The American Race – Drak Bibliophile

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

*Sorry this is so late.  I had some potentially worrying news yesterday and dealt with it the way I deal with things: by doing stupid cr*p, which meant I spent the morning finishing outdoor holiday decorations.  I hope Drak forgives me posting this so late.
Also, will 60 guilders, and whoever else sent me blog posts that haven’t run re-send with “blog post” in the title?  Thunderbird is a pain to search, and right now all I can find is William Lehman’s and Foxfier’s. – SAH*

The American Race – Drak Bibliophile

No, not the Indianapolis 500 or other auto races.

Awhile back some idiot over on AccordingToHoyt said that Sarah Hoyt isn’t a real American because she wasn’t born in America.  At the same time, this idiot appears to be saying that American Indians aren’t real Americans because they aren’t part of the American Race.

So what is the American Race if there is “such an animal”?

First we have to consider “what is the English Race” as the Founders generally considered themselves English and their major gripe with England was that Americans were not treated as Englishmen should be treated.

Well, the English can be considered to be the descendants of the Angles, Saxons and Jute tribes that conquered the area now considered England.  Yet, we can’t forget the Celts that lived in that region.  John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, points out that spoken English has major differences from any other Germanic languages.  These differences can’t be traced to other languages known to have been an influence on English, such as French or Latin.  Mr. McWhorter points out that spoken English shows influence from Celtic languages so it is very likely that the Angles-Saxons-Jutes must have ruled over a good sized population of Celtic speakers which influenced the development of spoken English.

So the English race is a combination of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Celtics.  However, we can’t forget the Danes who made successful invasions of England.  While the Anglo-Saxon Kings managed to conquer the invaders, the English language of those areas shows marked differences from the language elsewhere in England.  Therefore, we have to add the Danes to the mixture that is the English race.

Then we come to the last successful invasion of England by the “Frenchified Vikings” known as the Normans with their Flemish men-of-arms. Not only did they “add” to the English language, they added their genes to the English race.  Then we have those Scotsmen and Welsh who didn’t stay in their “proper places” and added their genes to the English race.

So even before the English pushed their way into North America, they could be considered mutts.

Even before America became a nation, plenty of other groups found their way into the developing American Race.  There were the Dutch already in America who got conquered by the English.  The so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (actually Germans) who found their way to America followed by other German groups.  French Protestants found their way to America.  Paul Revere’s family was originally from France.  Even before the Revolution, we got plenty of Scotsmen who didn’t like living directly under the English Crown. [Note from Sarah: there were a lot of Portuguese, also in the New England Region, apparently escaping the Napoleonic invasion.  But also a lot of British immigrants imported Portuguese servants (this was a thing in England, too, as early as the 1500s.) Curiously one of the heroes of the American revolution was Portuguese.  I don’t remember his name, but since his claim to fame was being able to single-handedly carry a cannon, and since he came from Azores, I figure he’s one of Larry’s relations – SAH]

Of course, let’s not forget the American Indians.  While Americans weren’t too nice to them, plenty of them married into American families or otherwise became part of the developing American society.

So even before we kicked the English Crown out of America, the American Race was a race of mutts.

Afterwards, Americans welcomed into the US plenty of people from Europe.  More Germans, Italians, Irish, French and others.  While there were some rough spots, in general Americans welcomed these people and allowed them to be part of the American Race.

Still Sarah and others are correct, these people were allowed to be part of the American Race because they accepted the American Ideals.  As long as they accept the Ideals, Americans as a group didn’t care if their ancestors were Polish, etc.

Our problems today appear to be that some “born-Americans” don’t accept the Ideals and those “born-Americans” don’t see the need for Immigrants, legal or illegal, to accept the Ideals that make us Americans.

IMO those people who see a difference between themselves and people like Sarah who while born elsewhere accepts the American Ideals, show themselves to be Not-Americans even if their ancestors have been here since 1776.

Note, comments and corrections are welcome.

 

 

305 thoughts on “The American Race – Drak Bibliophile”

  1. Sarah, I hope getting the decorations up was a decent distraction at least.

    I was thinking about something similar at lunch. What makes us Americans? I think it’s a shared ideal about freedom and allowing individuals to strive regardless of who they are.

    1. It was a decent distraction. Also made me feel that I’m not dying. And now this is my new motto: I’m not dying, even if they kill me. My body can just get used to the idea, because I’m not dying.

      1. Maybe you’ll become a zombie through sheer determination like Reg Shoe. Let’s not find out anytime soon.

        2. Or an accidental living zombie like Joe Buckley in Kate’s Con series. I suspect this is more likely, given our hostess’ noted stubbornness.

        1. I don’t know about that.
          Remember, franks got recruited to the American side after being hit by a cannon ball…

  4. This whole “American race” thing is caused by a misunderstanding of what makes a nation, I think. In Europe and most of the Old World, your nationality and your ethnicity were pretty much synonymous. So those nations could be considered “ethnic” nations, where you could be a resident of the country without ever partaking of its nationality. America was (and is) different. Far from being an “ethnic” nation, we are a “creedal” nation, where if you accept the values and concepts of America you are (and anyone can become) an American with no attention paid to his or her origins. The yahoo Drak was talking about here doesn’t get that, and somehow believes that some folks aren’t and can never be Americans for some nonsensical reasons. Now, by this definition of “American” some native-born people aren’t truly American, while some people in other countries are Americans who just haven’t managed to get here yet. I think that’s an entirely accurate way of seeing it, myself.

    1. *raises claw* Minor point of order, only because I’m reading way too much about it at the moment. The idea of a nation meaning all people of what we’d call a certain culture or ethnicity didn’t get started until the early 1800s. Until then “nation” could mean people born in a certain area or from a certain language area (The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) OR just to the nobility, or even part of the nobility. For example, in the 1840s oen of the hot-topics of discussion in Hungary was just exactly who was the Hungarian nation. The magnates? The magnates and the gentry (all those who didn’t have to pay taxes)? The literate middle-class who were driving the urban economic growth and who were filling in the new Imperial bureaucracy and who didn’t exactly love the gentry? The peasants who spoke Magyar, along with everyone else who spoke Magyar? They didn’t come to an agreement until after 1870.

      The French Revolution is what gave Europe the idea of blood-and-soil nationalism, the kind that sounded so good before 1848 and became so deadly after 1900.

      1. I’m amazed on just how recent the concept of blood & soil nationalism really is. Up until the American & French Revolutions, nations tended to be the personal property of various kings, dukes, and other nobility. And often then the nobility may pledge fealty to a king in some other country all together.

          1. Yes, I understand. Don’t like it, but understand.
            Wasn’t he also the one who said “apre moi, le deluge?

            And the Obummer and his minions are almost gone.
            And Posner is still full of – himself.

            JPDev

    2. *chuckle* I recently (as in, some months ago) saw a National Geographic cover, titled ‘The New Europeans’

      I kind of shook my head. Those are not people who look like they’ll ever acculturalise. (I’ll grant that the older women who are very used to the headscarf will probably never feel comfortable without the headscarf and I can understand that.) But they’re a slap in the face of the Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish friends I had in Germany, whose parents were determined that their children grow up ‘German’ by adopting as many of the German cultural characteristics as possible – and having the daughters wear the headscarf only during Ramadan.

      At a recent high school function, I watched a girl get an award for some sports-based achievement; I can’t remember what, because I was more distracted by the utterly adorable display of Embarrasingly Proud Dad her father was doing, cheering and whooping loudly as his daughter came on stage and accepted her award. It was only afterward – much later- that I realised that the girl’s mother wore a headscarf, and when I pointed out the couple to Rhys, he said he recognised them speaking in Arabic. Their daughter had no headscarf on. Other than the headscarf and the language they spoke privately between themselves (we were only a seat away) they wouldn’t have been noticed as different from the other Embarrasingly Proud Parents in the hall. If anything, the father would’ve stood out only because he had a booming voice. Housemate said that the EPP display was very Australian, and the parents were clearly adoring of their only child.

      I started reading a manga by Shintani Kaoru, whose heroine is an Australian, but is mentioned to be “second-generation Japanese.” So, the child of Japanese migrants; and there was nothing in her behaviour that indicated to me that she was ever culturally Japanese – visually, she’s supposed to be. (Rather notably she seemed also Christian based off of several scenes.)

      1. As it is already certain that my sins have condemned me to eternal damnation, I can confess to briefly envisioning a comparable cover proclaiming The New Palestinians and depicting Russian Jews of a century ago.

        I also imagined a cover portrait of Genghis Khan’s Hordes proclaiming them The New Chinese.

        Or a Nazi parade down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, announcing The New French.

        Y’know, what with this polar vortex hitting my part of the world, the fires of Hell don’t seem too bad at the moment. With my luck I will land in Dante’s Ninth Circle, reserved for punsters and other perpetrators of treachery.

      1. Dungeons and Dragons has a Fifth Edition now, with some nice innovations, but all the cool kids are playing homebrew and retroclones. The really cool kids are playing GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.

