I watched two movies today — Concussion and Bridge of Spies. They both explored American identity.
Is America a particular place and people? Not according to these movies.
According to Concussion, it is even better for an American hero to not be an American. The protagonist, a doctor from Nigeria, regards America as the place where you are most likely to rise as high as your abilities will allow.
America is an idea, an ideal of freedom and fair play and truth. It’s a proposition nation.
In Bridge of Spies, what makes America America is that it has a rule book and that it follows it.
I found all these ideas as absurd. The United States of America is a specific land space between Canada and Mexico that was created and remains sustained by specific people.
Contrary to Madeline Albright, Americans don’t stand taller and see farther than other peoples. They behave according to their genetic capabilities when combined with American geography.
As a Jew, I can tell you that the nation Israel is a very specific people with strong genetic ties to each other and a specific homeland with a particular language and particular practices. Adherence to a rule book does not make you a Jew. You’re either born it or you’re not (sure, you can convert, but that’s rare).
* “Americans love the crush of competition, the hard-fought struggle, the long-slogging race.”
What is the entity called “Americans” of which Frum writes? Is he talking about the Somalian who moved to Lewiston? That Somalian seems to prefer welfare to the crush of competition.
There is no such thing as American anymore, there is pre-65 white American and that stock is changing as the social welfare state and loosened morals work their magic on the character of that group.
There is no magic dirt which makes people into Americans such that we can assign traits to these people.
* Trump’s a businessman so, hopefully, he will get around to seeing this point – net tax consumers versus net tax contributors. The whole of society is better off if we decrease the former and increase the latter. This means hard, cold, calculating culling where we can cull – immigrants, infiltrators, and maybe even Green Card holders – get deported because they’re a burden on the public purse.
Think about where we would be today if this event hadn’t intervened between the 60s and present day:
“These advances are especially impressive because the massive immigration of unskilled Hispanic workers inflated the ranks of the poor. From 1990 to 2007, the entire increase in official poverty was among Hispanics.”
A rising tide can’t lift all boats if the passengers in the boats are drilling holes into the hull as the tide is rising.
* If someone was intent on running this nation into the ground, could they have been any more successful?
* One of the side effects of building a wall is that the benefits will be visible to all. People will see with their own eyes those who cannot get in. For those of us on this side, we will rejoice. For people on the other side despair. Either way, it will produce tangible results.
Employer verification will be the opposite. There will be no protests or visible displays of big eyed hungry children standing (or throwing rocks) just a few feet from our country. Illegals (and their employers) will simply get a letter telling them that they are in violation of the law and that if they continue they will be taxed severely (employers) or thrown in prison and taxed. This will be done one employee at a time so there will be no mass protests or police arrests, just people quietly self-deporting in the dead of night.
* “In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. In these latter countries the immigrants–who mainly belonged to the Latin races–mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.
In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following:
(a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered;
(b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap.
The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged.Man’s effort to build up something that contradicts the iron logic of Nature brings him into conflict with those principles to which he himself exclusively owes his own existence. By acting against the laws of Nature he prepares the way that leads to his ruin.”
* Not “Hitler nails it” but rather, what was common sense and widely held POV pre-Hitler is what nails it. Hitler in this quote is just stating what the ruling elites of the West universally held to be self evidently true.
