Custom History

[from 10/20/10]

This week Angela Merkel, the hot Chancellor of Germany that George W Bush couldn’t keep his hands off, said multiCulturalism has failed in Germany. She didn’t say it has failed elsewhere, raising the possibility that it might rather be Germany that has failed multiCulturalism.

I am going to prove that neither has happened. The sentences “MultiCulturalism has failed Germany” and “Germany has failed multiCulturalism” are both logically equivalent to “We lost in Vietnam because the Earth is as flat as a plate and held aloft by a giant French waiter.”

We need to understand what German-ness and “A Culture” are. We’ll look back into history and see how those things were invented.

It started when some tribes overran sort-of northern Europe from the even-more northern Europe and were caught by the Romans in the midst of doing it. The Romans said, hey, this is OUR Europe. They named the land the tribes had already overrun Germania, because they felt like it. To this day, Germans don’t really call themselves Germans, but that’s beside the point.

The Romans were all about kicking the “Germans” out of Germania, and the “Germans” were all about sneaking around into Austria and other places like that, whose spellings I don’t feel like looking up right now. Then the Roman Empire fell, and what was left was a whole bunch of little countries where people spoke German types of languages and enjoyed oom-pa music and ate too much sausage.

Around 1815 these little countries formed a confederation. This was way hard. They had to confederate not only Austria and Hungary but an additional 4 “kingdoms”, 10 “principalities”, 14 “duchies”, 6 “grand duchies”, 4 “free cities”, 1 “electorate”, 1 “landgraviate”, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In order to pull off this confederation all involved had to be convinced that they were all in one club. This provided work for philosophers just at a time when it was getting hard to make a living philosophizing, what with the Industrial Revolution and science getting all the glory.

Where would this club come from? Going on many years, the big idea was the Holy Roman Empire, modeled on the Profane Roman Empire, based on the idea of citizenship. You were expected to know Latin for formal occasions and hearings and such, but you could speak anything you liked at home, and people did.

So came the big breakthrough: Kultur. I mean, A Culture.

Long before all this, you grew stuff in cultures. Then people started using it metaphorically. There was the social culture, consisting of language, literature and customs, that children grew up in that made them who they were. But that was still a local thing. I grew up in a culture. That guy, who lives in that village over that hill, grew up in a different culture. No two people could experience exactly the same social soil.

Thus the great idea was, hey, we’ll pretend that all of these artifacts of culture, spread throughout all of these lands, are all manifestations of One Culture, A German Culture, characterized by One Language, but including disparate non-linguistic cultural characteristics as well (because simple linguistic identification wasn’t considered enough, especially in view of the fact that some of their dialects were so far apart that not all “German” speakers could understand each other.)

German-ness and the concept of A Culture (as distinct from cultural influences) were thus born together, and the latter idea was the export version of the package.

It was accepted all around the world, though embellished. The United States didn’t leap back into England’s arms just because we all spoke English here. It was figured that because of a revolution, we had created A New Culture, better than English Culture.

But wherever the idea has been adopted it’s been as stupid as it was in the beginning. There is no such thing as A Culture. So, no such thing as multiCulturalism. So of course it fails. It gets a big fat goose-egg.

Culture Wars: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

[from 9/23/09]

Last March that I noted that racism no longer exists in America because we have a black president. I got one angry letter about that, which made me laugh, so I'm writing it again. I'm not saying racism is gone forever, just that to find it you have to go outside our borders to countries that don't have black presidents.

It might help clear up this issue if we were all on the same base when it came to knowing what racism is. Racism is the belief that having race makes you inferior. People who are white skinned, excluding albinos, have no race. Albinos are annoying, as they must be dealt with on a case by case basis. Anyway, all others have races. Racism is gone from America because our president is half race-burdened. In the place of racism we now have racial bigotry.

Racial bigotry is different from racism because it doesn't have anything to do with what you believe. You can believe that all people are equally likely to be good and capable, but still go ahead and make up lies about them.

In fact, let's be clear. The more capable a race-afflicted person in power is, and the more likely he/she could be effective in carrying out his/her agenda, the more racial bigotry will be directed at him/her by the un-raced, and hence more lies and character attacks will be directed at that person. Because it's all about the power, and he who has had it wants it back.

White formerly-racist America is saying, "OK, OK! UNCLE! We GET it! You people are capable of doing anything! Alright, now, celebration's over; run along."

Racial bigotry isn't about what you believe, it's about who you tear down. It's about using unfair tactics, including lies, to undermine legitimate gains, not because you think they're illegitimate (though you might say so in specific cases as part of your tactics) but because you know they are legitimate, and that just plain pisses you off.

I also want to talk about other kinds. I mean, other kinds of bigotry. Obviously "other kinds of bigotries" is a huge subject and I can only scratch the surface of it in my remaining 290 words. So I will confine myself to a big one, cultural bigotry.

The thing that I want you all to know about cultural bigotry is, LOOK OUT! I mean, really, this is not sufficiently talked about.

I'll illustrate with examples from my own life. In 1972, a white friend took me to overnight at the house of a mutual black friend, whom I will call Wilbur. I pick that name because you never met a less Black black man than Wilbur. He was so not Black he was studying Tagalog at the U and planning to join the diplomatic service. I was sure that I would be safe sleeping overnight in his house, even though he had race, and he shared his house with 7 siblings of all ages, who also all had race.

Yet, within half an hour after we white guys arrived at Wilbur's house, one of his sisters put on a record of Sammy Davis Jr. singing Candy Man, and all 8 of them leaped out of their chairs singing and dancing around the living room like the revolution was starting. I was, of course, terrified.

Not many years later I was taken by some other friends to overnight in Upstate New York with a white family about the same size. Believe it or not, no one put on any Sammy Davis Jr., and when the Dad in the family played guitar no one danced. Instead, all his whiter than white kids sat around like adoring cherubs. I was sickened, even though there was no race anywhere.

I'm over those experiences. I have learned since to live with these and many other alien American cultures. But it has taken me over 35 years! Can America take that long to accept Michelle?