[Re-post] The U.S. Without Us

This stew won't be unstirred

I only wrote this back in March, but now that we have masked thugs patrolling our streets, sweeping up pretty much anyone whose skin-tone doesn’t match the white picket fence that they imagine defines America, I thought it might be worth re-posting.

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The more I read and listen, the more obvious it is to me that my MAGA fellow citizens don’t want me as part of their glorious, New/Old America—and not just because of my political views. They have a very clear vision of what they want from their country, and it’s not the vision I was raised with, as tested and challenged as that vision has been throughout my life.

When I first saw scenes like this one from Hamilton, I remember saying, “that’s my country—the past reaching out to the future to teach us who we are, despite everything, and the future reaching back into the past to claim ownership, despite everything.” All Americans claiming a share of “American-ness,” in all of its messy complexity. It was exhilarating.

Other people, apparently, saw it as an intolerable hellscape, and they elected Donald Trump to put a stop to it.

So many things that seem blurry or distorted can come clear when you put the right lens on them. Why is there so much Republican attraction to Russia and Hungary all of a sudden? How could people have been wearing pro-Putin t-shirts at Trump rallies? Was it just to troll liberals? Was it just an attraction to cruelty and authoritarianism and some weird, strict, Daddy’s-home-ism?

No. There’s more to it than that. Politics is temporary, but racial and religious supremacism is forever. Some people seem to have become convinced that Russia and Hungary are our true, natural allies in the great cause of “Defending Our White, Christian Culture against the Encroaching Hordes.” That’s why former Cold Warriors can switch sides and start loving Mother Russia. The battle lines have been drawn.

Which is grimly clarifying, I guess. It puts a lot of things into perspective for me. Message received.

I read a Substack post a couple of weeks ago written by a White man of approximately my age, bewailing the state of the country, with its crime and its angst and its uppity Black people and its out-of-control immigration. He devoutly wished the nation could return to the peaceful and monochromatic state of his youth. His essay had many, many approving comments, including a few who took the extra step of blaming everything on The Jews. Because, you know, of course.

You’ll forgive me if I call bullshit on the whole thing.

First of all, this gentleman’s shining, innocent youth was back in the 1960s and 1970s, just like mine, and if he thinks there was less crime and turmoil and political angst back then, and no Black or Brown people demanding their rights, he’s looking through some seriously bubble-gum-colored glasses. The way-back of an old station wagon is not the best vantage point for viewing the world and understanding its history.

I get it: nostalgia is a serious drug, and Baby Boomers have been under its influence for a long time. But a responsible author should clue his readers in to his drug intake.

The tone of this gentleman’s essay was more angry than wistful, more eliminationist than accommodationist. “Why can’t they all just go away and leave us in peace?” was his basic message, and it’s a question that, if taken seriously and not just rhetorically, is pretty chilling. At a time when the contributions and even the existence of women and minorities as active parts of the American story are being invisible-ized, it’s a question we should take seriously. These people mean what they say, and even if they’re a minority, they’re a powerful one right now.

It’s not just yammering yahoos on social media. There are well-known, influential writers who have been flirting with this issue for years. As hard-right and hard-White as I knew Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan to be, for example, I was taken aback a few years ago to see them talking about ideas like “settler stock” and how America was the birthright of Northern Europeans long before any pesky documents like the Constitution were written. The rest of us were just in the way, as far as they were concerned, and should be allowed to remain here only by the magnanimous good graces and with the explicit permission of our WASP overlords—which is especially horrific coming from an Irish American like Buchanan, who ought to know better.

If it was just the last 50 or 60 years that these people wanted to roll back—getting rid of Civil Rights laws and women’s liberation and gay marriage and all that—it would be one thing. One bad thing (bad for everybody). But some of these people seem to want to roll things aaaaaall the way back: pre-Ellis Island for sure, and maybe even further.

“Americans for Americans only,” as the charming Stephen Miller said at a recent, Nuremburg-esque rally. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think he was rallying for a more efficient system of legal immigration. He, too, is on the eliminationist side of the equation. Our purity must be preserved.

