BParks, what did you do to celebrate it?All you bright, shiny white faces at Crossroads (to borrow an Austinism), didja do anything special? How about you, Mr. Patrick Young?
I must confess, throwback that I am, that I didn't even know this ... um ... celebration existed.
So, what's next? World Slavery Chains Day?
Frankly, I'm holdin' out for World Hoopskirt Day.
More info on how folks are ... um ... celebrating this Muslim proselytizing "celebration," here, courtesy of The Daily Caller.
Ms. Chastain,
ReplyDeleteI was only vaguely aware of your blog before this year, but now that I have read it I have a brief inquiry. In discussions of "diversity" and immigration you have periodically said that a threat is posed to American culture. Sometimes you refer to "Western culture." I realize that what I ask is a little bit beyond the ordinary scope of your writing, but could you tell me what "American culture" is, in your view? This would correct my own sometimes contradictory assumptions about what I think you mean by the phrase.
Thank you in advance for your response.
One can only hit the high spots of such an undertaking on an internet comment thread. Howsomever, think of how the country was before the sixties, the counter culture, the sexual revolution, etc. That's a start.
DeleteMy descriptions are how things were generally before the war against traditional American culture progressed as much as it has today. Of course there were exceptions to everything, but in the past, they were much fewer, and carried much less weight.
Christianity was given outward respect by people, by the popular culture, by government and education, etc. God and Jesus were not ridiculed and mocked by leftists and/or hedonists, as is common place today. (Think "Piss Christ" or the virgin Mary splattered n elephant dung.) Christians and the clergy were given basically positive portrayals in movies and television.
Schools taught math, grammar/spelling/composition for the purpose of effective communication, science, history, etc.(not "historiography" -- i.e., telling people what to think about history) and nonsense "courses" like studying comic books, were almost nonexistent. The pseudo-social science of "women's studies" and "white studies" did not exist. Schools were for learning, not for social experimentation. .
Marriage/family = man/husband/father, woman/wife/mother, and children. Men were breadwinners, women homemakers. Sometimes women worked outside the home to help their husbands, but men were the head of the household. Heterosexuality was understood to be normal and healthy; homosexuality was not celebrated. Unmarried couples did not shack up, or hook up in great numbers. Most movies and books were clean; if they dealt with questionable subjects, they were low key and more tasteful about it than today. Erotica and soft-core porn were not considered part of the romance genre in books or movies.
All these and more traditional characteristics are what the left has railed against for generations.
After WWII, US GIs came home and, often using technology discovered and/or invented during the war, built a culture that was the envy of the world. With an updated version of America's pioneer spirit, they invented the suburban subdivision (see Levittown) of three-bedroom ranches and neighborhood shopping centers, and freeways into the cities, where the breadwinners drove to work. In some areas like the northeast, they took trains into the cities, but outside the large urban areas, the automobile came into its own and made us a highly mobile culture.
I think the San Fernando Valley in California as a microcosm of the US after the war. The economy was booming, people had jobs and money, there was a lot of optimism for the future reflected in everything from popular music to fashion to architecture to decor. That's why they were called the Fabulous Fifties.
They were followed by the Sick Sixties. Already, there was a segment, an element -- people who hated America for being too white, too successful, too rich, too smug, too optimistic and too happy. And they set out to change that.
The decline of our culture isn't entirely due to efforts of the left to tear down. In some measure, California was a victim of its own attractiveness, enticing millions of people to follow Route 66 to the Santa Monica pier, and then settle in and around Los Angeles, and other places, including the Central Valley and points north.
But an awful lot of our culture has been specifically targeted by leftists, many of whom don't seem to really care about blacks and hispanics; they just hate whites (and most of them are white, go figure). They don't really care about women, they just hate men. They don't really care about homosexuals, they just hate heterosexuals.
Does this give you a better idea of my concept of American culture? A simpler way to say it might be to look at what the left is targeting for eradication or at least irrelevance. Very likely, it is an element of traditional American culture.
Ms. Chastain, thank you for your response. I appreciate your description. I have a follow-up question that I hope you will also answer. Where does American culture come from? How was it developed?
DeleteThank you for taking the time to answer this.
The core came from Christian western Europe with the settlers. It was refined and influenced by the unique circumstances, environment, etc., they encountered here. It was greatly influenced by the aforementioned pioneer spirit. Also, by other groups of people, the Indians who were already here, the slaves brought from Africa, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt was molded by the challenges of "taming a continent," as I once read -- masterfully illustrated, to me, by George Caleb Bingham's painting of Daniel Boone leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap -- the different terrains, range of climate and temperature, etc. (I was pretty young when I read this, so don't remember the source, but it said houses up north were given steep roofs to shed snow while houses in the South were given lower/flatter roofs with wide overhangs and/or deep porches for shade, and often with an open dogtrot to catch breezes).
