What I got most from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s New York Times op-ed on how the outbreak of COVID-19 is killing off the last vestiges of any belief that the United States is the greatest country in the world was a graphic example of how much things have changed over the last 80 or 90 years. Take a look at the movies of back then like Foreign Correspondent, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mrs. Miniver and so many of them. Those pictures were made by immigrants who were grateful to their adoptive country. It used to be that immigrants whose lives were, literally, saved by the United States appreciated it.
We are a much better, more tolerant country than we were then. We are enormously more accepting of those who don’t match the hypothetical norm. Even with the manifest flaws of those 80 or 90 years ago, there was still manifest love for the country that had taken them in. Perhaps people under 50 don’t understand that. If they don’t, it’s because their parents taught them poorly.
It proves how right Sam Clemens was. The difference between a man and a dog is that if you feed a dog and make him prosperous, he won’t bite you.
I think Viet Thanh Nguyen represents the NY Times America suxs big time ideological cohort, not the majority of immigrants that have come into this country. If America suxed as bad he thinks it does, there wouldn’t be an illegal immigration problem, we’d be building walls to keep people in.
What happened to America-is-the-best country is Howard Zinn and his fellow travelers and acolytes who sold a bill of goods to schools. That being because America hasn’t lived 100% up to its ideals, it should be reduced to rubble so the new utopia could be built on the ruins. The people educated by this debunked piss-poor excuse of a history and its relatives are now in full ascendancy in government, education, and culture. Their fealty is for a mythical one-world utopia that never was and never will be as well as their ideological and financial fellows, and their bank accounts. America just happens to be where they live, and God do they hate living here, especially when they have to occasionally rub shoulders with you and me and everybody else who frequents this site who also by the way are the ones growing the food they eat and putting it on their tables.
BTW Sam Clemens was wrong about dogs, from personal experience.
At least among a certain subset there is also a highly romanticized view of Europe and, indeed, much of the rest of the world. The question that needs to be asked in some of these pieces is as compared with what? They’re imagining an England, France, or Germany without racial or ethnic prejudice which, as anyone who’s actually lived in those places and looked around with open eyes can tell you, is nuts.
They should consider how the Turkish gastarbeiter have fared in Germany or how the blacks from former colonies fare in France. The answer is that the ethnic states of Europe are still ethnic states. I can understand this from my own family history. My great-grandmother wouldn’t allow my great-uncle to marry his sweetheart because she wasn’t German (they married after his mother died). That’s typical and it’s the norm practically everywhere in the world.
Before my parents marriage my Swedish grandmother asked her counterpart, my Czech grandmother, how she felt about her daughter marrying outside her race.
Answer was, I’m not marrying him, she is.
The Swedes called them darkies and would have snorted at calling them White.