Which is nuts, because, like Pat Buchanan, he seems to think that his family would be spared and accepted into the volk while everyone else not of settler stock was purged. Mass deportations now! Just not my people.

I try to picture the America that their rhetoric seems to yearn for—one without any ethnic influences beyond England, Germany, and Scandinavia. See it with me, if you can: not only is there no hip-hop; there’s no rock and roll, no blues, no jazz, no gospel music. The Grammy Awards would just be versions of “Turkey in the Straw,” all the time. Ethnic food would be limited to pigs knuckles and knockwurst. I can’t even imagine what theatrical entertainment would look like if you removed from our history the immigrant influence on vaudeville, Broadway, stand-up comedy, and Hollywood. Would it just be a lot of this?

I know, I know, I’m being ridiculous. That’s not really what they want. But the Boomers who whine about the Good Old Days don’t seem to deal with the fact that their vision of white-bread America was compromised and infiltrated long before they were born. A lot has happened since the Mayflower! I mean, sure, it took a long time for women and gays and ethnic minorities to have anything resembling equal rights, but their influence was felt for years. It was in the mix.

The idea that a majority—that bulge in the center of a statistical distribution—can remain untouched and unaffected by the long tails to its right and left—it just isn’t true. Humanity is a continuum, and it’s dynamic. You can’t just snip off the tails and cast them away. That’s not how distributions work. Someone will always be the outlier.

When we think about the effects of immigration, we tend to think uni-directionally. You come to this country with your own language, your own regional and religious practices, your own clothing styles, etc. You’re in your own, little, ethnic enclave. But over time, you become “Americanized.” You move in the direction of the majority. Over the generations, you blend in more and more. We call that assimilation. But we could also call it regression to the mean: if you can’t get any more different or extreme, you tend to slide towards the center over time.

But the flow goes both ways. When you add new flavors to a soup or a stew, those flavors don’t vanish. They’re additive. Sure, they meld with whatever was in the pot originally. They lose a little of their distinctive tang. But they also change the flavor of what was in there. It’s not a one-way, zero-sum encounter. Immigrants become more “American” over time, but the flavors of their culture add to the mix and change what being “American” means. The anti-immigration folks know this very well; it’s exactly what they hate and fear. But it’s been happening since Day 1, and it’s never stopped happening. What “America” do the right-wing culture warriors actually want to freeze in amber? Do they even know?

Sure—the original, White majority of the colonies was mostly English, German, Irish, Scottish, and Dutch. Very northern European, very Protestant. But, even as early as 1776, they weren’t really those things anymore. They were something new. Whether they thought of themselves as loyal colonists or rebels during the Revolution, they did seem to think of themselves as something more than, or other than, Dutch or German or even English. They were a new nationality before the Declaration and the war gave them a new nation. Ben Franklin (in this movie version, at least) seemed to think there was something distinct about the people he was living with—something new that required its own nation.

So, even if our Founders all came from so-called “settler stock,” they were no longer what their immigrant ancestors had been. Things were already changing. Things never stop changing. So where, exactly, do Ann and Pat wish they could freeze the film? 1620? 1776? 1953?

I know Ben Franklin wouldn’t look around New York City today and say, “Ah—the Americans—my people.” But you know what? A whole lot of today’s Americans wouldn’t look at Ben Franklin’s America and call it theirs, either. I certainly wouldn’t. Neither would Ann Coulter, if she’s being honest. The overwhelming majority of us wouldn’t. Everything about it would feel strange and alien to us. Everything. Who “we” are is a moving target.

Like I said, I know this is all a bit of a straw-man argument. Ann and Pat and the Substack writer don’t really want to put on powdered wigs. They don’t want to eat only bangers and mash, and pigs knuckles for a weekend treat. They just want their 1950s America back, with cultural blinders firmly affixed, allowing them the benefits of a diverse society without having to acknowledge the people who are providing those benefits, without having to grant them any rights to vote, to shop, or to walk down the street without permission.