        1. Somehow, I don’t think most of the people here ever much cared what the “cool kids” were doing.
          Though, I still DM for the 3.5 version. I always loved how many manuals and supplements were available for the d20 system.
          Is GURPS good? I’ve been thinking of dabbling in it.

          1. “Somehow, I don’t think most of the people here ever much cared what the “cool kids” were doing.”

            As I recall my youth the “cool kids” were generally the ones who had drunk the Kool-Aid.

            1. In my expereince the cool kids were the ones who cared very much who was allowed in to the cool kids. And who was kept out.

          3. Frankly, my assertions about who or what is cool may be entirely baseless.

            I think ACKS, Dungeon Fantasy, and Doug Cole’s Dragon Heresy project sound interesting, but so far in my life I’ve been too much of an anti-social loner for role playing games.

            Commercially, Fifth Edition is probably what makes any brick and morter sales at all possible.

  6. Thanks Sarah for your comments about the Portuguese because I’m embarrassed that I forgot another group of the American Race, that is the Spanish (not Hispanic, Spanish).

    I had a native-born great-aunt in California who would firmly tell you that she was Spanish not Mexican. 😉

    Also, since I wrote the above and after Trump’s victory, a Liberal elsewhere was wondering how Trump would handle the “Great And Glorious Demographic Change” that is foretold to happen to the US.

    IE the increased immigration of “Hispanics” that Liberals believe will out-number Whites in the US and “change the nature of the US”.

    Well, in a sense we’re “heard this before”.

    But at the time people were afraid/concerned that “non-Northern Europeans” would destroy the US if we let too many of them into the US.

    They were talking about Italians, Polish, groups from Eastern Europe, etc.

    “Those People With Their Alien Languages/Religions Were Going To Destroy America”. [Sarcasm]

    Mind you, before the “concern” about those groups, there was concern about those “Papist Irish”. 😀

    We’ve made those groups Americans so we’ll make the “Hispanic Hordes” Americans as well (if we’re allowed to).

    1. The other part of that discussion is that demographic shift forecasts are necessarily based on mathematical models. You may recall back in the day, there was a discussion on this in the Kratskeller. Green Bear said that in his experience population model forecasts rapidly lose any accuracy. Like in three months. So this decade scale forecasting may be like purporting to predict tornadoes, down to the city and day, years in advance.

      As in, full of crap, and makes you wonder what other shit sandwiches they are trying to feed us because of their insane faith in numerical magical thinking.

      1. Even taking their numbers without salt (oh, I cannot stand the cardiac diet…), things are unlikely to work out quite the way the Regressives think they will.

        Donald Trump of “Build The Wall” fame actually received more of the “Hispanic Bloc” vote than Juan McCain – who is a rabid open borders supporter, except for about three months before his primary every six years.

        I suspect that the numbers would have been much higher with someone that was not such a perfect target for fear-mongering among the LIVs – say, Cruz or Rubio.

        The great ethnic takeover plan, at least for now, has been short-circuited. It depends far too much on the immense swelling of the “undocumented voters” demographic – not those citizens who came in legally, or have been here for ages (some before my ancestors, who came over in the 17th century). Those citizens, like Sarah and my wife’s coworker (of Colombian origin), are not particular admirers of the Socialist Paradise.

        (That co-worker also voted for Trump, although only my wife knows it at the school – she has enough troubles with her running fight with the lily-White Regressive that absolutely hates her for the fact that her “Hispanic special needs” students actually speak better English than the kids in the “Second Language” main program.)

        1. I’m not convinced that Cruz or Rubio necessarily could have pulled together Trump’s voters.

          Beyond that blood doesn’t always match politics, the demographic categories are ‘identify as’, and that isn’t fixed at birth. Furthermore, modeling over decades cannot account for movements or killings which can be unpredictable and significant.

          1. Oh, true. Unless someone here has one of those sideways time gadgets laying around – we don’t know that either one of those two would have pulled enough together to beat the Beast. I was speaking only of the “Hispanic” demographic.

            Which is not really a demographic, at least among those who have not Americanized. There are the Spanish, the Puerto Ricans, the Cubans, the Central Americans (of wildly different subtypes), the South Americans (ditto).

            In fact, I have noticed that the people from the Distrito Federal (Mexico City) are about as different from Sonora, Chihuahua, or Baja residents as our own “coasties” vs. “fly overs.”

          2. I will guarantee you Rubio couldn’t have; I would probably have not voted for President in his case. Jeb! might have gotten a vote for Hildebeeste out of me, because if you’re going to guarantee importing more people than we can assimilate, we might as well elect someone who’ll overreach into civil war quickly.

            Cruz I supported with money and time, because we need a Constitutionalist most of all. Trump is a gamble vs Hildebeeste’s sure thing, and so far the gamble is paying off.

            1. Trump was worth it just for the lamentations of the Left. He may turn out to be awful but the anguish and lamentations of the Progressives is cheering me up, day in and day out.

    2. What with Tammany Hall and the Italian Mob, and their influence on politics and culture in ways that run directly counter to the dictates of the Constitution, one could argue that the Irish and Italian immigrants did their best to destroy the US in ways that we’re still feeling today. (And I say this as someone who had Italian-Irish in-laws)

      I wonder if subsequent immigrants from other ethnies pushed previous immigrants to identify more closely with the ways of Americans before them?

      1. Waggles hand: MAYBE. A lot of that was here before in terms of corruption of our system. In fact, it’s amazing how old our fight is. And a lot of the rest, like the proto-fascism of FDR came not from immigrants but from really bad ideas our immigrants imported from Europe.
        Mind you there is a danger in a vast amount of immigrants who are here for reasons other than wanting to be Americans. It creates pockets of foreign culture amid our country. But in the long run it doesn’t last. 3 generations MIGHT be it for “immigrated in a large group with everyone from their village, and don’t REALLY want to be Americans.” In three generations, their grandkids ARE.
        For those who WANT to be Americans and work at it, no, it doesn’t take three generations.

      1. I think you meant “blanco”. 😉

        That series was full of Politically Correct nonsense. 😦

  7. No way is a 1st generation immigrant ever going to be a real American. It takes at least 3 generations of assimilation become a real American. But that’s not the issue regarding real Americans. The issue is the American nation being flooded with so many foreigners that it is impossible for them to ever be assimilated and become real Americans. Post modern immigration patterns are destroying America, and that means pretty soon nobody will be a real American.

    1. You realize Sarah is a “first generation” American and most of the regulars consider her a Real American.

      There is a Chinese couple in my church who are “first generation” Americans and their boys (born in the US) acted no differently from “White” American boys their age.

      While I agree that “Progressive Policies” have caused major problems with new immigrants becoming Americans, I dispute the idea that it takes “generations” for somebody to become American.

      1. Why do people equate being a “real American” with being a good person worthy of being in America? I’d say that the wonderfully talented and intelligent and thoughtful Sarah Hoyt is an excellent ancestor of many future real Americans. Also, I’m not yet a real American yet my self because my grandparents on my mother’s side were born in Mexico. I say 3 generations because I have respect for America as a country. I think people that say that anyone who washes up on shore is automatically a real American is showing disrespect for the country, under the delusion that they are being generous to the immigrant.

        1. Because becoming an American involves IMO the acceptance of the American Ideals.

          Sarah has done so.

          I feel sorry for you if you don’t believe that you’re American even after accepting the American Ideals.

          Note, my Dad traced back our family tree to before the ACW so “by your standards” I’m a Real American and I say that Sarah Hoyt is also a Real American.

              1. And I admire that in you. Me, I couldn’t, as he was insulting my wife (which he didn’t know, but there it is).

                1. Yes. I shall refrain also – because he is insulting my wife too, of Polish / Lithuanian heritage.

                  I never knew her original immigrant grandparents – but I can tell you that her parents were DAMN well “Real Americans.”

          2. My Dad got our tree back further here in the US. Suffice it to say, he joined Sons of the American Revolution as a result and I’m told I qualify if I wanted to join. I’m pretty sure that our qualifying individual (a fife player) was of Scotch-Irish descent (those folks uprooted from Scotland to colonize part of Ireland on behalf of the English for a period of time). You left out the Scotch-Irish in your description of early wave (and that group was notorious for generally supported the rebellion against England). In my lineage, I have everything from (i) farmers whose cattle froze during one hard winter in the northern part of the Great Plains (I want to say Nebraska), causing them to move back to Ohio to (ii) one guy who successfully made a fortune in the California Gold Rush (and then brought that fortune back to Chicago). As time went on, we have folks in the tree who arrived more recently as well, of course, from various places including France, Germany, and Scotland. Both of my grandparents served in WWII – albeit one as a postman in the South Pacific and the other was in U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942-1946. So, to the extent to which I’m anything, I’m very much an American mutt.

