Dan-
If what you want is for someone like me to admit that America ain't all
bad, get ready for that dream to come true.  After all, I wouldn't
devote my career to the study of American literatures if I didn't have
a deep and abiding interest in the places and peoples one finds there.
Yes, America has all sorts of good points, and yes, some of them have
to do with diversity, and yes, lots of good has happened because of the
actions of some American citizens.  However, it seems that what you
really want is a positive blanket assessment of "America" as a single
unit, as some sort of exceptional umbrella that shields us from the
prejudice that blights others.  It is still an absolutely historical
fact that no president besides Kennedy has had ties to non-Protestant
or non-Protestant derived church bodies, and just three years ago,
people were concerned that Joe Lieberman might have unAmerican
commitments to Israel.  Protestant hegemony in the US is closely
maintained.

I agree with you whole-heartedly that many kinds of people grace our
shores.  But I would add that immigrants enduring miserable conditions
and periods of virulent prejudice (such as that levied against the
Irish, the Italians, the "Krauts", the "Bohunks", the Jews, the
Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the Koreans, the Filipinos, the
so-called "A-rabs", and the perennial target, the descendants of
Africans stolen to build American wealth for free) were and are
motivated by something quite different than the American Dream as
represented in the lines of the Emma Lazarus poem.  The existence of
American capital and the availability of employment, however dreary,
has been sufficient to attract American Others, and has been sufficient
to keep Them in all their different communities between the sea and the
shining sea for generations.  The long-term presence of these immigrant
groups (some admittedly "older" than others) is all the more shocking
when one considers that, in the land of social mobility, only one Irish
descendant and less than a handful of German descendants have been
elected to the nation's highest post.  That post, we all realize, is
ideologically reserved for Anglo-Americans with Evangelical
allegiances, no matter the rhetorical myth that anyone could be
president.

Any number of contemporary cultures could be named as competitors for
"most hospitable", but in order to name a winner, we'd need some
criteria.  What sorts of measures do you suggest?  How about "which
country has the lowest historical incidence of lynching?" or "which
nation's prison systems have the lowest incidence of racially
disproportional incarceration?" or "which country has done the most to
provide health care for its pregnant citizens?"  I am not positive, but
I have a feeling that some Scandinavian countries might be putting out
some trays of lutefisk.  (Not that Scandinavian countries have entirely
unbloody hands -- I'm just suggesting a comparison.)

There are reasons why the United States is a stirring, vital,
important, and breathtaking vista to behold, and I do not want to
forget that in my haste to note its injustices.  But the best reasons
to regard the U.S. as a magnificent human endeavor are not singular:
they exist in the multiplicity of citizens, whose struggles to make it
new in many and various ways have proven astoundingly inventive and
sometimes enlightened.  They exist precisely in the agonism between
interested parties, struggling to bring productive resolutions to the
conflicts that characterize their democracy.  They have absolutely
nothing to do with the obscene provocations of the Mexican-American War
or the Spanish-American War, though they might have something to do
with the pain and sacrifice and heroism of soldiers swept into those
conflicts, as well as the conscientious objectors who did everything
they could to sound the alarm.  They have nothing to do with the
nauseating spectacles of chattel slavery, though they have much to do
with someone like John Brown, dismissed as insane by almost all his
contemporaries and remembered now as a kind of Christ figure.  (If you
need to know more about this multiplicity of people, read Howard Zinn's
_Peoples' History_ and be glad.)

There are two ideological whirlpools to avoid, and one of them is
uninterrogated hatred of "the West" or "America".  The other is
uninterrogated approval of the same, or an expectation that, given the
right storyteller, the pain of the past can be ameliorated to match the
ideals of the Declaration of Independence.  If you think seriously
about the U.S., you must be prepared to look into both abysses and
learn how to avoid their excesses.

Today's a vigorous day for writing.

