I love Americans – most of them. I love America – most of it. That country has given the world more Nobel Prize winners I think, than any other country in the world. There are more people in institutions of higher learning than any other country in the world. Henry Ford invented the assembly line and revolutionized manufacturing. The New York Times is one of the greatest papers in the world. Those are not just fanciful or mythic notions – those are facts.
But there is a mythic America, a country that exists in a world of boosterism and over-the-top claims and self-praising ideas. That I can only giggle at, and that giggle is not friendly. Example: “Americans are the most optimistic people in the world.” That statement was made during a discussion about the future of America. Two scholarly experts said it on Public Broadcasting's Jim Lehrer News Report. Where did this man, an obviously well informed, well-read intellectual – get his information? It is part of the American myth, the belief Americans have in themselves.
Americans are easily, among developed nations the most isolated from reality of any people in any other country. They characteristically know little, and care less, about other countries and other people, unless they happen to be involved in some kind of “nation-building” – often described as a “battle for the hearts and minds of (fill in the country.)”
So I ask, where, statistically can they back this wild statement up? Has anyone done an optimist study comparing a cross section of Americans against a similar group of Canadians of Romanians or Frenchmen? They live in a world surrounded by uniquely American superlatives – dreamed up without proof – to reinforce the idea that, after all, where else would anyone in the world want to live?
During the current recession, with unemployment approaching 10% and hope for several tens of millions of American people fading fast, I heard Barack Obama say something like:“Americans are the hardest working people in the world!” He said it witha straight face. I would not be one to differ. Could I say that Americans are NOT the hardest working people in the world?” Who knows? Politicians currying favour will use thus kind of mindless hyperbole. But again, the question I ask is: had anyone done a “hard-work” study to determine whether or not the “fact” is true? Are they harder working than say – the Japanese? How about the millions virtually chained to machines in China producing the world’s all-time greatest volume of consumer goods? How about Asian students who lead in just about every category at schools and universities in Canada?
It beats me. In the next few days I will be taking an extended trip into the U.S., heading for a few days with a friend in Charlotte North Carolina, one of America’s most advanced and progressive boom towns. From there to the slightly chic and artsy, intellectual, picturesque city of Asheville, grandly nestled in the Blue Ridge. Then a return to home with a stop in Cleveland, one of the cities in America that is relentlessly shrinking but has some of the most astonishingly good cultural facilities in the world!
I have a lot of time for what is good in that country. I have a lot of feeling for their sense of being misunderstood. I only wish they would stop the bugle-blaring fanfares for levels of accomplishment that exist only in fantasy.
And finally, I must not, will not, add by railing against their indifference to Canada. They don’t even really know we’re here. Not one American in a hundred knows that we are their largest supplier of energy – not as they would believe – Venezuela or the Middle East.
Besides, they gave us Costco. That’s enough to love them for.
Monday, September 7, 2009
ME? RACIST???
A nineteen year old neighbourhood favourite was shot dead the other day in downtown Toronto, a few blocks from where I live. Today there is a small shrine – the usual flowers piled up at the site of the shooting. The neighbours remember the boy as always smiling and loving to dance and play basketball. There were the usual comments about “too many guns on the street.” So we mourn again. Trouble is – we lay blame in the wrong place.
Bill Clinton said it best a few years ago. Referring to racial tensions in America, he said (and I paraphrase) that it is not a question of race, but a question of class. Giving the lie to the red-neck notion that somehow race is an element inherent in a certain kind of behaviour. In grotesque studies like “eugenics” there have been so-called scientists who have examined certain kinds of aberrant behaviour and its correlation to race. Everything from sexual promiscuity to testosterone gunplay. In fact, and I don’t remember who said it but it was an prominent and respected social scientist, that the most dangerous animal on Earth was a nineteen year old inner city black man. And he did not mean that colour had anything to do with it. He was just making a statistical comment about the realities if life in America.
But I believe Clinton nailed it when he set aside the idea of trace-based behaviour. So did Studs Terkel in his book “Race” which was all about the racial divide in Chicago.
It becomes cultural, economic, and environmental – none of which are in any way genetic.
Sadly, some of the black population will be predictably up in arms, claiming racial profiling or something like that. The police will run for cover and insist that they do not do that, and except for increased vigilance in dangerous areas, are not making racial judgments.