These challenges enhanced the division of labor between men and women, although other cultures also had a similar divisions. Men explored, hunted, cleared land and built, women birthed children and cared for them, grew and prepared food, spun and weaved and sewed. Tradesmen, merchants, shippers, etc., followed the pioneer explorer and settlers into newly opened areas and created first trading posts, then small settlments, which grew into small towns, and some into cities.
Navigable rivers influenced settlement areas (and served as communication arteries), as did terrain and fertility of the soil; for example, there weren't wide-ranging, midwestern-style farms or huge plantations in Appalachia. The plains of the west where buffalo herds once lived were adaptable o raising domestic herds (sheep, cattle).
It is my belief that the influence of Christianity enhances man's God-given ability to explore and invent, and the population of that area of North America that would become the USA proved creatively inventive in meeting the challenges of making the land habitable and starting trade. Although it is taboo to say so, Christian Europe also influenced the notions of government in the New World, and this is one reason it is difficult to transplant western style democracy onto cultures such as Iraq, so that our "nation building" in such places is pretty much doomed to failure. (Due to character limits on comments, I will have to continue this thought in another comment.)
My answers to you are of necessity very rudimentary and piecemeal. My notions about such things were developed over my lifetime, from many different sources. I could not name them all for you. Some of the information was likely mistaken, some of it filtered through my own perceptions. But believe the information my concept of American culture is, on the whole, valid -- regardless of the hideous cackles of ridicule it might provoke in my critics.
I found a couple of aspects of this passage particularly interesting and wrote about them elsewhere:
DeleteFirst is the notion of staticness in culture. The contributors to the creation of the American culture all seem to have arrived by 1776 in this authors opinion. Change seems only to have come through the encounter with the natural environment.
Second, is the curious fact that if the United States had a unified culture in the early 19th Century from which we have fallen away from after the 1960s, it was a uniquely violent and divisive culture. Since the author of the selection counts blacks, Native Americans, and white settlers as contributors to American culture, it should recalled that whites enslaved blacks and that whites and Native Americans waged a low intensity conflict against each other for more than a century. It is also notable that from 1861 to 1865 members of this alleged American culture slaughtered each other by the hundreds of thousands.
Charley Reese did not approve of Bush-era middle eastern wars, "exporting" democracy, nation-building, etc. He wrote that western-style democracy evolved over hundreds of years in Britain and continued to evolve when western Europeans came here. From Charley's column:
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, mere elections are not what define America’s unique form of freedom. Today, practically every country in the world has elections, most of dubious validity. What most countries lack is a commitment on the part of their individual citizens to the concept of human rights, which cannot be legitimately abrogated by government.
For us, that concept took centuries of thought and conflicts to mature. It began at Runnymede when some barons presented a British king with demands that became known as the Magna Carta. It placed limits on the king’s powers and defined certain rights not only for the aristocracy but for the common folk, too. And the barons were there with their swords to make sure the king understood that it was not negotiable.
A great deal of blood was shed and words written and spoken before the concept matured. Today it’s found mainly in what in politically incorrect days were called the Anglo-Saxon countries — the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Our form of freedom is a gift from our English-speaking ancestors. In other parts of the world, government went off in different directions, even those we consider more or less free. But their concept of freedom is not the same as ours." The Fatal Flaw in Neo-Conservatism
Ms. Chastain, thank you for your answer. I did not expect footnotes, so no need to apologize about not citing sources.
ReplyDeleteYou did mention that American culture was "refined" over time beased on the settlers' experiences and the challenges they had to meet. You also say that it was influenced by certain non-Western cultures like Native Americans and those people brought from Africa as slaves.
I am interested in that process of cultural change. Do you think that the past "refinements" you speak of were good? How do they differ from the changes in culture that you seem to fear come with modern immigration?
Just a few examples. In my personal case, American Indians (Cherokees) influenced my European forebears by marrying them. By the time I came along, that influence had been lost in the past (I look plain vanilla white but it's unmistakable in photos of some older generations of my family) but the internet has helped me recover some information about it.
ReplyDeleteIndian names liberally sprinkle our landscape. These sub-cultures influenced our food/diet. Foodwise, one of the best things the Indians gave us is corn, and one of the best things the slaves gave us is okra. Succotash, gumbo... fried okra, creamed corn...You get the idea.
Although the Founders of the government were operating form a European Christian standpoint, and knew models from that tradition, their creation was as much a rejection of European government (royalty, peerage) as adherence to it. Some people say the Iroquois Confederation influenced the kind of government the Founders gave us; some say they didn't.
But the cultures of the Indians and Europeans clashed more than they meshed.
