* But some people can’t get ’nuff of those Alienation Blues.
Take the snooty Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri.
She was born in the UK but left for the States at the age of two where her alleged acute sense of alienation provides a river of material for her books and reasons to whine about life in the west. She has, naturally, been showered with prizes for her “honesty” and “subtlety”.
“In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.”
Note: she admits to not being able to speak Bengali properly nor read and write it.
Now, in middle age, she has switched to Rome and Italian:
“I think it’s not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolized for me. For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.”
Her mother, a doctor, was of course regularly racially insulted by the staff at the hospital when she started work in the States.
But “In the United States, she continued, as far as possible, to dress, behave, eat, think, live as if she had never left India, Calcutta. The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was her strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity. Becoming or even resembling an American would have meant total defeat. When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.”
In a peculiar way Lahiri, like many of her fellow writers in ‘exile’, come across as displaced blood and soil nationalists; she says, for example, that every language is ultimately rooted in a particular locality.
As far as I know Lahiri has never demanded that her Indian ‘homeland’ be swamped with non-Indians – perhaps to spare the newcomers the alienation? It never seems to occur to her that mass immigration might produce in white and black Americans a feeling of loss that is worse than the putative alienation suffered by overachieving migrants who bask in the steady state existence of their home culture.
Lahiri has now of course discovered that Italians are racist and chauvinist: still mass immigration will surely cure than in time eh Lahiri?
* What are basic human rights?
You might be able to sell me on the idea that we (meaning the developed nations) should feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick of the underdeveloped world. (But only if birth control is part of the deal.) There have been programs in place to do these things for a long time.
But since when is being given a free ticket to an advanced country and unlimited access to all the welfare goodies a *basic* human right?
A reasonable person can argue that no one should have to sleep on the street – that there should be shelters for the homeless. Most folks would probably agree with that idea, although many would insist on certain conditions – they might want the able-bodied to do some kind of productive work in return for the free bed.
But what you’re saying is that the lousiest, drunkest, nastiest bum has the basic human right to spend his days lounging in a mansion on the taxpayers’ dime, simply because he’s alive and breathing.
Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.
* When we have things you want to take, our ancestors are blamed and we are supposed to give our good stuff to you.
It is so very convenient that the historically evil people presented by the Narrative are the same people that have nice things they are supposed to gladly give away.
