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UPSG -> RE: americanness (3/3/2009 11:54:09 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sravaka
Ok. I have a question.
I come here semi-often, and read the political threads, and have my own thoughts about them.... but i'll put said thoughts aside to ask this:
Where [on earth] do you [whoever you may be] get your ideas of what "being American" is/means?
I have my own ideas of what this (Americanness) entails.... and don't claim that mine is any more or less valid than yours-- after all, we all have passports, don't we? (parenthetical intentionally left blank)
Be honest, please. Where do your ideas come from? From your parents? From your early education (please specify)? From life experience processed later in the game? What?
I think most of the conflicts come down to this. (Hint: conservatives, liberals, and liberatarians alike are all convinced that they alone are true to "Americanness")
I have no delusions that these conflicts can be resolved, but I'd very much like to understand their sources better, and will appreciate any input.
Mine increasingly comes from outside the typical propaganda of the United States.
United States citizens and born and culturally bred patriots are more accurately United Statesians. "Americanness" belongs to all inhabitants of the American continent. The history of the transatlantic slave trade, neo-feudal life on plantations, European immigration, marginalization of the Amerindians... is something more culturally shared between Brazil and the United States than between the U.S. and England. The cowboy is found in Brazil and Venezuela just as he is in Mexico and the United States - not France.
You can separate Americans just as you can Homo sapien sapiens into different racial groups (which is a social construct and reality but biologically a falsehood). There are one Americans and one human race.
Now if that'll f*ck your head up wait until I suggest to you the "Dark Ages" (a totally subject term of propaganda) that Europe supposedly fell into "because of the Catholic Church" never could have happened because Europe did not come about until much later and as was partly a creation of the Catholic Church. (Europe is a concept and ancient Romans did not view themselves as "Europeans" culturally linked with the Germanic and Celtic tribes. Furthermore Constantinople - under the Catholic Church and Byzantine culture - flurished culturally and financially and the Latin Catholic Church in Rome gained most its intellectuals after the sack of Rome from North Africa. Ergo North Africa was more Latinized than Northern Europe at the time, which logically concludes that the ancient Romans had more cultural linkage with North Africa than with the Germanic and Celtic tribes)
So, how we construct things in our minds, how we instill historical and cultural facts, and how we encourage children and adults to percieve the world around them greatly matters on how that trickles into judgments on policies or nationalism.
True - or at least greater - freedom throughout the Americas would mean adopting a unified currency and trade relations like the E.U., along with dropping the need of crossing boarders with passports because we step over an imaginary line (a creation of "nation-states" which began a few centuries ago - nation-states require clearly defined boarders).
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