            Speaking as such, I very much agree that America is far more an idea than it is a bloodline or race. Those folks who arrive with the American Dream, those who work hard in order for their children to have a better opportunities for success, should be characterized as Americans very quickly, at least in my opinion. I’ve not met Sarah personally yet, but from her writing, it seems to me that she gets it. Some of her reactions are probably still colored by where she came from and/or what she was used to growing up, but I’d be happy to characterize her as a “Real” American.

            1. That “colored by where she came from / what she was used to” – MY reactions are “colored by” by where I grew up – a small town in Arizona – and are wildly different from people that I know from New England. And, at least going by the examples I see – completely OPPOSITE to those exhibited by most of the residents of Beverly Hills or Martha’s Vineyard.

            2. The reactions that most mark me as “not born here” are my positive allergy to Marxism. You see, they made me study it in three courses per year between 9th and 11th grade. My kids have the same allergy because they READ history, and realized it was Marxism they were taught in school.

              2. Sigh. My wife is also an immigrant from Europe and LOVES decorating the house for the holidays, up to and including some sculptural type decorations. (Side funny note – my wife actually got sworn in as a US citizen in a courtroom which had a picture of my grandfather on the wall, looking down, despite the fact he had died many years before I ever met her.) Of course, despite the fact she volunteered and was a member in a conservative leaning party in Europe, she’s been nullifying my vote ever since she became a citizen. My analysis of the situation is that her Overton window is heavily influenced by what she perceives as having been a broader political spectrum where she came from, she is deeply uncomfortable with social/religious conservatives and, among other things (including a real fear of guns and no understanding of the 2nd amendment), doesn’t understand the purpose of the split in authority between State and Federal governments. As a result, I’m heartened by your kid’s allergy to Marxism.

                Back to decorations though — I blame my WASP heritage for having a strong preference for a deliberately understated look and cringe when I think of how many boxes of Christmas stuff we have. Life being what it is, my wife wins generally in terms of putting the stuff up – and we do get a fair number of compliments as a result of her hard work, so I should stop while still ahead.

                1. I learned long ago that an essential ingredient of household amity is learning to distinguish when you are Management and when you are Labor. When in the latter state it is important to remember that however often management asks your opinion, your opinion should be limited to essential elements, such as “It will ne’er bear the load.” Views on Management policy and aesthetics are for your own amusement only, as has been the case for Labor since Time’s dawn.

                  Dean Martin demonstrates the proper response to all Management questions.

                2. Give her Red Planet to read. My WASP husband was pro-gun control until I gave him that.
                  No, conservative in Europe is completely different. It’s a blood-and-soil thing.
                  I’m just allergic to Marxism and can read print when it’s ten feet high, so I saw the Marxism in both parties, but more in the Democrats. I actually pulled my poor near-apolitical husband sharply to the right. 😛

                  1. Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately, while I love science fiction, I doubt I’d be able to get her to read it. Got any equivalent thoughts over in the Romance section? It would have to be subtle – putting a partisan speech in a character’s mouth won’t have the same effect. Hm … maybe one set in the Highlands of Scotland around 1750 or so with the effects of the Act of Proscription playing some kind of role in the plot? (Bad people with guns, good people have been disarmed per the law, etc.)

                    Also, to be fair, my wife is not a true European conservative in the blood-and-soil sense, more of a I-have-seen-when-the-far-Left-runs-everything-into-the-ground sense. Her position is that her more “conservative” party in Europe comes closer to matching the positions taken by the Democratic party than it does the Republican positions – which may well be factually correct, unfortunately.

        2. My Momma used to tell the story about a teacher asking the class how many had both their parents and grand-parents born in the USA. She did not tell it as a compliment to the teacher or the teacher’s attitude.

          On her mother’s side Momma was a descendant of many famous Americans whose families had been in the country since long before the Revolution. On her father’s side, well his mother had escaped the Russian Pale. Did this make her not a real American?

          1. An aspiring American can be more American than a degenerate descendant of real Americans, because what I’m talking about is spiritual, not carnal, and that’s why the carnal idiots cannot get the point.

            1. Was I you I would be careful about pointing that idiot finger.

              Being American is philosophical, not merely carnal and not merely spiritual. If you were a real American you might understand that.

            2. A) Stop insulting people. B) You don’t know spiritual from a hole in the ground. Trust me, the people you’re accusing of not being “spiritual” have been here for years, and they GET it.

              1. Reading between the “lines” of jsolbakken’s nonsense, when he’s talking “spiritual” I think he’s talking about a connection with a “Racial Spirit” or “Spirit Of The Race”.

                Mind you, it appears to be different (somewhat) than the idea of the Aryan Racial Spirit because he believes that the great-grandchildren of “outsiders” can become part of the “American Racial Spirit”.

                I don’t know if this idea is part of any “Alt-Right” groups or if it is something that jsolbakken made up.

                  1. I agree completely.

                    I’m just trying to make some sense of this “interesting” person’s talk. 😉

        3. And there are some people who are Americans who have the misfortune of being born in another country. They get here and go “This… This! This is home!” (Our hostess is one. I have a couple of cousins to whom this also applies, and several people I served with while on active duty.) You, sir, are the one showing disrespect to America by assuming that familial longevity in a country is even remotely necessary. People assimilate if they choose. We are a country of choice. That you do not think yourself a real American is your own CHOICE, but to insult others because they don’t meet your unsupported criteria is presumptuous to put it mildly.

          1. I’m saying that people who think saying “this is home!” makes them a real American are showing disrespect for the country and nation that they supposedly love. I show respect for the nation I love by not claiming more for my self in its regard than is warranted.

            1. Bull shit. You’ve put forth three generations as a standard for being a ‘Real’ American. As if just having been born somewhere gives you some superior claim on anything. You haven’t provided any proof for it. You’ve presented it as a truism then mocked and belittled people who don’t agree with your unsubstantiated bullshit.

              You’re not being noble. You’re looking down on your nose at others because they haven’t accepted YOUR assertion that they’re not real Americans. You haven’t provided any evidence. Just expected us to blithly take your word. So put your money where your mouth is and actually provide evidence rather than parroting an argument that’s over a century old without any apparent thought.

              3. It is a difficult task, though certainly a worthy one, to work to sway believers in magic dirt with mere words. But as a believers in the “mere words” that defined and birthed this country, and the ideals and rights those words proclaimed, I will never be swayed by the arguments of magic dirt.

                Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were both born foreigners, as Subjects of the British Crown in the British colony of Virginia, yet between them they were the authors of many of those words. Neither Jefferson nor Madison, though they had every opportunity, wrote any such “three generations” requirement into the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

                I remain unpersuaded (and indeed, I fear, unpersuadable) that “We hold these truths to be self evident, that after three generations of birth within current political boundaries, all men are created equal, and after the aforementioned waiting period, are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…” is an improvement.

            4. Then you do not get it and trying the false humility by “excluding” yourself isn’t helping your cause at all.

        5. “I think people that say that anyone who washes up on shore is automatically a real American …”

          Straw man meets flying monkey; debris results.

          Only idiots say that setting foot in this nation makes you American, just as only idiots with no true understanding of the American Creed imagine setting foot in this country is necessary to qualify as American.

          Heck, I know of families that have been in America for six or seven generations that still produce the occasional un-American. Shucks, Bill Ayers, of Weathermen infamy, can trace his line back to Obadiah Ayers, born 1635 in Massachusetts.

          2. I can trace my ancestry back 13 generations on this continent. That’s the side where all my great-grandparents were born out of this country. (One Italy. The other three, Canadian.)

        6. The most patriotic American I ever met was a college professor who canceled her class because of the Presidential Inauguration. The next day she castigated those of us who didn’t. And I felt mighty small because on every point she was right.

          She was a naturalized citizen. She wasn’t born an American, but she “got” what America is all about, got it a h*ll of a lot better than this natural born citizen, who’s ancestors were over here before there even was a United States of America, and some may have been here before there was a strait separating Asia from North America.

          That’s what binds us. An understanding of how we work; of a government by and for the people, a desire for liberty that the rest of the world frankly thinks is utter nuts, that embraces the idea of America as a shining light upon a hill, and, to steal from Pratchett, have a strong dose of “Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!” This is what makes an American, not food or customs or pastimes or religion or language or even liberal or conservative.

          I’ve know Sikhs who wore traditional garb and former Mexicans more comfortable with Spanish who were a dang sight more American than our self-appointed elites. They were assimilated where it mattered most before they ever set food in this country. I am happy to call naturalized citizens fellow Americans. They have a better idea of what it means to be an American than some who’s ancestors have been here longer than mine.

    2. Its a combination of rate of immigration, and attitudes on the part of the educational, governmental, and societal institutions. Most of the institutions are bending over backwards to make it possible to live in America without ever learning English, let alone assimilating old school American culture. We could easily handle mass immigration (though perhaps not at quite the recent scale) if those institutions were promoting assimilation, rather than abhorring it. Let’s go back to the Melting Pot, and relegate the Salad Bowl to wear it belongs – on the dinner table.

