20/ First-generation immigration stories are only half-told because they half-heard. Americans ask, “why did you come to America?” expecting to hear flattering things about their own society. They are rarely curious about the stories of departures. Why?
-
Show this thread
-
21/ I know why: the unspoken assumption is “well of course you wanted to leave because it’s a shithole country compared to Great America, who wouldn’t?”
1 reply 3 retweets 19 likesShow this thread -
22/ So curiously, even as immigrant stories get woven into the American story, it’s curiously half-woven. Except for Albion’s Seed people who supply an origin myth, no other story is welcome in the American grand narrative.
3 replies 2 retweets 14 likesShow this thread -
23/ So is it any surprise that American culture is curiously isolationist and not in any sort of real dialogue with other cultures? Even the tightest and most unavoidable of dialogues — with Spanish culture — is one sided.
1 reply 2 retweets 12 likesShow this thread -
24/ Hell, on the west coast, despite all the Spanish names and obvious signs that the base layer here is Spanish (there are is;ands near *Seattle* called San Juan islands for a reason), the remarkable mythology here is that Hispanics are the aliens.
2 replies 5 retweets 24 likesShow this thread -
25/ You don’t even have to go as far as talking about Native American cultures to note the fundamentally brutal erasure-oriented nature of American culture. Americanism in that respect is like a harsh young religion, like Christianity or Islam in their early centuries.
1 reply 6 retweets 24 likesShow this thread -
26/ You dont so much migrate to America as you convert under pressure, subtle or not, to Americanism. Often due to dynamics set in motion by American economic evangelism and crusading worldwide.
1 reply 3 retweets 24 likesShow this thread -
27/ This is a terribly impoverished way to inhabit the planet. For 300 years, the excuse was geographic isolation. Today that’s no excuse.
1 reply 1 retweet 15 likesShow this thread -
28/ I’m particularly distressed and sensitive to this stuffbecause I’m *not* a “crisis” migrant. My parents live in India, I’m free to go back and forth, stay as connected as I want, have the best of both worlds.*I know what crisis-migrants lose because I still have it*
2 replies 2 retweets 27 likesShow this thread -
29/ So when I see America being cruel to people who are at high risk of losing half of their cultural beings, it feels like a spectacle of willful cultural violence and really bad global citizenship.
1 reply 3 retweets 28 likesShow this thread
30/ It feels especially selfish coming from a country that could wage 2 world wars and a Cold War at a safe remove and then reshape entire continents to its liking in the aftermath, without even gaining the label of “colonial power”
-
-
31/ For almost 100 years, America has been free to take the best of the rest of the world, be mostly insulated from troubles caused both by itself and other powers. Arrange a planet’s worth of raw materials, carbon-sink forests, markets etc for its benefit.
3 replies 5 retweets 34 likesShow this thread -
32/ And now it has the gall to act like the injured exploited party, take its resources and retreat behind its isolationist borders, loudly claiming it is the rest of the world that is “ungrateful”? Takes a very special, heavily edited sense of world history to do that.
6 replies 5 retweets 67 likesShow this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.