such a raid was called “riding out” and such a raid was called a “road” There were a number of what were known as Riding surnames, like the Armstrongs, Nixons, Grahams, Elliots, Maxwells, Robsons, and Scotts. Each major name, like each major clan, had its supporting families. The Beatties were a minor name.
              The borders families were also known for their generational feuds, a tradition they brought to the new world and to Ireland where a number were transported.

              GM Fraser, the author who wrote the Flashman series, also wrote a book about the Border, called The Steel Bonnets. He mentioned that the role of the Warden was difficult because although he supposedly had full support for his position, he had to win the support of the local landowners and clans, and keep them in line without antagonizing them. Some….flexibility was required.

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    2. But I do like knowing stuff about the ancestors, because it provides sure and certain proof that the apples do not fall far from the tree, and that we’ve always been weird and argumentative

      Had a minor disappointment recently– the doctor sent out an automated message, triggered by my weight, asking if I was worried by my weight and what I thought was the main factor.

      I picked “somewhat” and “family,” really hoping the doctor would ask why… so I could pull out pictures going back over 100 years showing the ladies on both sides of my family, at my age or ten years older, looking exactly like me.
      The only thing that’s odd about my female relatives since about the 50s is that we’ve stopped having an easily slim youth– and yes, it correlates with doctors telling women they MUST keep their weight gain down during pregnancy.

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  14. The Aussie version is rather like the American version, with extra black humor. We’ll knock our own culture like you wouldn’t believe, but let anyone *else* have a go at us and there’s hell to pay.

    Of course, the *average* Australian’s view of immigration is “Welcome, mate. Follow the house rules and give it a go, and she’ll be right. Leave the nasty stuff outside, bring in the food and the parties and the sports. You try to bring your old pissing matches with you, we’ll kick your arse so hard it comes out your mouth.”

    The politicians lean rather more to the politically correct, which has been known to make things… interesting. Such as the way a rather large group of young Australian males made it known to the… *ahem* “adherents of the religion of peace” who had been assaulting young women for not belonging to their faith and not meeting their personal dress code. Apparently, the “religion of peace” in that area pulled its collective neck in rather quickly after discovering that no, the locals weren’t going to roll over no matter *what* the politicians said.

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      1. Yes, indeedy. They discovered Aussies are laid back – until they’re not. Then it’s all hell breaking loose until the trouble’s done. After which, the Aussies have a beer and relax.

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        1. The English used to be that way,according to Kipling:

          “I have watched them in their tantrums, all that Pentecostal crew,
          French, Italian, Arab, Spaniard, Dutch and Greek, and Russ and Jew,
          Celt and savage, buff and ochre, cream and yellow, mauve and white,
          But it never really mattered till the English grew polite;

          Till the men with polished toppers, till the men in long frock-coats,
          Till the men who do not duel, till the men who war with votes,
          Till the breed that take their pleasures as Saint Lawrence took his grid,
          Began to “beg your pardon” and-the knowing croupier hid. “

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        3. When we left Germany, some friends in Nederland were getting ready to bust some of the religion of “peace.” They were accosting good Dutch girls, and raping the girls because “clothes.”

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    2. Leave the nasty stuff outside, bring in the food and the parties and the sports.

      You got plenty of nasty on your own….

      My mom nearly killed my dad– roughly the nicest person on earth– over him leaving a skinned, salted, stuffed rattler hatchling on her desk.

      YOU guys can play with the dangerous stuff. Over here? I’ll shoot someone that plays around with even maiming level junk….

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      1. Someday, when the statute of limitations expires (and a few people expire), I’ll have to publish the Adventures of the Great Rubber Rattler. It was an . . . interesting summer at the airport. Bored pilots + realistic rubber snakes = excitement. + real snakes = real excitement.

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      2. Eh – my dad caught a live rattler, kept in an aquarium in his study – just to teach me and my slightly smaller brother (we were aged about 3 1/2 and 2 years) about how to cope with snakes, poisonous and otherwise.
        Mom was totally cool with that, although she did have to come up with a fast explanation about the noise that it made to the visiting grandparents and great-aunt.
        Long story short – I have no fear of snakes. In fact, I rather like snakes, although I was never tempted into keeping one as a pet…

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        1. We never caught venomous snakes, but I have astonished people by catching wild snakes bare-handed (and I’ve never been skunked by a garter snake, just lucky.) I also know the trick to catching lizards, which is to cover your hand with a white handkerchief because it messes with their depth perception.

          There was one summer up at camp when we had a whole mess of rubber boas. Cute little things; they’ll try to squeeze your finger. I still don’t know how I managed to convince the waterfront director (think classic handsome tall lifeguard, and apparently scared of snakes) to carry one back to Staff Hill, but the image of this great big guy holding a teensy snake out at arm’s length is still a memory to warm my heart.

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          1. Rat Snakes really stink a place up. Glad I missed it and my former supervisor was the one who grabbed it. Egad that thing made a skunk smell lovely by comparison.