    3. Sorry son, but that’s a load of crap. What you’re saying is what many folks have said for many decades. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.

      1. Being an American is more than just wanting to be one. In order to be a real American one must be Absorbed in to the Body, and that takes more than one generation, because it is a complex process. Until then the immigrant is not yet Of the Body. The problem is when so many foreigners flood the country so fast that the absorption becomes impossible, and the Body succumbs to the foreign infection and dies as an identity. And, so what if many people have said many things for many decades? Such an idiotic and irrelevant point is what is known as a “non-sequitur.”

          1. Please forgive my allusions to the Star Trek Episode, “Return of the Archons.” I don’t know what came over me.

            1. Landru, apparently.

              Kirk, of course, destroys Landru, rendering the whole “of the Body” thing moot.

        2. You’re describing blood-and-soil citizenship, and something close to what France has culturally. The US has never had such an institution. And your argument demeans the desires and aspirations of people like the first-generation American citizens I know and work with, who have adopted lots of American culture and who firmly support the ideas and ideals of the country, have taken oaths of citizenship and in some cases oaths of military service.

          1. No, I sure as hell am NOT talking “blood & soil.” I’m talking spiritual assimilation, which requires time. There is no substitute for time when it comes to being a real American of the kind that I’m talking about. All the time in the world would not change blood, nor would it change soil, but it can and does change the spirit inside.

            1. That is just not true, and the untruth of it is evident by just looking around at the recent immigrants who are as American as any of us, and more so than some I could name.

              1. How do you explain why 90% of recent immigrants vote Democrat? They do that because recent immigrants aren’t real Americans enough yet to realize that Democrats are demagogues pandering to their Marxist inspired emotions. I think the poor dumb immigrants can’t help being duped by the DemonicRats because they are in fact not real American’s yet. So, they fall prey to what are in fact degenerate former Americans corrupted by demonic Marxism.

                1. So you’re claiming that voting Democrat is evidence of not being a real American? I’m not a Democrat either, but man you’ve decended into lunacy.

                  1. Note that the ‘true blue’ sons & daughters of real Americans in the North East tend to vote Democratic in large percentages as well.

            2. Ah, yet you presume the change must happen after being on the right soil, or mixed with the right blood. The change is ideological and can happen anywhere, at any time. Then it’s a matter of finding the way home.

              1. The change is spiritual and cannot be rushed. It’s like cooking a roast. If the recipe says cook the thing at 300 degrees for 4 hours, you can’t rush the process by cooking it at 4800 degrees for 15 minutes.

                1. Bull. True spiritual awakenings can happen instantaneously. But this has nothing to do with those just because you misuse the terminology.

          1. C’mon, the people who INVENTED AMERICA are different from the people who crash the place later on. You might as well try to tell us that Moses wasn’t Jewish, because there wasn’t any Judah extant at the time.

              1. Because I have respect for America I do not claim my self to be a real American, nor do I recognize my own family as real Americans until the 3rd generation has established themselves as such. There is nothing I hate and despise more in immigrants than this fundamental disrespect for the country that allows them to say they are real Americans when it is impossible for them to be. Why can’t they just say they are aspiring real Americans? Is that not respectable enough?

                2. No, it’s not. Naturalized citizens are real Americans in every way, just as much as anyone born here. Your disrespect is obvious.

                  1. Legally American is not the same thing as Real Spiritual American. I guess you can’t get the point because you ain’t spiritual.

                    2. As a Multiple-Generation American, my Spiritual Side said that your “Spiritual Belief” is bunk.

                      By invoking “Spiritual Beliefs”, you have shown that you have no facts on your side.

                    3. If by “Real Spiritual American” you mean someone who believes wholeheartedly in American values and concepts, I submit, sir, that you aren’t one.

                    4. I think that the person believes in an American Spirit made up by the spirits of all Real Americans who came before.

                      To be a Real American is to be “joined with this American Spirit” and he’s claiming that it takes three generations for somebody to have joined with this “American Spirit”.

                      Since I lack any Great Greats who immigrated to America, I say that he’s dead wrong.

                    6. By your own assertion, you are not qualified to make such determinations, being neither American nor Spiritual.

                    7. Wow, that’s a crazy blend of the No True Scotsman fallacy combined with the Emperor’s New Clothes.

                      I suspect the one who doesn’t “get the point” is you and you’re twisting, spindling and mutilating several points to avoid admitting it.

                  2. Well, no. They’re not eligible to run for president. There are good reasons for that. Looking at out current CinC, I’d be willing to extend the prohibition on who can be president to people who lived in the country- including on military bases- from birth until age 18.

                    1. Point taken, but that doesn’t make them less American. It only means that the qualifications for being President exclude them.

                3. You deny being American yourself yet presume to define what being American requires?

                  Mighty cheeky, keed.

                  1. Hey, doofus, at least I admit that a person’s descendants can become real Americans, the way that you and me and most of us on planet earth cannot ever in a zillion years become real Frenchmen or real Germans or real Russians and especially not real Japanese.

                    2. You are still presuming to decide what qualifies people for membership in a group to which you do not claim to belong.

                      N.B. – using such phrases as “Hey, doofus” does not enhance your rhetorical position.

                4. Don’t think of yourself as a real American. I disagree with your definition, but it is what you believe.

                  I am not going to let you, a self proclaimed outsider, define me. I am an American. Not because no one in my family was born outside the country for a sufficient number of generations. Not because I can draw my lineage back to both the FFV and to early settlers in Pennsylvania. I am an American because I embrace the Declaration, the Constitution and that noble experiment of a government dedicated to the idea of liberty.

                  Because it is a delightful bit of performance, two quintessentially Americans who are by your definition, not real Americans:

                  For those unaware, Bob (Leslie Townes) Hope was born in London and James Francis Cagney, Jr.’s mother’s parents were a Norwegian ship captain and an Irish woman. Both of whom were legally American, one by birth, one by naturalization — which is the only definition I know which doesn’t stand upon shifting sands of someone’s opinion. Both also were recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

        4. Nope, still a load of crap. Know how I know? My wife is a first-generation immigrant, and a real American, both legally and notionally. While your warped view of what being an American means makes me wonder if you actually fit the definition yourself.

          1. It is emotion that leads to your misunderstanding of the difference between being a sincere aspiring American who will produce real American offspring, and being an actual real American. There’s nothing wrong with being an aspiring American. I make the distinction because the problem America faces today is too many immigrants swamping the country, some of whom aspire to be real Americans, but mostly they don’t have any such aspiration but only want to remake American in the image of the shit hole from whence they came.

            1. And the distinction you make doesn’t actually exist. Naturalized Americans are real Americans, most of them perhaps moreso than some born here. (You, perhaps? I don’t know you, so I can’t say with surety, but your argument here strongly suggests so.)

              1. I remember arguing with idiots 40 years ago about the reasons why 1st and 2nd generation citizens of America didn’t get elected President. I tried to explain to the knuckleheads that assimilation was not and could not possibly be complete until a sufficient amount of time to assimilate had passed. I’m still running in to the same ignorant knuckleheads.

                2. When you find yourself “still running in to the same ignorant knuckleheads” over a forty year period, perhaps it is time to consider whether the knucklehead is you.

                  Having reasoned one’s way to a conclusion different from yours does not, generally, constitute ignorance. Have you considered the possibility of that word not meaning what you think it means?

                3. Son, what RES said. When you try to explain nonsense to others, complaining that they don’t understand nonsense only makes you look even more foolish.

              1. Too many immigrants are bad enough. Invaders mean the end of America for sure. I believe the mathematics prove America is doomed, because there are so many degenerate Americans who believe in Marxism, and invaders who take sides with the degenerate Marxist Americans, and too many ignorant immigrants who don’t any better because they aren’t real Americans yet.

                1. And there we have it. You’re an elitist who figures, my forebears got here, now it’s time to close and lock the doors. Sorry son, but we’re not having any of your nativist bull.

                  1. No, that is NOT what he is saying.
                    He is saying that because the immigrants are NOT assimilating and that many Marxist Americans don’t want them to. That the POLITICAL results will overturn what America has been and is supposed to be as defined by the founding documents. America is an Idea but if enough people want to change that Idea it will be changed.

                    You seem to think that as long as the PEOPLE decide what America is, America is the same. Sorry you are wrong. If the people no longer follow and believe in the founding documents and Ideas and vote for different Ideas then America has fallen and no longer exists. Something calling itself America exists but it is just a name.

                    1. Sorry Dan.

                      Plenty of the regulars will agree about “some immigrants not assimilating” and about “Progressives not wanting them to assimilate”.

                      But that person was into “Racial Spirit Nonsense” where an immigrant can’t become part of the American Racial Spirit and only his great-grandchildren can become part of the American Racial Spirit.

                      When that person claims that somebody like Sarah Hoyt can’t become part of the American Spirit no matter how “worthy she is”, then he is talking nonsense.

            3. There is “emotion” because your idea is garbage.

              Yes, there are immigrants who have no intentions of “Becoming American”.

