A friend of this Blogger sent him an essay, by a Canadian anthropologist, lamenting the fall of the America of the AMERICAN DREAM. This Blogger found the essay laughable, but in line with the Globalist lament. Many Globalists, foreigners, asylum seekers, illegal aliens, newly minted naturalized citizens are dismayed by the decline of the America of the American Dream. The America of the American Dream was good for the world order, but not too good for American males, and their wives, lovers, children and mothers. It has been the American male who has paid the price for the American dream admired by all. The Republic has been spending the blood of American males since 1917, one hundred and three years of war, longer than the Thirty Years War, longer than the Napoleonic wars, and longer than the Hundred Years War.
The Canadian was interviewed by Hari Sreenivasan on the PBS program, AMANPOUR and COMPANY.
“Sreenivasan was born in Mumbai, India, into a Brahmin Tamil family, around 1974. After immigrating to the United States at age seven, In September 2008, Sreenivasan became a U.S. citizen.”
Sreenivasan is a Hindu Tamil, from the highest caste in the Hindu religion; Kamala Harris’ mother was also a Hindu Tamil; who took Kamala to a Hindu Temple. No Liberal reporter has yet to ask Kamala what caste was her mother? This Blogger assumes that the Hindu caste system is not interesting to Liberals.
The Global Elite, Liberals, Hindu Tamils, Canadians have varied and sundry reasons for the fall of the America of the American Dream; however, this Blogger and Anthony Spano of Pennsylvania know the true culprits: multiculturalism, Diversity, and Illegal aliens.
“Back on Moosic Road, Anthony Spano had adorned a goose lawn ornament with a patriotic outfit to welcome Mr. Trump. “I love him,” he said of the president. Insisting he was not “being a fanboy,” he cited the pre-Covid economy, when unemployment reached its lowest in 50 years, as well as Mr. Trump’s efforts to close the borders to undocumented immigrants.
“I don’t dislike immigrants,” Mr. Spano, a 63-year-old disabled truck mechanic, added. “My parents were immigrants. My grandfather came over in 1906 from Italy and went to World War I. These Mexicans coming in here, they’re not going to fight for this country. They don’t even want to speak English.”
The name of the Canadian is Wade Davis; the following is excerpted from his interview.
“CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, with protests on the streets, a global pandemic, and a polarized political landscape, you might wonder if the age of American exceptionalism is coming to an end. Our next guest, Wade Davis, believes that it is. He is professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. And in a recent article for “Rolling Stone,” he wrote about how COVID-19 signals — quote — “the unraveling of America.” And here he is talking to our Hari Sreenivasan about how even great empires have their day.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HARI SREENIVASAN: Thanks, Christiane. Wade Davis, thanks for joining us. This has been a popular concern among critics of the president, this idea that the American empire is unraveling. And I want to start with just a little quote from the essay that you had penned for “Rolling Stone.” And you said in there: “No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th.” Why do you think that this is the end of the American empire or the American era?
WADE DAVIS, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA: Well, I think, obviously, that’s not something I’m looking forward to. And I think if the era does slip away, we’re going to be very nostalgic for it, particularly if the — if the weight of history moves to China with that political structure. I was really at this piece trying to look at it through the cultural lens. It’s interesting. The arguments have always been about morbidity and mortality, as if it was a medical story. And you had one side saying that these figures are really desperately terrible, the other side saying, oh, we’re exaggerating and so on. And it struck me that the real issue was what this pandemic meant in this moment of time. ….we also have had other pandemics. My own grandfather died in the Spanish Flu in 1919. Millions of people died, yet that didn’t shake history, because it happened at a time when the world was already numb from death. And people forget that, for example, in the summer of Woodstock, when 500,000 kids swam around together in the mud in New York state, there was a major Hong Kong outbreak that left people in Berlin storing corpses in subway stations because the hospitals have got overrun. So what’s different now? I think what’s different now is, first, obviously the global reach of both technology to disseminate the story and the global reach of travel to disseminate the virus. …….what has changed is the absolutely astonishing impact it’s had on the reputation United States and the myth of American exceptionalism. Here we were, a nation with 2,000 people dying a day, discovering that we were living kind of in a failed state ruled by a kind of a dysfunctional government, led by someone who clearly intellectually could not even begin to understand the significance of what was happening all around him.
