Steve Sailer tweets: “NYT writer can’t quite figure out Joe Lieberman and GW Bush came up with “Homeland” because the word sounds Israeli.”
There’s a great exchange in the Robert DeNiro movie The Good Shepherd about the creation of the CIA:
Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
All culture is the product of particular genes and a particular environment.
Nationalism is the most powerful political force in the world today. Donald Trump is unleashing its power in America. The United States is not just an idea, it is a concrete political state created by a particular people.
James Traub writes for the New York Times:
In 2010, the screenwriter and producer Alex Gansa finished the script for a political thriller involving a deeply troubled C.I.A. agent and a soldier who had been turned by the Taliban, and began thinking about a title. He recalls that he wanted a word or phrase to conjure an atmosphere of “creepy subversion” — something sinister, xenophobic, un-American. “Shadowland”? No, not quite. “Homeland”? Perfect.
Ever since President George W. Bush, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, vowed to “strengthen the homeland” and authorized the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security, this peculiar coinage has burrowed its way into the American lexicon as if it were an earwig. In the current presidential campaign, “homeland” fills the air. In a December debate, both Senator Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich included among a president’s core obligations “protecting the homeland.”
Yet as Gansa intuited, a word ostensibly deployed to offer a sense of comfort instead unleashes deep undercurrents of anxiety. When the D.H.S. was first proposed in June 2002, the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan complained that the president should have found some less spine-chilling entity to secure from attack. Even Tom Ridge, the department’s first director, conceded that he had heard grumblings that “homeland” was un-American.
What is it about “homeland” that feels more like a violation than an affirmation of American identity? In traditional usage, the word evokes the link between a people and the state that is theirs, or that they wish to be theirs. With the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews gained a homeland. Palestinians lost one. “Homeland” throbs with the primal forces of state formation. The word points to a world of solidarity forged through blood ties, through ancient ritual and legend.