The election of Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new day of tolerance and understanding, and perhaps most important, a new age of black self-esteem in America.
But nothing changes. In cultures where gangs prevail, where drugs are rampant, where guns are a phallic extension of testosterone, someone will be shot. I am no sociologist so I do not pretend to understand the dynamic of the disenfranchised, or the marginal. The fact still is, that for whatever reason (some of them sadly racially motivated) we marginalize certain groups. Those groups are characterized as below average in school, lacking vocational skills, and not having the right to what the general population conceives as fulfillable aspirations. Whew – that’s a long psycho-babble.
Remember too that many of the families living in Toronto today have come from another geographic culture where the gun was power, and where your chances of being unemployed were high, and being under-employed even higher.
My greatest concern is for the blacks who personally, often privately, cringe when they read of a street crime, hoping that it will not involve any of them. But it does. Like the person who is supposed to have seen the shooting and will be in horrible fear that he, only because of what he saw, could be next.
I have no idea what to say or what to do. I am, because I am white, suspect. And sadly, because I am also a Jew, I hear the kind of smug “I-climbed-out-of-the-ghetto-why-can’t-they?” utterances from many of my own people. I am privileged. The “others” are not. It has nothing to do with my ability to climb out of whatever hole I may have been in. It has to do with having been marginalized myself, but outgrowing the problem, I have had my own measure of success and it has been free of any kind of lawlessness.
The answers can’t come from me, or our well-meaning but in this case, impotent mayor, who says there are larger social problems to be dealt with. Of course there are. But where do we go from the “mea culpa” admission of our own complicity?
Enough. I am sorry. We all are sorry. It should not happen in a civil society.
Bill Clinton said it best a few years ago. Referring to racial tensions in America, he said (and I paraphrase) that it is not a question of race, but a question of class. Giving the lie to the red-neck notion that somehow race is an element inherent in a certain kind of behaviour. In grotesque studies like “eugenics” there have been so-called scientists who have examined certain kinds of aberrant behaviour and its correlation to race. Everything from sexual promiscuity to testosterone gunplay. In fact, and I don’t remember who said it but it was an prominent and respected social scientist, that the most dangerous animal on Earth was a nineteen year old inner city black man. And he did not mean that colour had anything to do with it. He was just making a statistical comment about the realities if life in America.
But I believe Clinton nailed it when he set aside the idea of trace-based behaviour. So did Studs Terkel in his book “Race” which was all about the racial divide in Chicago.
It becomes cultural, economic, and environmental – none of which are in any way genetic.
Sadly, some of the black population will be predictably up in arms, claiming racial profiling or something like that. The police will run for cover and insist that they do not do that, and except for increased vigilance in dangerous areas, are not making racial judgments.
The election of Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new day of tolerance and understanding, and perhaps most important, a new age of black self-esteem in America.
But nothing changes. In cultures where gangs prevail, where drugs are rampant, where guns are a phallic extension of testosterone, someone will be shot. I am no sociologist so I do not pretend to understand the dynamic of the disenfranchised, or the marginal. The fact still is, that for whatever reason (some of them sadly racially motivated) we marginalize certain groups. Those groups are characterized as below average in school, lacking vocational skills, and not having the right to what the general population conceives as fulfillable aspirations. Whew – that’s a long psycho-babble.
Remember too that many of the families living in Toronto today have come from another geographic culture where the gun was power, and where your chances of being unemployed were high, and being under-employed even higher.
My greatest concern is for the blacks who personally, often privately, cringe when they read of a street crime, hoping that it will not involve any of them. But it does. Like the person who is supposed to have seen the shooting and will be in horrible fear that he, only because of what he saw, could be next.
I have no idea what to say or what to do. I am, because I am white, suspect. And sadly, because I am also a Jew, I hear the kind of smug “I-climbed-out-of-the-ghetto-why-can’t-they?” utterances from many of my own people. I am privileged. The “others” are not. It has nothing to do with my ability to climb out of whatever hole I may have been in. It has to do with having been marginalized myself, but outgrowing the problem, I have had my own measure of success and it has been free of any kind of lawlessness.
The answers can’t come from me, or our well-meaning but in this case, impotent mayor, who says there are larger social problems to be dealt with. Of course there are. But where do we go from the “mea culpa” admission of our own complicity?
Enough. I am sorry. We all are sorry. It should not happen in a civil society.
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