Peace,
Jon

On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 12:11  PM, Daniel Pearlman wrote:

> Yours are all good points, but perhaps you are missing my own
> far more hastily presented idea (hardly MINE in terms of originating
> with me!), namely, that greedy Western imperialism necessarily
> involved confrontation with other cultures, and such confrontations
> eventually resulted in greater understanding of ourselves and the
> Other.  Show me any other contemporary culture where the
> Other is treated with similar courtesy--where the Other is not
> either ignored or distrusted or hated.  You bring up India, where
> Hindus and Muslims continue to kill each other (and please don't
> blame this on the Brits!), and you might examine Japan, or China,
> among the most ethnocentric nations on earth, or the whole of
> ethnically cleansing Middle-European barbarianism, etc.  Getting
> back to our own North American shores, where we have such
> wonderfully invigorating ethnic mixes in population and university
> programs of study, all this would be inconceivable if not for our
> long-standing national policies of openness to immigration.  This
> is not to deny concomitant evils, but the "liberal" emphasis is
> usually on the evils, whereas the positive contributions of Western--
> and specifically American--culture tend to be ignored.  I guess
> this liberal tendency to see evil in our history is itself the result
> of our freedom, which we take so for granted that it is invisible,
> transparent as the air we breathe, a clear lens through which
> our wrongdoings show up quite dramatically.   Let's bring some
> balance back into this picture!  I am able, for instance, to
> appreciate EP's poetic genius even though he was a rank amateur
> and total embarrassment in virtually every subject he ever
> incorporated into his Cantos.
> ==DP
> At 10:12 AM 2/13/03 -0600, you wrote:
>> Dan wrote, "Along with Western imperialism came cultural anthropology
>> (studies of the
>> Other), Comparative this-n-that, etc., leading to a self-critical look
>> at
>> our own Western ways, to the point of self-loathing--as is practised
>> so
>> well in academia.  Anyway, all this is said as an "instigation."  To
>> provoke frontal-lobe activity."
>> ==Dan
>>
>> Indeed.  And just preceding full-blown imperialism, there were
>> missionaries.  Everyone knows they were only doing the Lord's work.
>> (Just like the anthropologists were only furthering the progress of
>> disinterested note-taking and information gathering regarding the
>> habits of cultural others, and are therefore quite innocent of
>> "Western
>> imperialism".)
>>
>> Some thinkers, I will grant, have taken it upon themselves to practice
>> self-loathing for all of us.  But this minority of thinkers does not
>> by
>> itself explain the growth of comparativist projects, which largely
>> arose because of the increased numbers of "non-traditional" students
>> in
>> the humanities, such as those who originate in formerly colonized
>> territory.  The "normal" (read white American) graduate students take
>> classes side by side with their South Asian counterparts, and realize
>> abruptly that some adjustments must be made to their own parochial
>> (and
>> often quite innocent, I feel I must add) preconceptions about global
>> politics and migration and Caliban's structural role in  _The
>> Tempest_.
>>  This process responds to more than an intellectual desire to
>> demonstrate adequate self-loathing, and very well might leave people
>> asking , honestly, what was so undisposably great about the Great
>> Books
>> of the West.  In other words, some encounters with what they call
>> "others" will oblige people to rethink their assumptions and begin
>> thinking more critically, less constrained by this reified entity
>> known
>> vaguely as "the West".
>>
>> Vice versa, South Asian graduate students have just as much adjustment
>> to perform.  Many of my Indian colleagues grew up on a steady diet of
>> British classics, and very few of them had read much by Indian authors
>> while living in India.  The colonial legacy lives on for them in this
>> way.  Many turn to post-colonial critiques of the West as one of the
>> only available tools for understanding the complex effects
>> colonization
>> leaves in its wake.  They, clearly, are not practicing self-loathing,
>> any more than Toni Morrison was when she wrote that _Moby-Dick_ is
>> really about race, and the whiteness of the whale has a meaning that
>> even Ishmael never thought to gloss.  She is not trying to make white
>> people loathe themselves.  There is no lasting value in doing so.  But
>> to understand how the racial system in America left its marks in the
>> most unexpected places is to do what a good critic does: read, and pay
>> attention to the content that a book can't quite express in the open.
>>
>> For one final perspective on the self-loathing efficacy of academics,
>> please see this charming cartoon by Tom Tomorrow:
>> http://archive.salon.com/comics/tomo/2001/12/03/tomo/index.html
>>
>> Everyone keep your heads covered -- today's a scary day,
>> Jon
>>
>> On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 08:34  AM, Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>>>
>