SREENIVASAN: So, is the critique more about the specific government response and perhaps the president than it is about America in general? I mean, are those two the same?
DAVIS: No, they’re not. I think — I say in the article that the election of President Trump in 2016 was not a — was not a symptom or cause of decline. It was an indication of the intensity of the dissent, in a sense. We forget what’s become of America. And, again, I want to stress this. I have often described since this piece went viral, as a Canadian commenting on America, I married an American. I became a naturalized American. I love America. I got my education there. I — my entire career could never have happened in Canada. My own son-in-law is serving on active duty in the U.S. forces right now overseas. So, I am…
SREENIVASAN: So, you’re saying this, what, out of love?
DAVIS: Yes. It’s — you know what I think it is? It’s like a family intervention. If you have an intervention, the first thing you have to do is hold the mirror to the person to show you where they have gotten to. ……The measure of success in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but the strength of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that sort of bind everybody one way or another into a common purpose. ( BLOGGER’S NOTE- Multiculturalism destroys the bonds of communal reciprocity, weakening the ties that bind; that is the point of multiculturalism to weaken the ties which bind the individual to the main culture and replace those ties with everlasting loyalty to a minority culture).
I mean, people in the United States just forget what they did. They save civilization. The Ford Motor Company made more industrial output than Italy. We were popping up Liberty ships two a day. The record for building a Liberty ship was four days — four days, 29 hours and 17 minutes from scratch. I mean, literally, industrial might of America, together with the blood of Russian soldiers, literally saved civilization. We ended up spending $6 trillion since 2001 on military adventures. We have — China’s never gone to war since the 1970s. We have never been at peace. And in that time, China every three years poured more cement than America did in the 20th century as they built their own country.
DAVIS: Well, the cult of individualism has always been one of the great strengths and wonders of the United States, of course, going back to the founding fathers. But in the wake of World War II, don’t forget that with Europe and Asia in ashes, the United States, with about 6 percent of the world’s population, controlled 50 percent of the world’s economy. We built 90 percent of the world’s automobiles. And that affluence allowed for a truce between labor and capital that really gave rise to the middle class. And when I was a boy, relatively — a man with relatively little education could readily own a home, own a car, put his kids in good schools. And we kind of have a nostalgia for that era. But we also — we forget that the America of the 1950s, in economic terms, resembled Denmark more than it does the America of today. ( BLOGGER’S NOTE- the democratic socialism of 1950s America was pre-multiculturalism). Remember that marginal tax rates on the wealthy were 90 percent. So the rise of affluence in what was often seen to be the golden age of American capitalism lifted all ships. When people go out to bars now, or — and we have seen this in the upsurge of cases — or go to the beaches, or go to conventions or protest the use of masks, that’s not a sign of freedom. That’s a sign of a people — of weakness, of people who lack the stoicism to endure the pandemic or the fortitude to defeat it. (BLOGGER’S NOTE- Diversity and the grievance industry around Diversity destroys stoicism for the greater good).
SREENIVASAN: I was talking to my uncle the other day, and he kept hammering home that, hey, don’t give up on the United States. This is still a place with a tremendous amount of resilience. There is no better container right now of some of the best talent in the world, some of the best capital, institutions of higher education and research. That doesn’t go away with one election or one pandemic. (BLOGGER’S NOTE- perhaps Mr. Sreenivasan should chat with Mr. Spano instead of his uncle).
DAVIS: I agree 100 percent. And I wish with all my heart that your uncle is absolutely right. As I say in the essay, the decline of America is no time to gloat. It’s no time for celebration. At a moment when all of civilization could gone down a rabbit hole of unimaginable horrors, the military might and the industrial might of the United States literally, in the lifetime of our fathers, saved the world. And that’s not hyperbole. And, certainly, if the hinge of history does turn to an Asian century dominated by the current regime in China, with their 200 million surveillance cameras and their treatment of various minorities and so on, treatment of the people of Hong Kong, we will certainly be nostalgic for the American era. But, again, I think that, if America is to heal the bonds, you have to have some kind of sense of collective community, some sense of benign collective purpose. (BLOGGER’S NOTE- collective community is antithetical to multiculturalism; they are mutually exclusive concepts.) The talk of polarization in the States is always seen through the lens of the political immediacy, if you will, in the States. But the — in historic terms, it is so deeply sad, and it’s so deeply corrosive. And no matter what how happens in November, whoever is elected, whether the president is resoundingly defeated or whether he wins again, if America can’t begin to bridge the gap between itself, that kind of prosperous and hopeful future that your uncle envisions may just not happen.
