In one easy tweet
The lie Leftist Christians tell themselves is the same lie, or what I once called the myth of myths, that the Left is founded upon. That is, Americans in some way say America is sinless, or flawless, or like God, or perfect, or some such.
As I said many times, I've never known an American to say that. My parents were patriots with the best of them, but had no problem decrying segregation when they experienced it back when my dad was stationed at Fort Hood. Likewise, they had no problem condemning our treatment of American Indians, while at the same time loving our country.
The problem is, the Left sees the sins of America and hates America for it because the Left refuses to see its own sins and admit to them. Convinced they are flawless and without significant or meaningful sin today - today of all times - they can't see tolerating the sins of our country and those reprobates who came before.
And because of multiculturalism, they've been taught not to judge any other cultures or nations, in case conservatives want to point out the obvious. Mongols, Aztecs, Mayans, Assyrians, Huns, Celts, Algonquin, the Khmer, the Han, Hindus, Muslims, Arabians, Buddhists - pick anything out of the Western Tradition, and multiculturalism/liberalism says we don't judge. We celebrate. We look only at those cultures to celebrate them or, at worst, approach them with a neutral, non-judgmental assessment.
If those cultures practiced slavery, or fought wars of genocidal extermination, or practice matricide, patricide, infanticide, or human sacrifice or child sacrifice, what of it? It was their culture and they were all just fine with it. Besides, some might even suggest that such things weren't so bad in other cultures. Slavery? Bah. In all other cultures slavery wasn't that bad; sometimes it pretty awesome. Not like the gas chamber plantations of America's slavery death camps.
And that's just what Ms. Gross is saying. She's acting as if the world of the 19th century was one like liberals want ours to look but doesn't. A beautiful place of peace, love, joy, tolerance, John Lennon songs. Only in America, however, are we beatings slaves (we also beat non-slaves as a form of punishment), or own slaves in the firs place (slavery predated America by ten thousand years and continued in other parts of the non-Western world until the late 20th Century). If it is pointed out that slavery existed in other parts of the world, leftists lie and say it was a beautiful kind of slavery, not like ours (see above).
Bonus observation. One of the cherished lessons I learned in my sojourn with the Orthodox was just how much others in the world hate such things that leftists say. There were Orthodox who are old enough to remember when family members in their memory had been taken as slaves by the Ottomans. They chafe when they hear leftists say things like 'slavery wasn't bad in other parts of the world like it was here.' But then, except for those in the world who want to see the West burn, most of my experience is that people are bothered by many of the assumptions of the American Left. Not that the Left necessarily cares about them, any more than it cares about women now that the latest fad is Transgender.
I'd be totally on board with the first tweet, as long as it was applied consistently to all other cultures as well. I live in the Hudson Valley. The Dutch settlers and local Mohicans got along fairly well until the Haudenosaunee (more commonly known as the Iroquois, which is actually an insulting name given to them by the Mohicans, yes, American Indians used racial slurs on each other) chased the Mohicans out during the Beaver wars.
ReplyDeleteSure they did. Remember, we have a Thanksgiving story because Massasoit was looking for muscle power in an ongoing conflict with neighboring tribes.
DeleteI remember a historian said we do worse with the story of American Indians and Europeans today (that was the early 00s) than they did 100 years ago. It's almost parody. I'm reminded of when the movie Dances With Wolves came out. Despite its rather dismal portrayal of America, most Americans I knew loved it. But there were protests. The protesters I saw interviewed were descendants of the Indian tribes who had been swallowed up or taken out by the Sioux. They objected to the angelic portrayal that the movie gives them, as much as Irish tend to get bent out of shape over too glowing portrayals of English history. Something Irish don't need to worry about of course, because England is second only to America in bashing and trashing its own history.
Of course none of this matters, because our information is channeled through institutions that want such falsehoods promoted, while those aligned with them are happy to enjoy the falsehoods and poor scholarship.
"That is, Americans in some way say America is sinless, or flawless, or like God, or perfect, or some such." What you WILL see is people thinking of the United States like Catholics think of the Catholic Church: that is, that the citizens of the United States may be sinful, and they may due terrible things even in the name of the United States, but the United States per se is still sinless. You will not often hear this stated outright, but then you will not often hear people explicitly state that they worship sex, or drugs, or money, or power, either.
ReplyDeleteEveryone's household was different, but if I'm not mistaken, Stanley Engerman and other students of the antebellum South have demonstrated in their research that breaking up slave households through sales was actually quite unusual (Clayton Cramer has references) and whipping them was not quotidienne, either. (The Engerman / Fogel calculation was that the typical slave was whipped < once a year).
ReplyDeleteThe rhetorical strategy of the left is always to elaborate on cherry-picked examples to denigrate selected targets and aggrandize their own kind. Academe is shot through with deceitful and catty office politicians. They're not the sort who can settle a virgin territory, wring a living out of the land, build a town, build a factory, or build a business. They're ungrateful parasites off their ancestors and off the people who produce the real goods and services from which their inflated salaries are paid.
"Academe is shot through with deceitful and catty office politicians." Very true, but I think that is true of any white-collar job.
DeleteDisagree on 'any'. Other lines of work have operational measures of competence and require co-operation between workmates to get things done. This tamps down certain problems.
DeletePeople are people wherever you go. I've been teaching physics for 21 years, and physics is grounded in reality, unlike "the other side of campus". But you still have people being jerks, being suck-ups, having fragile egos, etc., which is what makes for OFFICE politics. If you think you know of places where no one is a jerk, no one is a suck-up, no one has a fragile ego ... you just haven't looked closely enough.
DeleteBut you still have people being jerks, being suck-ups, having fragile egos, etc., which is what makes for OFFICE politics.
DeleteNote, the labor discipline to which faculty are subject is quite odd. They're permitted to be jerks in manner and degree that just won't fly elsewhere.
Funny, I thought bosses in the private sector had a lot more power over their subordinates than you find in a university.
DeleteThat the faculty do not work for someone in the sense an ordinary person does is the source of much of the trouble they cause.
DeleteLet me be more specific: About 15 years ago, I was denied tenure after being recommended for it by everyone all the way up through the provost. I found out later the dean had asked this of the university president. He was apparently more angry with me than I thought that a committee I chaired would not change its recommendation on a hire to provide cover for the candidate he wanted. Understand that he had the authority to hire whomever he wanted, and he did hire his candidate -- after first offering the candidate we recommended. I did not consider it honest to change the recommendation. The chemistry department apparently had no such scruples, duly recommending the dean's candidate for their department, who was hired as head of the department with full tenure. It didn't take long for students to google the new head of chemistry and find he was being sued by two of his graduate students for getting them pregnant. But hey, the dean could always say he was just following the recommendation of the committee, so it must be THEIR fault.
DeleteThat is what I mean by office politics. It had nothing to do with the Republican or Democratic Party, or my opposition to abortion, or anything like that. It was a trombonist promoted above his competence throwing someone under the bus for refusing to provide him with cover. You will find that everywhere.
No clue why you'd figure I didn't know the difference between office politics and electoral politics. You keep telling me that 'any white collar job' has these problems, then give me examples from academic institutions (which have their own peculiar pathologies).
DeleteFirstly, I do not believe university faculty are a different species than other white-collar workers. What you believe I do not know.
DeleteSecondly, most employers in the private sector have greater latitude with how they deal with employees. A good example can be found with what happens to whistle-blowers in the airline industry even though there are supposed to be protections in place.l
But hey, if you want to believe that the private sector is some sort of Capitalist paradise where office politics is never a problem, that's up to you. It probably means you don't work for Mozilla, though.