Africans -- music, speech patterns, story-telling. Did I mention music? When I was 17 or so, living in Montgomery, Alabama, and racial unrest gripped the country, I was driving across town one day, listening to WBAM Radio (The Big Bam, Rockin' the CRAdle of the ConfFEDeracy with FIFty THOUSand WATTS of POWer!) and the news had just ended, and a report about racial unrest had me thinking. And I tried to think it out, and I finally came to the conclusion, "Well, it probably would have been better if they had not been brought here."
About that time, the Big Bam plays Reach Out, I'll Be There by the Four Tops. It was my mostest favoritest song in the whole wide world at the time and it hits me like a slap, "That song wouldn't exist if they hadn't come here." In fact, many of the songs I liked were Motown tunes, and none of them would have come into existence without the presence of blacks here. So I'm driving along trying to think of all the ways it would be different without blacks (and okra was one of the first things to come to mind), and I realized, "My gosh, without them, we'd be just like yankee pablum..." I've learned enough since then to recognize some basic difference between Southerners and yankees, much of it based on the differences that existed between the European stocks who settled the different areas before they even came here, but I didn't know that then. And yes, I recognize that my reasons for appreciating black influence were selfish.
I love black music. Always have. Spirituals, jazz (well, not so much traditional jazz as the more melodic subgenres of it), blues, ragtime, Motown. There are a few I don't much care for -- rap/hip hop, because they don't have tunes/melodies to speak of, so I don't consider them music. Black music isn't the only music I like, but it is among my favorites. In 1956, when I was seven years old, I loved a lot of songs I heard on my aunts' radio, but two of my favorites were Memories are Made of This by Dean Martin (who spoke Italian only until he was five years old, but I only found that out recently) and Honky Tonk Part 2 by Bill Doggett.
These are pop culture references. I could probably give you lots of other ways these groups influenced American culure if I sat down and thought about it, but I'm posting here while I'm trying to finish writing a novella, and that's what my mind is on.
The difference between that and today is that much of multiculturalism, immigration, and similar/related issues are being deliberately engineered to target the dominant culture, which the targeters perceive to be "white" culture, which they think makes it worthy of reduction or elimination.
So, what do you think, Mr. Young? Is this material sufficient for Brooks D. Simpson to take back to his blog to rip apart, and toss the scraps to his followers?
ReplyDeleteI am not the person to answer that question, Ms. Chastain.
DeleteI have been either the chairman or vice chairman of the New York Immigration Coalition for 20 of the last 23 years. I think that historically immigrants have been extremely important re-makers of America's cultures and I believe that contemporary immigrants continue to serve that catalytic role.
I think that many of the cultural categories to which you refer are not primary to the thinking of immigrants, or to native-born people like me who live in largely immigrant communities. I think that America, unlike some European countries, has made change and adaptation a constant within our culture. These are only informal musings on my part at present, but I'll weigh them more over the next few days..
Thank you for your time in writing your response.
I don't think immigrants in the past remade American culture. I think they became a part of it. To the extent that they influenced/changed it, it was a natural part of their adaptation to their new country. But now, if immigrants are remaking American culture, it is at the behest of people who want American culture changed unrecognizably, or outright replaced.
DeleteI'm old enough to remember prayers in classrooms and devotionals where Bible verses were read. No more. Christianity has been warred against in public schools for the last 50 years.
Recently a kid in California brought candy canes to school to share with his classmates at Christmastime. He had attached a religious message to them. Teacher tore the messages off the candy canes and threw them in the trash and reportedly told the kid Jesus is not allowed in school
Meanwhile, In Tennessee, Muslim Prayers Allowed in Metro Schools
This is not the kind of "re-making" of my culture that I approve of.
My link to the candy cane story in the comment above must have a typo. Here it is from a couple of sources.
DeleteTeacher says Jesus not allowed in schools.
New York Daily News
The Daily Caller
Immigrants were as influential in remarking American culture in the 1850s and 1860s as they are now.
DeleteWhat immigrants, and how did they remake (I think you meant remaking) American culture?
DeleteYou are correct. I did mean "remaking".
DeleteMy comment above timestamped February 7, 2014 at 6:39 AM, answering the questions put to me by Patrick Young, "Where does American culture come from? How was it developed?" was posted at the Crossroads flog at 4:20 p.m. The hyena pack should pounce and begin ripping any time. Remember, their thing is ego inflation by denigration of others and false witnessing.... This should be most interesting to watch.
ReplyDeleteThanks Connie! You always deliver us material on a silver platter!
ReplyDeleteThe better to showcase your intolerance, untruthfulness, hypocrisy, destructive leftism, bullying, love of denigration, and hate ... Puddin'.
DeleteIncidentally, B (what does that stand for, btw? Wait. Don't tell me. I'll figure it out.) What did you do for World Hajib Day? Did it involve speaking or writing? And did you do it in English, B... B... Bitch?
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