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        2. I like snakes. My mother didn’t. She nearly beat me to death when she discovered the green ribbon snake I’d had as a pet for six months. That taught her to never open my desk drawers again, though… 8^)

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  15. I am English, through and through, and therefore “a stupendous badass”. Your Welcome.

    When I think of nation I think of the gene pool I swim in… so far as I can tell, English throughout. Maybe if you go back far enough you might find some Norse, but then, I live in the North of England, and Nordic place names, and surnames etc, are common. Mind you, I know lots of people of celtic heritage, who likewise say English when asked… I know so many “Maccas” it’s unbelievable. So… it’s as much about culture as anything else.

    I mean: The Alamo is mentioned. I’ll raise you 1066, or Alfred and the cakes. Heritage is genetic and history. About 4 miles from me right now is a stone circle, that’s part of my world, even if only on the periphery. Likewise, a ten minute walk I can get to a small sandstone castle. They built it because of the Scots reivers who raided, raped and pillaged with impunity for centuries. It’s not very impressive, but I get a buzz when I walk under it, much as I do when I go to a stone circle, even though I am probably not connected in any way to either in any genetic sense; it’s still a part of my world, mein volk.

    Put another way, a friend of mine was working in the desert Texas way (Mexico even, it might be, can’t remember). He’s German-Merican. He sent me pics of stone arrowheads. “Sheyyit, you find these things everywhere.” His thinking was that these people were like stone-age savages while ours were well into the iron age stuff etc. And he’s quite right, but hey, imagine a Native American finding such a thing? He thinks: “That’s my people.”

    So… Nationalism, I understand. It runs deep, deeper maybe than mere genetics. I don’t think that it necessarily follows that I want to destroy anyone not English, but then I am an Englishman, and therefore a Gentleman (you can tell by the smoking jacket and pince-nez, and the ironed newspaper (I have an excellent valet)).

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    1. I think you just made Alma’s point, us Americans look at what you just wrote and say, “So what?”

      I mean sure you had some ancestors a few hundred years ago that got raped by Scots, so their sons (possibly half Scottish) built a castle. You (and all nationalists, not picking on you) seem to think that defines you, we on the other hand, don’t understand nationalism. We look at that don’t see any connection between some people centuries ago being victims and then building a castle to defend themselves, and you being a worthwhile human being. Nor do we see a connection between those Scots that raped and pillaged your ancestors and their current descendants, we don’t think their descendants are worthless thieves and rapists, because that is how their seventeen times great grandfather lived.

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      2. Thank you bearcat for the response.

        “I think you just made Alma’s point, us Americans look at what you just wrote and say, “So what?””

        I was trying to illustrate a nationalistic POV from a non statist POV. I could say you colonial types are just mongrels, and blood is thicker than water, but, hey, I English. Politeness is second nature. :D

        “I mean sure you had some ancestors a few hundred years ago that got raped by Scots, so their sons (possibly half Scottish) built a castle.”

        Didn’t say that, I think. But hey, not the point really. The castle is a pele castle, rather common in the north. Not impressive, not Disney, functional. I am Northern, Winter is Coming. We just get on with it.

        “You (and all nationalists, not picking on you [thank you, truly]) seem to think that defines you, we on the other hand, don’t understand nationalism.”

        I am not a National Socialist, or any other kind of Nationalist politically-wise. I am English. It’s an accident of birth.

        “We look at that don’t see any connection between some people centuries ago being victims and then building a castle to defend themselves, and you being a worthwhile human being. ”

        I don’t think they were victims. they were practical. Winter is Coming.

        “Nor do we see a connection between those Scots that raped and pillaged your ancestors and their current descendants, we don’t think their descendants are worthless thieves and rapists”

        Now then, you haven’t been to Glasgow, have ye?

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        1. This reminds me of the old joke about the lottery prizes. First prize: one week in Glasgow. Second prize: TWO weeks in Glasgow.

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        2. I have been doing a fair amount of driving lately, and was thinking about your use of the phrase “blood is thicker than water”, while driving the other day. That is a phrase heard here in the States, also, but it isn’t used the same way or really understood as it is in “nations”. As stated by Alma, we are a State full of Patriots, not a Nation full of Nationalists. Americans don’t actually believe blood is thicker than water (at least past immediate family; brother, sister, mother, father, and sometimes not that far) we believe that water, those that believe like we do, do things that we do, etc. is much thicker than blood. We don’t really comprehend how someone could choose to support someone else just because they are the same nationality, even though they believe totally different beliefs, over someone who believes the same as themselves but whose ancestors happened to come from the other side of the mountains.

          This is worth a whole post, and possibly if I have time I may write one up and send it to Sarah, but I’m a little busy right now.

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    2. I spent my “childhood years” in a small community (Tioga, LA) north of the twin cities of Alexandria/Pineville — white-bread towns with a modest black community. About twelve miles north of Tioga was the town of Pollock (lots of Polish families). A few miles to the east of Pollock was Jena (founded by Germans). To the southeast of Tioga was Kolin (founded by refugees from Bohemia in the mid-1800s) and Marksville (mostly Cajun). There were also French, Italian, and even a few Russian families. The only time any of that mattered was during football and basketball season, when the various communities supported the local teams.