              But plenty of immigrants both today and in the past have come to America with the strong intention of “Becoming American”.

              You are lumping the two groups of immigrants into a single group.

              You remind me of the idiots who screamed about too many Irish coming, too many Italians coming, too many Greeks coming, too many Czechs coming, too many Slovakians coming, too many Slavs coming, too many Russians coming, etc.

              All those groups came to America and became Americans.

              Some adapted to American ways soon after they came, with others it was their children (even those who were minor when they came), but they became American.

              1. My Czech & Slovak and Hungarian ancestors didn’t become real Americans until they had been here 3 generations. That is my attitude and I see no need to change it.

                2. Has it occurred to you that “attitude” is not a synonym for “argument”? It is, however, largely synonymous with prejudice in your usage.

            4. but mostly they don’t have any such aspiration but only want to remake American in the image of the shit hole from whence they came.

              Sort of like the people who leave liberal states because of their high taxes and then proceed to vote for legislatures in their new state that will enact the very laws and policies that cause them to move?

        5. Actually in this case, it’s saying “We have debunked this argument over and over again for at least a hundred years, why are you bringing this stupidity up again?” Only more politely.

              1. The difference is I never arrogantly claimed to have debunked you, dummy. I’ve made my assertions and backed them up with some context, but I’ve not claimed to have proven my obviously subjective viewpoint as some sort of scientific fact. Only a psychotic wacko idiot moron would suppose that defining what a real American is an objective scientific question. Sheesh.

                2. Except you haven’t defined it. You’ve made an unsubstantiated assertion then expected us to take your unadorned word on the matter. You’ve mocked people because we have not accepted your view, then claimed false nobility by excluding yourself from ‘real Americans’ as if that makes you any less full of hot air and arrogance you havering jackanapes.

                  3. Sorry, I was out of town at a doctor’s appointment. Um… I’ll explain what is going on if you pm me.
                    I’m going out now. If he’s still being a butthead when I come back, I’ll ban hammer.

                4. Nor had Wyrdbard claimed to have debunked you. The claim was that your arguments had been debunked. Your inability to comprehend that point does not require us to “reinvent the wheel” every time some un-American presumes to trot out such old tired arguments.

                  Simply put: We do not agree. As you’ve offered no arguments we’ve no need to debunk your claims. When you stomp in claiming “water is hot; fire is wet” you are not owed the courtesy of rebuttal.

                5. You know, the way you dispense the “dummy” and “idiot” how can people NOT agree with you?
                  This blog has one rule “Don’t be a Butthead” — you’re breaking it.

    4. The argument that immigration patterns are destroying America has been made many times before.

      We do have a possible problem with having people enter the nation who wish to destroy it, but that is not new.

      Yes, we do have a problem when certain political factions that are selling the idea that assimilation is an altogether bad word. And there always remains the question of how much assimilation is necessary to be American — as well as assimilate to what?

      I suggest reading lots of history, it helps when you get the feeling that things have never been so terrible.

      1. If only it were a simple matter of unplugging the Great Computer that has been misruling us for the last 6000 years…..

        1. The presumption of Deities goes back well beyond 6K years. Learn some History. Learn some sense instead of the nonsense you’ve been spewing.

            1. Landru wanted to cleanse the Body of the infection by removing all elements that had been exposed. That is the logical reason explaining why Landru figured out that he was in fact the enemy of the Body who was destroying it and not nurturing it. The logic was similar to that which convinced Nomad that he had to destroy himself because he was flawed, and imperfect, and also like M-5 figuring that he was a murderer and worthy of capital punishment for violating the laws of man and God.
              I’m afraid that too many immigrants in fact become a deadly infection to the Body of America. And it does not matter how much those immigrants assume that they are in fact already real Americans. Being a fresh immigrant means that they cannot maintain the spirit of American civilization. It takes a long time of having internalized enough Americanism to be capable of preserving and passing down American civilization.

              2. Staff Sergeant Clipov, Specialist Musoke, and a dozen others I served beside would beg to differ. And they never had the arrogant audacity to presume to tell anyone else whether or not they were REAL Americans. And all of them took an Oath I doubt you ever took and certainly haven’t taken to heart. As does every new citizen of this country. Going through the process to become citizenship takes a lot more effort than lazing about on your ass because you got here there easy way. It tends to attract people who WANT to be here, who are willing to work their tails off to stay here.

                YOUR behavior more closely mirrors those you have chosen to reference. Like you, those presumed to decide for OTHERS not just themselves. It is YOU, not our hostess. Not the immigrants that come here to become American (as differentiated from those who come here for other reasons and generally fall into three categories: Visitors, Refugees, and Invaders). Who are perilously close to the very things you espouse to prevent. We call the ‘projection’. Take the plank out of your own eye.

                1. We call the ‘projection’. Take the plank out of your own eye.

                  Or not, if he’s insistent. It’s mildly amusing watching him swing that about, clipping doors, windows, standing lamps, etc.

                  Though it does seem to be annoying the cats which is a bad thing.

      2. it helps when you get the feeling that things have never been so terrible.

        There is that moment of “Wait, what?” when I tell the younger folks that when I was very young the news was that a river caught fire. And that was when things were improving.

      3. Yep. I want to see more assimilation (in a MAJOR way) by Muslim immigrants, myself. But I really hope they don’t lose the cuisine along the way – they make some mighty tasty food. (Well, at least the one in northwest Africa, and Pakistan – those being the ones I can attest to personally.)

        1. There is no cuisine fit for human consumption that does not contain pork, and ovinophagy is a crime against nature.

    5. “The issue is the American nation being flooded with so many foreigners that it is impossible for them to ever be assimilated and become real Americans.”

      That’s what the Iroquois said.

      I believe Bobby Jindal would dispute it.

    6. Speaking as someone who counts ancestors from the Mayflower, immigrants from before the American Revolution, and immigrants during the 19th century before the Civil War and can therefore claim to be as American as they come, I call utter BS on the notion that it takes 3 generations to become a “real American”. There are people, our hostess included, who have naturalized and acculturated and adopted American ideals in the first generation. In this country, choice and commitment matter more than ancestry. It has always been so.

      If you had studied your American history, you might have been exposed to the notion that America has always been flooded with immigrants and “foreigners”, even more so than today, and that an immigration and naturalization process was set up by law to regularize the transition and assist immigrants to become American.

      The biggest difference is that today, some of our political classes have been encouraging selected groups to ignore the law and be treated with all the benefits of citizens without going through the legal immigration and naturalization process.

    7. Boy, you must have been hiding under the manure pile when G-d was handing out brains. You are well into Yahoo Serious levels of incoherence. James Cameron and the crew of the Trieste couldn’t plumb the depths of your stupidity. I’ve seen less begging of the question in a Paul Krugman column. You might be able to beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe, but only if you went first and the chicken spotted you two squares. The brightest you’ll ever be is when some kind soul lights you on fire.

      1. Sir, allow me to compliment you on your facility with insulting language. It is an art as difficult as poetry, when you don’t resort to facile insult-words like our misguided guest.

  8. Whatever happened to taking pride in the idea of being the great American melting pot?

    It is not that we were perfect about it. From the beginning there were problems. On the religious front the nation has been decidedly pro-Protestant, with anti-Catholic / anti-Semitic veins. Immigrant groups from certain parts of the world, particularly once they had demonstrated progress, such as the Chinese, faced laws restricting their ability to join in the American dream. During WWI, as a nation we certainly lashed out at those of more obvious German descent. During WWII we moved against those whose families came from Japan.

    But still, we had the ideal, even if we honored it often in the breach rather than the practice.

  9. Any twit who rants about an “American Race” has largely defined himself as apart from it.

    From the first Broadway show written by Kurt Weill in 1938, after he renounced being a German (where being Jewish was not in with the In crowd) in favor of becoming an American … and wondering what that meant.

  10. Even if you use “race” in the Victorian British sense (like the “martial races” = cultures with a military tradition and that defeated or came close to defeating the Brits at least once), calling Americans a race might be stretching it a tad. Growing up in the Midwest for a while I remember some schoolyard spats between the Poles and the Irish (third generation at least) over who had the better saints’ day parties and parades, with the Jewish kids rolling their eyes and the Greeks (third generation at least) looking at all of us funny. We’ve got so many subcultures within the American ideal that maybe the American Persuasion might be more accurate.

    1. Even that may unify too much. Perhaps a bunch of different factions all mashed together, without much in common beyond a deal that minimizes the internal bloodletting.

  11. No, not the Indianapolis 500 or other auto races.

    There is nothing more American than NASCAR with its roots in avoiding taxes and tariffs.

          1. Wonder what a 2017 Avanti would look like. And I don’t mean the ones they still make in Indiana…

        2. Some years ago a friend called me from his car. He was driving through Indiana and had been passed by a coffin-nosed Cord, then an Auburn. And while he was on the phone, two Dusenbergs passed him. And he was moving right along, too.