But gosh, that’s a hard state to maintain—keeping the cultural door open, but only just so much—letting in some things but keeping out others—enjoying the fruits without enfranchising the producers. You can do it for some period of time, I guess, but it takes something like a police state to pull it off. It takes Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Which, as we can tell from the rhetoric of the Trump administration, is not necessarily off the table.

But...forever? I don’t know. Even with a figurative boot on their face, it’s hard to keep control of your kids, and their curiosities, and their appetites. Anyone who remembers the events of 1989 knows how hard it is to build a wall around a culture. Influence is constant, and fluid, and it permeates even the strongest of walls. The East Germans who poured through the holes they made in the Berlin Wall already knew what was on the other side, waiting for them.

Even my Substack writer’s blessedly WASPy 1970s weren’t as White as he imagines. The cultural palette was already changing. We already had Italian food (and remember: Italians were not originally considered “White” when they started coming here). We even had Chinese food (that group whose continued immigration was explicitly banned by law in 1882). Granted, it was all just pizza and spaghetti and chicken chow mein when I was growing up. It was terrible and bleached and bland. But it was here—it was part of America. Had been for years. Exotic compared with the Wonder bread and American cheese of the mainstream diet, perhaps. But we wanted it. We wanted it so much that pizza and spaghetti are now as American as apple pie. And once they became the norm, firmly part of the Big Middle, people started wondering what else might be out there on the edges, that might be even tastier. There was no Mexican food at all in the Long Island world I grew up in. None. Now it’s a staple of fast food, everywhere you look. The outliers don’t just regress to the mean; they’re actively pulled in.

How about bagels? Bagels don’t even qualify as ethnic food anymore. They’re just…bread. You don’t have to be a New Yorker or a Jew to ask for a bagel with a schmear. People eat blueberry bagels! How White can you get? Do Ann and Pat really want to foreswear bagels because their settler ancestors wouldn’t have known about them? Please.

What I’m saying is, America may have made my Jewish family less distinctly “Jewish” over time, but we also made America a bit more Jewish in the bargain. And that goes for all of us former immigrants. The middle affects the edges, and the edges affect the middle, and the “normal” is ever-changing. And thank God.

We celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day whether we’re Irish or not. An American holiday. We listen to jazz and R&B and hip hop. American pop. We add klezmer to jazz and blend both with European classical music, and we end up with Rhapsody in Blue. The American songbook. We blend immigrant vaudeville with British operetta and end up with musical comedies. American theater.

We are culturally voracious; we take everything and make it part of who we are. Our hunger for newness and variety is part of what makes us America. The center reaches out, takes, and normalizes what was once extreme. The mean wants to contain the whole. That’s precisely why Hamilton becoming mainstream theater was so exciting.

But when the narrow and limited and fearful people huddled together around that mean refuse to engage in any outreach, you get xenophobia, and homophobia, and anti-Semitism, and all of the desperate clinging to rotten ideas like ethnic purity.

Ethnic purity! Forget “settler stock.” This is way beyond that. These people seem to think there was, once upon a time (1620?), such a thing as a pure Englishman, the same way the Nazis thought about pure Germans. But no Englishman is a pure Englishman. What does that even mean? English DNA (and the English language along with it) is the result of years of conquest by Romans, Celts, Germans, Vikings, French, and God knows who else. No one is exempt; World history is an endless series of wandering, warring, conquering, raping, intermarrying, converting, etc. No one isn’t a mutt. Not unless they’ve spent a few thousand years isolated on an island.

Purity. What a small and constricting and stupid thing to hold onto. It should be laughed out of any room it’s spoken in.

Making America anything “again” is regressive and insane. The world only spins forward, and it was doing so 100, 200, and 1,000 years ago. We were never pure. We were never “only” anything. What we are in this country is the product of hundreds of years of cultural assimilation—every group affecting and inspiring and changing the other. You can’t un-stir that stew. The mix is mixed.

You can whine about all of that and wish it weren’t so. You can gather up your thugs and take to the streets to separate the This from the That. Or you can relax and go have a taco.

I know, for me, which choice leads to a happier life.

And, just to drive Stephen Miller crazy, here’s my new national anthem: