www.lacucaracha.comI hate to do this, I really do. I ran across a column by David Brooks in the Times from two years ago that made me reconsider my passionate *ahem, dislike of his column. I'm a big girl, fully able to admit when she's been not 100% correct (known in the reality-based community as being "wrong"), so today I'm going to quote from and link to...gasp...a column by David Brooks, my second least-favorite New York Times columnist. Any guesses on the first?
The title, "The American Dream", comes from a Samuel Huntington (a good nemesis if anyone out there is looking for one) quote from one of his later broadsides against modern-day America: "There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English." Get this guy a time capsule, he's crumbling before our eyes.
You have to give Huntington a break -- remember he was stopped illegally and then felt up by that racist cop in Los Angeles, and ever since has been struggling with feelings of anger towards...wait, I think that was "Crash." Huntington, on the other hand, has no excuse for the pseudo-academic nonsense he's been spouting for the past twenty years. Maybe he's truly concerned with the demise of his "Anglo-Protestant society." I just don't know where it ever existed in the first place. The only truly American art forms are jazz and hip-hop, and Eminem and Michael Bolton not withstanding, neither is exactly a bedrock of Anglo-Protestant influence.
But back to Brooks, whose columns I normally enjoy ripping apart. In this one, though, he really gets it right. I think in light of the national debate over immigration policies, it's worth re-reading.
We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see.
Huntington is right that Mexican-Americans lag at school. But that's in part because we've failed them. Our integration machinery is broken. But if we close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss goodbye the new energy, new tastes and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.
That's the real threat to the American creed.
1 comment:
I'm glad you've perfected the circuitous method of admitting that someone has exceeded your lowered expectations of their outlook... I was recently angered by Sunday's column in the Plain Dealer which misstated all sorts of facts about the balkans to make a valid point about Iraq. In other words, I hated to disagree, because the premise was totally disagreeable, but the main point about Iraq's long term potential for violence was probably correct. It's like someone explaining that the reason you shouldn't hit your fingers with a hammer is that the hammer might give you splinters. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but also sort of right.
T-minus how many days/hours and counting? Same here.
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