          He called back from a gas station a while later. A couple of cars had stopped for gas and minor repairs of some sort. Bruce found out they were from California, headed to the annual gathering at the museum in Auburn. But unlike the “waxer” collectors, the Auburn-Cord-Dusenberg owners had no respect for trailers; the thicker the coating of dust and dead bugs when you arrived, the better. A few oil leaks, a roadside repair of two, nobody was going to pull your concours points for fiddly things like that.

          I’ll likely never own one of those cars, but their owners call into one of the various groups of “us.”

          1. I completely understand. Those machines weren’t made to be admired from afar, they were made to be driven.

  12. If you’ll forgive the digression, some folks are complaining about Perry’s scientific credentials. Their case against Perry shows that he has a better scientific education than a lot of the humanities majors who ‘love science’, and hence feel justified in dictating technological policy to engineers.

  13. As a Mythological American (note lack of silly hyphen), I just don’t see what the fuss is about.

    Or is this ‘Real American’ like ‘True Fan’ and other such bilge?

  14. One of the things that I’m most thankful for is that my family has a pretty long memory so I get to hear neat (half-legendary) stories about how my mom’s side of the family fought in the American Revolution (I have a distant great-great-great-something grandfather who died as a POW aboard an English prison ship), and then proceeded to wander around through most of the continent as it expanded westward before settling on a farm in the Midwest. So that part of our family’s history has been on the continent for AGES

    In comparison my dad’s side of the family has only been in the US for a much shorter period of time, emigrating up the Mississippi River to Cincinnati and then out to found a township in Illinois in the late 1880’s. As a German Catholic settlement amongst the Lutheran and Methodist strongholds that were the predominant settlers in the area, there was a large amount of mistrust around their town (almost hilariously so). There’s a story about when the church’s organ was being repaired, and some people from a neighboring town mistook the pipes poking out of the back of the wagon for cannons, and feared an attack from them.

    Nowadays both sides of my family would be considered indistinguishable from each other, both equally white, Christian and stereotypical “American”, even though they came from strikingly different origins that somehow managed to converge on each other. Ultimately, I think the convergence comes from what you described, a belief in the ideals of the country that make that integration, expansion and history possible in the first place.

    I think our terrible grasp on our country’s history is more a symptom of how rootless our family structures have become. There’s no personal stake in what came before you if you don’t know your own history.

    1. Yeah. My mother had (European) ancestors waving at the Mayflower and my father was the first American-born generation. (In fact, his last name is so rare that I can pretty much guarantee anybody with it is related to me within the second degree of cousinship*.) Very different backgrounds, but both very American, married for 46 years before my father died.

      *While the spelling may be an artifact of immigration, even swapping out the Y for a J barely doubles the sample size. Really rare last name.

      1. Same here – one grandmother whose’ family was on the second or third boat after the Mayflower and nailed down a Penn land-grant … and the other three who came over in the early 20th from Great Britain. Including the grandfather who remained a British citizen to his dying day, as he was so PO’d at being turned down for military service in WWI for flat feet that he tore up the naturalization papers and remained a resident alien to the end of his days. But his only son died in a B-17 over France in 1943 … so, yes – being American is sometimes a complicated thing.

        1. The Mayflower settlers were Johnnie come latelies. Some of my ancestors were here before that. Having said that, some people have no idea of their ancestry. I traced a friends family for her; turns out she was a Mayflower descendant. On more then one line of descent. She had no clue. Also thought she was mostly Irish. Nope, Scottish. Turned out we were distant cousins from a set of brothers in England who came to the colonies as indentured servants. Her brother to Massachusetts, mine to South Carolina. The mother had a very unusual name, and when I got to her, I thought, “Gee, I think I remember that from my tree!” Of course, if you go back far enough, we’re all related…

          Also an oddity in my ancestry I found a sea captain out of Nova Scotia who apparently had 2 families, one here, one in England. Never the wives to meet. I mean, in the days of wooden ships and iron men, how would the two wives ever find out as long as the crew kept silent? Having found it once, I’ve got to wonder- Just how many other sailors of the time did the same thing? Not just loving and leaving, which is common, but actually had two families?

        2. On my mother’s side we go back to William Penn…but I doubt one of my brothers is really an American the way we understand it–wannabe European aristocracy, pfooy b*tthead…

    1. My point was more that it’s tough to care about history to give you a better perspective on where you’re going if you don’t know how it relates to you personally.

      If there’s one thing I’ve learned from teaching, it’s that you need to give students a personal stake and connection to the material for them to remember it and apply it. Knowing what events your grandparents were in helps to put that history into context. There’s millions of individual stories that give shape and meaning to how our country has developed. We’ll never know all of them, but you can learn the ones that relate specifically to how you got to where you are now.

      1. I’d like to call bullshit for a million. Explain, dear teacher, why I have always had a passion for English history, when I know for d*mn sure I have no ancestors in it, and I am an history geek. And I’m not the only one on this blog.

        1. I was speaking generally from my experience, of course there’s going to be exceptions. I meant no disparagement or insult.

  16. The USA isn’t about race. It’s about ideas, about principles. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The day###generation this country becomes first about race is the generation in which it dies.

    Yes, race is used as a marker for national origin, and national origin is an important element of public policy, especially when the nation of origin is in conflict with us. And there are pseudo-nations now at war with us (hearkening back to the days before the nation-state; see Philip Bobbitt’s *The Shield of Achilles*) but they are at war not because of our race, but because of our ideas and principles.

    I’ll say that again: The pseudo-nations now at war with us are at war with us because of our ideas and principles–because the very existence of a free people is a threat to them. So too are the Organized Left, at home and abroad.

  17. Somebody better clean up the blog before Sarah finds out and gets mad. I don’t know how to tell you, guys, but you’ve been arguing with a Small Perl Script or something similar. Really, there’s vast swaths of unreachable code in this one. Logic just bounces off…

      1. The things I’ve done to Small Perl Scripts? We left microaggressions behind about five miles ago, and Genghis Khan is looking a bit green around the gills and edging away slowly. Yeah. We’re not friends.

    2. Oh good. I was wondering if I was the only one starting to feel a gravitational singularity of stupidity (or ideological blindness, it’s hard to tell).

      1. Not the only one, no. He was becoming an Ideological Ouroboros, except instead of swallowing his own tail he was shoving his head further up and further in.

    3. As a person of small perl scriptness, I am deeply offended at the comparison. And even more deeply frightened by some of your other comments. *Runs off in tears*

      🙂

        1. Viewed through the Spambot-American lens, my output should be a bit too erratic for something written in a single language.

          More seriously, as a programmer I’m an okay computer tech. I have not yet put in the time and effort to get to the level where ‘programmer’ is appropriate. Python was the last language I installed on this machine and started getting up to speed in. I probably know it better than I do anything else, but I’ve been really sick since I last touched it.

  18. The trouble (IMO) seems to be determining between Americans in desire, Americans in residence and aristocrats. The former is the group that wants to take the risks, to step out and move ahead. This is the first class of people we should want. Those that want to embrace what made the country and support and grow it. The second are those that simply want to work, get paid and go back home. The best of these are mercenary. The worst are like the CA locusts. “I want the low taxes and jobs but then I also want all the laws and services I had before. Aristocrats are those that use to the serf/ruler hegemon. These are the ones that try and gain power for those with ‘right to rule’. Whether it is the dime a dozen liberal fascist or the fireless smoke of the Right wing Theocracy they serve the same purpose.

    The first and second generation immigrants/citizens who were raised in an environment different that what is available in the United States or had family that were will always have a few spots where they are ‘off’ from the typical American, however the existence of a blind spot won’t preclude being, or striving to be that first ‘class’ of citizen. Between our screwed up system of immigration, subsidization and empowerment of balkanization and the desires of ruler wannabees we do make that extremely hard. That, not just a stabilization of immigration (speed up legal, penalize illegal, and ensure that we are getting people that want to come, not merely ones that want money or job until they make enough to go home.), Will go a long way to both preventing some of the darker natures from escaping and giving new immigrants a way to enter society so they are not dropped into the dark.

    At least for me, we should be prioritizing that the culture is upheld and strengthened and that we play fair both with immigrants (currently a mexican immigrant is more likely than say a Pole of the same status and skill to get the golden ticket by virtue of geography, even if he does it illegally) and those currently in the country who do see the negative effects of unchecked immigration, especially as it currently stands.

    Hoping not to push anyone’s BP with this. Just very often seems that the argument for citizenship and definition is always personal and the more personal the harder people seem to come at the opposite side.

    1. “will always have a few spots”

      Where I grew up, in West Virginia, there were more than a few Yankee tourists come through with a few of those blind spots.

      I understand many Coloradans (as well as Nevadans, Utahans and so on) with similar complaints about Californians’ blind spots.

