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.
-
Show 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”
1 reply 2 retweets 28 likesShow this thread -
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 -
Replying to @vgr
What voice do you focus on as the official anthropomorphic representative of the country?
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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.
-
-
Replying to @vgr
I haven't thought of Uncle Sam as relevant to anything in at least one generation, if not two or three. Can you attach this idea to anything concrete? I think of it as the "confused cacophony". Sure, some people are isolationist, but others are interventionist.
3 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @atthatmatt
Never in American history has the opposite of isolation truly been ‘interdependence’, the default for most other countries. Political science profs talk of isolation vs interdependence, but laypeople talk of isolation vs intervention. The latter is more accurate view of US.
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like - 5 more replies
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.