Free-ee-ee-ee-dom!
July 3, 2014
THIS July Fourth promotional photo for Microsoft Outlook is a vivid example of corporate globalism and its agenda to erase borders and eradicate national identity. Not that there should be no Asians celebrating July Fourth or that there should be no Japanese or Vietnamese or Chinese citizens of America. But the incessant promotion of multiculturalism by the corporate world, of which this is but one small example, is obnoxious. Imagine the Japanese publicly celebrating their national holiday with photos of white people from, say, Kansas carrying Japanese flags. You can’t imagine it. That’s because the Japanese recognize that they are not just a political entity or a commercial entity but a people with a shared history and extended kinship. And the world does not accuse them of exclusiveness because of this. There really is no such thing as a multiracial nation in the sense that modern multiculturalism would have it. Why does America allow the corporate world to insist that there is? They do because liberty is our founding ethic. Freedom is intoxicating. Freedom calls out to every American, indeed every citizen of the world. It’s a torch held high, drawing all to its magnificent light.
— Comments —
Dan R. writes:
It’s been more than twenty years since Ben Wattenberg wrote The First Universal Nation, and by golly, he’s turned out to be a prophet! Wattenberg is a neo-con par excellence, and in retrospect his book seems to symbolize the beginning of the collapse of conservative opposition to multiculturalism, despite Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America, which was at the time a strong statement against it by a liberal Democrat par excellence. Unfortunately, in those twenty-plus years we traveled a very long way down this road created by the Left. The major corporations have become a sort of caricature in their eagerness to latch on to these things. Burger King, for instance, just launched the “Proud Burger” in honor of “LGBT Pride Week,” though I believe this was only in the San Francisco area.
The conservatives regularly remind us that we are an “exceptional” nation, while disregarding the signs of collapse appearing all around us in this hubris-laden effort to prove that we are indeed exceptional. “Huddled masses” would be another meme falling into the category of Myths Conservatives Live By.
In the end, it’s hard to imagine our “first universal nation” will survive for long.
Karl D. writes:
This post reminds me of an episode from an animated comedy television show called Futurama. The show takes place in the year 3,000 where the nation state is long gone and world government prevails under the leadership of Richard Nixon whose head has been kept alive inside of a jar. Once a year the entire earth celebrates what they call “Freedom Day”. A day where everyone can do whatever they like and people just mindlessly scream “freedom” without any regards for what it means. They truly have become “intoxicated” by the word. One of the characters named “Dr. Zoidberg” who is a lobster-type looking alien eats the earth’s flag and sums up the feelings and mindlessness of “Freedom Day” quite well with this quote:
“Yes, fellow patriots, I ate your flag. And I did it with pride. For to express oneself with doing a thing is the very essence of freedom day! Bless this planet and all its wonderful people.”
Buck writes:
We are not a nation. What currently exists below Canada and north of Mexico-proper is a confused and desperate federaton of weakly self-governing disparate peoples, increasingly alien, in an uncertain and evolving political arrangement. Groups are either tethered to the state or in conflict with it. The state keeps us all in check with its monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. A nation is generally defined as a unity of people of common descent, language, and history who populate a particular territory. We are certainly not that.
“Nation” is vestigal term, like “America,” that once had real meaning. Many reflexively use it without really thinking about what it means. Many purposefully use it like they do many other terms, with the strategic intention of forever changing its meaning. Like Ben Wattenberg’s book title: The First Universal Nation. It’s a contradiction of terms. It simply makes no sense, unless you’re bent on changing the meaning of nation.
There was a time when minorities, in spite of real and ongoing discrimination, desperately wanted to become Americans and to think of themselves as Americans. Discrimination arguably accelerated and facilitated a necessarily rapid assimilation. Today, that would be deemed a hate crime. Today an employer who objects to the fact that his employees can’t speak English is deemed a hater.
Buck writes:
The photo that you posted could be the daughter and grandaughter of a South Vietnamese refugee who arrived here in circa 1975. Here’s a story about California Governor Jerry Brown’s resistence to what he called the “dumping” of South Vietnamese refugees into his state. We currently, and likely never, have heard anything from him about the ongoing Latina/Hispanic invasion and reconquest of California. The white population of California has not grown since 1970, when it was the overwhelming majority of California’s population, at around seventy percent. The black population has remained flat and steadily diminished as a percentage. The Hispanic population exploded from a small minority in 1970 to just shy of being equal to the white population today (but with many more babies), increasing around 800 percent, while “others,” which I assume is largely Asian, has increased around 500 percent, but to total numbers at around one-third that of Hispanics. I guess La Raza is on.