      1. Oh I’m fully aware of it. I enjoy living in OK and enjoy 90% of its attributes but I know that I’ll always have a slightly different mindset. It’s a liability but not a disability if that makes sense. I am one that feels full assimilation (actions uniformly similar to those who have been there longer) takes generations in one spot. But just putting forth the effort to recognize and deal as necessary with those spots is all I need/want to see (learn language, recognize local mores and customs, do not expect local customs to change to suit you, etc). Given the size of the US we’re all mutts at some level. It’s your attitude and willingness to adapt that defines American to me.

      2. And a good example is liquor. In OK all strong beer is at a liquor store. In CA and IL it, wine and liquor are all in grocery and drug stores. In the Northeast when I lived there alcohol only in liquor stores. But having no hard beer or liquor at grocery store, according to the CA escapees I work with was prohibitionist and misguided Fundy stupidity.

        1. Liquor law variations is an excellent example of regional … distinction.

          “That ain’t how we do it back where I come from.”
          “Then go the eff back where you effing came from.”

          Is a very American exchange.

        2. Tell them that they are being genocidal mass murder apologists.

          I think the history of liquor sales restrictions is more nuanced in general. Oklahoma’s history of that also has the matter of the Indian tribes. Native Americans did not have the enzymes for digesting alcohol that European populations had developed. It was more poisonous for Indians, and attempts to keep whites from selling it on reservations very likely had some influence on Oklahoma’s decisions on it as a state.

          1. It’s possible. Part is just that it was amended into Constitution during prohibition if I understand correctly and never was worth modifying until a voter referendum put it on today.

            1. Oklahoma was a dry state into, IIRC, the 1960s. (I once heard that a major political mover and shaker would show up drunk on the legislature’s floor when state dry laws were in effect.)

              The same forces that lead up to national prohibition, which was a decades long process, would have been active in or around Oklahoma, and would have had more influence there relative to other parts of America. Sure there was a religious element. There were also elements of a) the civilizing of the frontier b) the perspective some had of saloons, which does not really match modern perspectives of bars c) mistaken ideas of how alcoholism actually works.

              1. Oddly enough, Prohibition led to Oklahoma’s relative impoverishment and slower economic growth than many states. Sheriffs in dry counties used to board trains stopping there and arrest the bartenders to shake down the railroads for graft. As a result, the railroads abandoned many stops in OK. Hard to grow your business when you can’t ship your goods…

          2. There was also a tendency to assimilate it to the category “mind-altering drug” so that the point was to get dead drunk. This is not something that makes you happy long term.

            1. The reservations were not the most empowering of places.

              Behavior while drunk often seems to depend on what your culture says about how drunks behave. Some cultures have pretty murderous drunks. (Japanese and Koreans seem to have pretty heavy drinking cultures. I think I would’ve heard by now if their drunken murder rate was as high as some I’ve heard of.)

              Oklahoma was settled when the Indian Wars were much more recent. A lot of the early politicians might have been sensitive to minimizing certain possibilities.

              Oklahoma, of all the states, has a pretty good set of reasons for saying “well, it’s kinda complicated” about the dry laws. Of course, there was a lot of bad blood between Californians and Oklahomans to begin with.

      3. Wow, another West Virginian! It’s always neat to find a fellow mountaineer out in the wild. I don’t mean literally as a WVU alumni either, just others who grew up in the state and appreciate its unique place within the nation.

        1. Here is where I point out my husband’s mother is from WV. I have less cultural conflicts with him and his Connecticut relatives than she did — at the down basic, social interaction. The region I come from was long under English influence, and the basic manner/model for interaction is closer to New England than is West Virginia. Consider that a minute.

  19. Just looking at my family and my wife’s family, I can see the idea it takes 3 generations to become fully assimilated. Sort of like the language rule. First generation speaks it, 2nd generation (usually) understands it, 3rd generation know the curse words. Inverses of each other.

    I suspect my g-grandfather came here intending to return to England, but liked it here once he got here. Every other ancestor of mine, tracing back to the earliest born here I’ve traced in 1623, came to this continent knowing they weren’t going back. And those that were settled in our neighbor to the north that came to the United States after came here to be Americans, not to change us. As did all my other ancestors.

    As far as assimilation goes, there is one vital step that liberal courts have torn away a is language. One nation requires one language, period. There should be no ballots in the states and Federal District in Spanish, Chinese, or any other languages the California ballot or any other is published in. If you’re not fluent in English, you cannot possibly understand all the issues in America, and from what I’ve read and understand, translations of our founding documents don’t mean exactly the same thing in other languages. The most common example I’ve read is that in Chinese peaceful transfer of power through elections is a “controlled revolution”. Not quite the same thing. Further, the Chinese consider each administration to be a separate government; we consider us to be under one government continuously. I don’t know how these concepts transfer to other languages, but I suspect there will be similar inconsistencies.

    As for other steps to assimilation, it’s hard to quantify. I think a very good case can be made that the Amish are not truly American. They’ve been here since the 1700’s, but aren’t fully a part of America. Those that leave the Amish become fully American. Pretty quickly. (One of my sons in the Army had an Amish squadmate…), Those that stay Amish do not participate in the mainstream of American life. If you meet anyone not Amish born and raised her and strike up a conversation, you can probably very easily find some common ground to talk about besides weather. Sports, television, movies, current events, college, Xbox, cars, something. What are you going to talk to an Amish about? But, they are American in that they don’t insist we live as they do, they don’t harass scantily clad women walking by them (Guess who I’m referring to there?), they don’t insist we adapt to them, and when for safety reasons we force them to change some of their rules, like require they have lights and reflectors on their buggies, they fight in court, but eventually give in to the secular authorities after they’ve exhausted legal means to resist.

    1. I think we all keep getting hung on the idea of assimilation of culture vs assimilation of national ideals. You can hold every belief exposed in the foundational writings but not know of the entire cultural zeitgeist that informs the populace. Two different assimilations. But they play off each other and support each other. On the other hand, one can be as fully assimilated as possible in one the other may take much longer to reach a lower lever of assimilation.

      And are you sure about curses? First thing I learned in high school.

      1. Yeah, pretty sure the curse words are the first things foreigners learn in any language, because the native speakers think it’s funny to teach them those.

        Using them correctly and to best effect might be a different matter though.

        1. My poor older son, of Portuguese knows only the six words I say when I burn myself while cooking.
          When he tore his ACL and the medic was prodding his knee, he said these six words. Unfortunately for him the medic was second generation and his mom was Spanish. He stepped back and said “What did you say about my mother?” He was apologizing profusely when we arrived to get him.

            1. yeah. if you listen to Portuguese and Russian together you get this impression they’re similar, but the only letters I make a mistake on are pronouncing things like leave leeve, not the vowel exchanges of Russian.

    3. Given that America was founded and colonized largely for the benefit of weird religious groups willing to get along in their own weird way, of course the Amish are Americans. And yes, there is considerable cultural difference between Amish groups in different countries or even states. There would be a lot more if intermarriage wasn’t such a thing.

  21. Sorry to come late to the party, but Re: 3 generations to become ‘Real Americans’, I give you *cough*our Hostess*cough* & *cough*Kate Paulk*cough*

      1. His opinion is his opinion. I accept this, he has every right believe whatever he chooses. He wishes to impose his opinion on the rest of us. This is where I draw the line. Being rather much an American I have my own opinion, which, for the moment, stands.

        I believe that Sarah and Kate are American. They know more about the ideas that are the foundation of this nation than most native born Americans. They have embraced these ideas, which is certainly more than many native born Americans do. They have chosen America, unlike many native born Americans. We are lucky to have them.

          1. Not all “facts” can be documented “scientifically,” so demanding such documentation is disingenuous in this sort of discussion, which revolves around a subjective point of view regarding who is a real American and who is not yet a real American. What I object to and the reason I say that one cannot be a “real” American until the 3rd generation is because, in my personal experience, and my general observation has been that recent immigrants to American have way too little appreciation for the Americans who are already here. Recent immigrants think too much of themselves. Recent immigrants assume that they are contributing more to America than America contributes to them. I’d like to see recent immigrants to America show more appreciation for the Americans who have been here for so long and who actually built the country as it is that makes it a place that immigrants want to immigrate too. I’m sick and tired of the entitled and superior attitude of immigrants. Coming to America is a privilege, not a right, and the privilege ought to be under the control of the real Americans who are already here and have been here for so much longer. I think that part of what makes one a real American is a sense of protectiveness for America, a sense that it needs to be protected from being inundated with too many immigrants. If America was a life boat it would have sunk by now from having too many people piled in to it.
            I’m not talking blood and soil, I’m not agreeing with Vox Day’s assertion that genes are what matters. What I’m saying is that the entitled attitude of immigrants is deadly to the nation, and I fail to see how this assertion of mine has been refuted or debunked or even addressed by my critics here.

              1. Ha ha. You think you’re being clever but you’re merely demonstrating that you have nothing intelligent to say. Who exactly would be impressed by your nonsense. You are an embarrassment to Sarah’s blog.