SREENIVASAN: I mean, do societies know when they have peaked, or how long until they figure this out? I mean, it’s not like an athlete that can just kind of look back at their split times and say, yes, you know what, I was faster five years ago.
DAVIS: The fascinating thing is, the British empire, few people realize it reached its greatest geographical extent in 1935, long after the Great War, but we now know, of course, that the empire was absolutely bled white and bankrupt by that war. In fact, probably, its height was back in the 1880s. And yet there they were in 1935 still having their gin and tonics in all corners of the world, and the map of the world was red. But the torch of history had long before passed the Americans. And so it’s the first thing you read from that article. Again, none of this is wish — something I wished. And, certainly,
I did not write it in any bitterness or any desire to hurt my American friends and family members. But the reality is that empires rise and fall. Eras come and go. That’s the truth of history. And if the people can’t see what’s going on to themselves, that’s often a sure sign that the danger is on the horizon.
SREENIVASAN: What’s so wrong about pointing inward and saying we have our own problems to fix, and perhaps we don’t need to be on the world stage in the same way? What is the impact of having global leadership or a society standing, if you choose to do that?
DAVIS: Well, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong about it. It’s more an issue of the American presence on the global stage. Do we look back over the last 50 or 60 years and believe that it’s been, for all of its problems, fundamentally a positive or a negative force in the world? ….I think this — no nation can stand when it’s — it’s like Lincoln said. No nation can stand when it’s at odds with itself, and until America, I think, looks in the mirror and sees how crippling this polarization has become, not simply as an artifice of political discourse, but deep cultural divide, really unprecedented since the divide before the Civil War. (BLOGGER’S NOTE- Of course there is a divide, of Civil War proportions, due to the lunacy of multiculturalism-“ More than 145 different languages are spoken in Houston. That's the third largest number of languages spoken in a U.S. city behind New York (192) and LA (185). More than a third of Houstonians older than five speak a language other than English at home.”).
…..SREENIVASAN: So do you think then that it is possible? I mean, here you are. You have written this love letter intervention to the United States, in a way. Millions of people have read it. So do you think America has the capability to turn on a dime again, to try to figure out how to build these bridges and maintain its leadership?
DAVIS: ….. I mean, my whole pitch is not that I want to be critical of America. I just want America to be the America of my dreams as a boy growing up in Canada, and that was the America of Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the Grateful Dead. That’s what I want….PBS.”
On August 18, 2016, this Blogger published a prebuttal to Mr.Davis: A Brief History of America's Decline: American Community to American Diversity........
The following is excerpted from that Blog:
“That Periclean Age that Golden Age, lasted from June 6, 1944 to December 8, 1993, when President Bill Clinton passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which ended the American Dream for American workers.
NAFTA was followed by America allowing Communist China into the World Trade Organization(WTO), on Chinese terms, massive waves of illegal aliens(which is the greatest existential threat to law and order in America since Prohibition), outsourcing of American jobs to China, massive imports of illegal drugs, and Diversity, leading to misguided multiculturalism.
During the Periclean Age, there was a real American Community, flawed by racism but uplifted by minimum class distinction.
…. …..The successor of Periclean America is Diverse America or Multicultural America. In the new Diverse America, American individuals don’t count. Only one thing counts, the throw weight of which subset one belongs to in a diverse world.
…. America’s Ruling Elites do not have a clue on how to maintain civil safety, or manage or govern the multicultural society they have created. The Elites can create multicultural societies but they cannot govern them…..THE MAXEY CHRONICLES.”
Liberals, Globalists, befuddled Canadian academicians will learn that they cannot have both the AMERICAN DREAM America and multiculturalism in American society. One will have to be sacrificed to the carnivore of History and soon.
Comments
Post a Comment