A Little Empathy

but not much ....

Before closing with the same adam Sewer quote that I used, Andrew deals with Pat Bukkkanan

This is what he means by "tradition." America - once uniformly white - is now, for him and those he speaks for, bewilderingly multicultural and multi-confessional. Hence the anxiety. Hence the panic. Hence, in some ways, the confluence of fear and paranoia among the 20 percent of Americans who seem to feel this way and see the federal government in some way as the enabler of this destruction.

But this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue.

From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

That some cannot see Buchanan's cartoon as a travesty of history remains America's tragedy of self-forgetting.

A Gay Irish-Catholic Immigrant from England understands this country so much better than paleocons.