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  16. I Gloat! ‘Twas I as planted the question for today’s Klavan & Whittle (www[DOT]pjtv[DOT]com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=756&load=9991 and why ain’t choo a member?) and they finally reached the correct answer! America is not exceptional because of our economic power, nor our military might or cultural vitality. America is exceptional for being based on an idea, and the economic, military and cultural strength derive from that founding.

    Sigh – the proper soundtrack accompanying the opening title should be: I Gloat!

    Stoopid BBC, not putting this wonderful show on the interwebs (or even for sale at a decent price), denying me the ability to post clippages for purposes of doing my chortling. We saw the series on A&E back when they offered both Arts and entertainment and would dearly love to give people small amounts of money for the pleasure of watching it again.

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  17. Seemed somehow appropriate:
    “This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.”
    R.A.H. in Time Enough for Love

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  18. We are human – therefore Americans although poor in depth of history are carefully nurchuring every scrap of nationalism as described and cherishing it. We reject the old fights of the Old World, but start our own.
    The Confederate flag is a good example. It raises emotions as deep as any Irish march. And those passions predate any objections from blacks. ( I refuse to use that abomination African-American)
    The people of the east coast and the west coast regard each other as distant but peer civilizations, and the rest of us in fly-over country as foreign and vulgar folk of no value or consequence.
    The Alamo… All I can say is if the United States ever does break up I shall make my way to Texas. They are honest enough for all their faults to have retained a vision of themselves as a nation before they joined the US. Given necessity they can be again. And if it comes to that I expect them to take a buffer to the south of at least two thirds of Mexico, and to the north at least to the Colorado border. To the east to the Mississippi, and far west. Perhaps to California. Perhaps to the Pacific.

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    1. I agree, Mackey, but make the northern border a tad higher, to include Colorado Springs. The western border should be the Colorado River. We don’t want any of the insanity that pervades California and much of Nevada. Draw a line from Grand Lake (good link for the source of the Colorado) to Palmer Lake, east along the Palmer Divide to the town of Simla, then southeast to Lamar. After that, follow the Arkansas to the Mississippi. That way, I don’t have to move. 8^) Besides, most of that was the original Texas Territory.

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  19. Wonderful essay. Being something of a fan of G.K. Chesterton, myself, I often wonder to what degree the rise of nationalism grew, not out of the French Revolution, but out of German and English Protestantism. The basic political theory of Europe during the Renaissance and Middle Ages was that one Commonwealth (variously called a Republic or Empire) should rule all lesser kings and barons and keep the peace, and one Church (variously called Universal or Catholic) should shepherd the souls of the faithful. Before the final split between East and West circa AD 1000, the claim of the Church to universality was weightier (particularly since areas that were Nestorian, Monophysite or Arian had by then largely fallen under Mohammedan domination).

    In any case, my comment is that Europeans since the time of the Romans were used to having their local and tribal language and customs, and conducting business in the official languages of the Empire, Latin in the West and Greek in the East. The idea of a Nation, that is, a tribe with its own dialect, ruling itself without a Holy Roman Emperor (variously Spanish, German or Austrian) was an innovation.

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    1. Thank you, sir!

      I suspect that one could make the argument that the Hussite Wars took the idea of a linguistic/cultural nation, tied it to religious difference, and began the process. If that’s the case, the Thirty Years War and English Civil War pushed it forward, and the French Revolution and Enlightenment/Aufklarung philosophies brought the idea of “Nation as volk” to full bloom, to bear fruit through to today.

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  20. The upshot of it was that the Hill Country Germans were incredibly clannish because of the Civil War experience and quite wary of outsiders.

    When they started moving out of the hill country west towards San Angelo (Rowena/Olfen/Wall) and Midland (St. Lawrence), they got a lot less clannish. I grew up in Glasscock County which was about 50% German Catholic farmers and 40% Anglo Baptist ranchers and 10% Mexican laborers. All us kids played together, partied together, and in many cases, intermarried…….

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  21. I had a history prof in college who stated that the core problem in Eastern Europe is that every nationality produces more history than can be consumed locally.

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    2. Yup. As much as I love roaming around Europe, I’m glad I don’t live in such a history-saturated world (out here, a three-generation spat is considered ancient). “The past is another country” and I’m happy to be able to come home.

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  22. Come for the snark, stay for the edjumakashun. Kate – anyone who understands Anzac Day is appropriately scared of the bloody Aussies.

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  23. Amusing story Rhys heard from some Aussie special forces: ‘the one thing we feared the most in Afghanistan were goats.’ Because it didn’t MATTER how good the hide was, no matter what they tried to keep goats away (including tiger dung shipped in at one point!) the goddamned goats would ALWAYS FIND THEM. And start eating their hides. And the Aussies would be forced to relocate and start over building this hide that would be invisible to anyone else… but the bloody goats.

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