                2. Ha ha ha. Orvan is a fairly respected regular, if a bit new. It is not his doing that you are poorly read, and apparently are familiar with neither the Hacker jargon file’s definition of ‘Mu’, nor Larry Correia’s definition of Moon Ferret argumentation, which recently has been helpfully reposted on monsterhunternation dot com. If anyone’s behavior is embarrassing, it is yours. However, your silliness still does not bring shame to ATH, because we get folks like you fairly regular. Like the apparent white supremacist trolls from File 770.

                  1. Or maybe I just like to moo at inherent or inept silliness. }:o)
                    Yeah, you’d expect I’d be much more vocal.
                    I think I like your explanation better.
                    *The ox bows to Bob, P.R.F.

                  2. I know that mu is a letter in the Greek alphabet. The point of saying “moo” is to attempt to dismiss my points with ridicule, and I’m supposed to slink away in shame at having been ridiculed by a superior intelligence. The problem is that saying “moo” is just being stupid. I’m embarrassed at finding out that Sarah’s blog is populated with such blithering nitwits. I’ve been railing against immigrants for their entitled attitude, but, I never said I wouldn’t be willing to trade them out for the blithering idiots on this blog here.

                    3. If you actually had bothered to make any points you might have one. As it is, you have wandered in, made an ass of yourself, and then proceeded to call everyone names for not fawning on your brilliance. “I say it takes three generations for people to become Real Americans and my sample set is California which hasn’t seen one in residence since the dustbowl.” Is not a point. It’s the kind of thing that they make comedies out of.

                    5. I outright gave you the citation.

                      http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html

                      Sometimes questions do not have a yes or no answer because they assume false premises. Mu is an answer to such questions that denies those assumptions.

                      I happen to know that Orvan visits the blog of the man who compiled that dictionary.

                      Orvan provided a better counter argument to my case than you did. You merely confirmed that you do not research the arguments of your opponents, which weakens your counterarguments, and makes you a laughingstock here.

                3. More like he heeds the admonition regarding casting pearls before swine. As you’ve yet to make an intelligent argument, nothing intelligent need be said in response.

                  BTW, in my experience real Americans do not attribute any given individual’s actions to a group and thus would never accuse somebody of being “an embarrassment to [Group].”

                    1. The American Left has been attempting to perfect Artificial Americans for several decades now, but thus far have only succeeded in manufacturing Surreal Americans.

                    3. I rather anticipate his self-deportationbanning but I have been subject to fits of unreasonable optimism.

                      Is anyone interested in starting a pool on when his last comment appears? Do we have enough potential participants to divide the chances by the quarter hour or should we establish hour long blocks?

                4. ROFL

                  The Ox is expressing an opinion about your silly posts but you don’t realize it. 😆

              2. Over on MGN, somebody reposted that, so I’ve been explaining that the Moon Ferrets are, sadly, necessary to keep the Moon Rabbit population in check, so that the Rabbits don’t invade earth.

                1. You’re too late, then, because Rabbits have already invaded earth. We’re gonna need a hell of a lot more ferrets, and mongeese for all the cobras, too.

                    1. Perhaps forgot to keep the receipt when last sent out wits to be sharpened?

                      Ox slow. Ox not that slow.
                      Ox bored of this… deteriorating tape loop?
                      Sleep now.

                    2. He’s using words that the VolksDeutsche Expatriate and his ilk have given weird meanings too, and thinking everyone gives them the same meanings.
                      G-d save us from born-followers, morons and born-follower, morons infatuated with just-so theories.

                  3. The expressed concern was over Moon rabbits invading. They are a distinctly different species than those occurring naturally on Earth.

                    I am surprised that a person of your apparent discernment didn’t know that.

                2. I think it is tedious and likely to never be interesting, but am unsure that merits banning. I’ve got to wander off for the day soon anyway.

                4. As the Ox says, he’s a lot like a tape loop or a poorly trained parrot. He writes stuff, but doesn’t understand what he’s trying to argue.
                  I do wonder if there is some standard manual of rhetoric these blood & soil alt-whiters use? If so, it is as broken as Hillary’s election’s model

            3. “What I’m saying is that the entitled attitude of immigrants is deadly to the nation,”

              Objection! Tarring of an entire group with the actions of a few blithering twits. Assumes facts not in evidence.

              1. Sorry, it’s not a few, at least around here in the San Fran Psycho Bayarrhea Kalifornia area. Of course, the entitled gimme gimme gimme attitude is epidemic amongst all peoples here, but it is particularly annoying to hear the illegal criminal aliens saying gimme gimme gimme. I know I live amongst the fruits and nuts and flakes, and it colors my perceptions of humanity at large, but remember, these fruits and nuts and flakes gave Hillary here popular vote majority, which ought to scare the excrement out of you.

                2. Ah, there’s your problem, sir. You’re generalizing based on moonbat country.
                  And Clinton did not, in fact, gain a majority of the popular vote.

            4. It is apparent you lack a clear understanding of the distinction between opinion and fact, judging by your proclivity to assert as fact that which can only be opinion — and your ad hominem responses to those who differ in their opinions.

              If your observations, limited though they are, are actually representative of the larger polity it is because that larger polity has become indifferent to the courtesies due them and are willing to accept the new entrants in spite of that lack of respect. Alternatively, they may have concluded that a different approach to such rudeness is more likely to be effective than the one you advocate.

              In any case, it is not for you to act the White Knight on behalf of those Americans you consider more authentic; we are entirely capable of speaking up for ourselves and don’t need non Americans putting words in our mouths.

      2. Meh. He, by his own admission, fails to meet his asserted standard for being an American. As an American by both his standard and my own, I agree he is not an American and therefore has no say in who is part of the family.

      1. For those who have not Gravatared, WP a while back arbitrarily shuffled icons. It would appear CACS’s prior icon has been restored … for the present.

        WP is a moron.

        Posner delenda est.

    2. Dang, dang, dang, dang, double dang, dang! I’m back to the distorted blue thing again.

      I don’t like most greens, particularly those that could be called chartreuse, but I miss my green heart shaped, elephant trunked, robot armed, one eyed critter. Word press delenda est.

  23. I find some of the comments in the above thread slightly disturbing.
    I can trace my lineage to the Mormon pioneers crossing the plains to reach the Salt Lake Valley. My family tree is mapped out for quite some distance.
    Despite this, anyone claiming they are more American than someone else, just because their ancestors have been here longer, gets my back up.
    It echoes too closely with , ‘Go back to where you came from.’ That’s the sort of statement I’ve heard from too many bigots.
    The comment about the Amish not being American because they can’t converse about the culture? Well, color me non-american because I don’t know a d*mn thing about sports or pop culture..
    And I would be willing to bet I’m not alone among the Huns. I’m sure many of us were into strange and esoteric things long before it was cool.
    To claim that we have to be part of the culture to be American is entirely too vague.
    I’ve now lived in 13 different states in this great country, and you don’t have to go far for the culture to begin changing. And that’s just regional. There are more subcultures than you can shake a stick at. Youtube alone has started/contributed too how many thousands of subcultures?
    I agree with Drak and our Beautiful Hostess. A commitment to the Constitution and what it signifies is far more important than where we are from, or how long our genes have been here.

  24. We are all talking about immigrants of one sort or another. In the past immigrants came to become Americans, money, a million DIFFERENT reasons. Today there is one group that are NOT immigrants, they are colonizers. Yes, I am speaking of Muslims. They will NOT become Americans, they are Muslims first, last and always. I have lived in Saudi Arabia. I have read the Quran. What is happening in Europe is an INVASION! They mean to destroy Western Civilization, the same as they have wanted to do for over a thousand years. The Left in Europe is making it easy for them. They will out breed the Europeans and when they take over it will be ugly.

    The same Colonization is happening here there is just far too few to make a difference yet. One on one Muslims can seem just like anyone else but in groups they have to show how GOOD a Muslim they are if they don’t they can be ostracized from the group and that is bad for them and their families.
    I saw this in Saudi. Each one in the group trying to show that THEY are a better Muslim. The insanity spirals up quickly.

    You must understand, Muslims FEAR not being seen as Muslim ENOUGH.
    Because in their culture that can get you killed and their culture doesn’t really change.

    Read the Quran. It isn’t like the Torah, Bible, or other religions people know about. Mohammed is the Prophet of the Sword. Not of Peace. Jesus was their Prophet of Peace and Love but in their view he FAILED so GOD sent Mohammed the Prophet of the Sword. Muslims that seem to assimilate, their children will become holy warriors. It is happening in Europe. We must not allow it to happen here. Islam and Western Civilization are totally incompatible. The West doesn’t CARE that Islam exists, we mean it no harm, but our TV, Radio, etc. is seen rightly by Muslims as an attack on Islam. Long term BOTH cannot exist together. And the Quran tells them explicitly to destroy us.

    How do you radicalize a Muslim Father, he walks into his young daughter’s room and finds her dancing and twerking to a Rap Video, a Spears video, etc. and the Quran tells him that violence is the RIGHT way to stop it.

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