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.
Conversation
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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27/ This is a terribly impoverished way to inhabit the planet. For 300 years, the excuse was geographic isolation. Today that’s no excuse.
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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*
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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.
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”
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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.
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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.
Replying to
What voice do you focus on as the official anthropomorphic representative of the country?
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Good question. It’s not as narrow as a Trumpist shouting MAGA cliches, but it is also not a confused cacophony of internal debate. There’s definitely a well-defined egregore for “American”. The cartoon Uncle Sam actually comes close.
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You are welcome to go home at any time. Americans will still be here, and we will still have this country and all its problems to fix, long after you buy your last cheap avocado.
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Border Metaphor extensions:
Borders feel more like beaches between 2 cultural fabrics (water/squishy-land/land)..hence waves of migration washing over.
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Neo-Americanism is the orthogonal pivot away from
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
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