This article by Glastris claims there is no Greek self-hate in the
United States.I posit that there is and out of all the Dias****a it is
most intense and felt there .Now this heretical OCL is a manifestation
and the overall attitudes to the old country.
More research needs to be done to find the cause and cure of this
phenomenon because it is a threat to Hellenism and Orthodoxy.The
Dias****a in the United States is the weak link of worldwide Hellenism.
I guess some in the U.S. are in denial about the magnitude of the
problem but the U.S. census doesn't lie.Only 380,000 Greeks in the
U.S. and GOA claims 3 million !
Assimilation is our enemy especially if we don't have large families.
Folks it isn't enough to be doctors and lawyers . We need to have
babies too !Think of the demographic time bomb.
Peter
Read more here:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_12_39/ai_n21193071/print
The politics of resentment
Paul Glastris
This month we feature, among other fine pieces, a profile by Jacob
Heilbrunn of uber-neocon Norman Podhoretz (see "Norman's Conquest,"
page 32). Podhoretz is a senior foreign policy advisor to Rudy
Giuliani. He has argued that the Iraq War is a triumphant success and
that bombing Iran is an unavoidable necessity. Most recently, he has
suggested that the latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding
that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons in 2003 is the work of disloyal
anti-Bush intelligence officials--a notion he retracted after it was
pointed out to him that the president's own people control the
elaborate process by which the NIE is put together.
That Podhoretz would make such accusations, and such a rookie mistake,
isn't surprising. He has no government experience, no real foreign
policy expertise, and has spent his entire professional life as an
editor and polemical essayist. Why, then, would Giuliani choose him as
a foreign policy mentor? The answer, says Heilbrunn, is that the two
men are drawn together by a shared set of liberal enemies and an
almost pathological combativeness each learned growing up on the
streets of Brooklyn.
Podhoretz has been quite honest about the various animosities he
acquired in his youth. In his seminal 1963 essay "My Negro
Problem--and Ours," he confesses to sometimes feeling toward African
Americans "twinges of fear and ... resentment," as a result of being
repeatedly beaten up as a kid by blacks. In one incident, he is
confronted on the sidewalk by a "surly Negro boy named Quentin." The
boy gives Podhoretz a violent shove. Podhoretz pushes him back--and is
knocked unconscious by the bat-wielding Quentin.
Blacks are just one group Podhoretz grew up to resent. In his
autobiography Making It, he seethes at the treatment he, the child of
poor eastern European Jewish parents, was afforded by his fellow
classmates at Columbia University--"the prep school boys ... the
homo***uals with their supercilious disdain ... and the prissily bred
middle-class Jews who thought me insufferably rude."
Such powerfully felt class and ethnic animosities are, of course, not
uncommon. It's what makes many people--and much of American
politics--tick. In an intellectual way, I get this. But on an
emotional level, I confess, I mostly don't.
This may have to do with where and when I was raised--not on the mean
streets of New York in the 1930s and '40s but in the mostly quiet
suburbs of St. Louis in the 1960s and '70s. Such places weren't
breeding grounds of ethnic and class hatreds, for the simple reason
that there wasn't much evident ethnic and class diversity. I don't
think I knew a single kid growing up whose family was truly poor, nor
more than one or two who were truly rich. Most of my friends had Irish
and German last names but were remarkably unaware of their ethnic
heritage.
I was the exception in that regard. My family was Greek American, and
you could not be around my parents for more than five minutes without
their letting you know as much. Our ethnic pride was--and
remains--unbounded, in part because our identity carries with it no
painful, double-edged issues. We are not (with rare exceptions) a
hated minority. Nor are we taught to hate others (except maybe Turks).
Quite the contrary: Greeks are raised to believe that all people
should be proud of who they are--but especially Greeks, considering
the gifts we showered (and continue to shower) on civilization. There
is no such thing as a self-hating Greek.
I had only one childhood experience that was remotely comparable to
Podhoretz's, and it didn't have the same effect on me. In the 1960s,
we lived in a ranch house in the suburb of Kirkwood. Such was the
nature of segregation in those days that we were largely unaware that
a few blocks away, on the other side of Kirkwood Road, was the
all-black community of Meacham Park. In 1968, Meacham Park kids began
to be bused to my school, Robinson Elementary. Overnight Robinson went
from being all white to about 30 percent black. I was in the fourth
grade at the time, old enough to be aware that my new classmates were
different, but not old enough to care all that much. Indeed, except
for their skin color, many of the African American kids dressed and
behaved pretty much like we did.
But there was a group of black guys who were orders of magnitude
tougher than the toughest white kids I knew. One day, I inadvertently
knocked one of these boys, Maurice, off the monkey bars. Later,
Maurice and his friend, a wiry kid named Lynn--whose left eye, I
recall, had a pupil shaped like a star--found me in the bathroom and
started shoving me against the wall. It was the scariest moment of my
young life. Unlike Podhoretz, however, I felt no desire to shove back,
and the boys left me alone after that.
The lure of more house for the money led my parents to move us to the
exurbs the summer after fourth grade. It was a sensible decision, but
personally I had no urge to leave. The only lesson I took away from
the incident in the bathroom was that it is wise to give tough black
guys a wide berth. Indeed, on balance, I rather liked being in a
school that wasn't all white; it made things more interesting.
My childhood, then, was not one that left many chips on my shoulder.
Or maybe it's just that I'm not by nature a very resentful person.
Whatever the case, I do understand that class and ethnic resentments
are for some the result of genuinely painful experiences. I just have
very little patience for those who actively nurse those feelings--in
themselves or others. And I really worry about the prospect of such
people running the country.
Our best presidents have not been grudge nurturers, even when their
childhoods were difficult. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both grew up
in economically strained homes with abusive, alcoholic fathers. Both
became famously sunny adults (though Reagan was not above playing on
racial anger for political gain). Presidents who have carried around
deep ethnic or class resentments, on the other hand, have often been
undone by those feelings--think LBd, Nixon, and now George W. Bush
(whose class anger is directed inward, toward the East Coast elite
into which he was born).
So, as we look at the field of candidates this year, which ones harbor
uncomfortable levels of inner turmoil and resentment? I see none on
the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton certainly holds right-wing
operatives and the Wa****ngton press corps in minimal regard. But
coming from Park Ridge, Illinois, a standard-issue inner-ring American
suburb, she seems to be quite at ease with every rank of American.
Barack Obama wrestled with some racial anger as a young man, but that
struggle has produced a real uniter, not a divider. John Edwards works
the class-outrage angle--and justifiably so, given the country's
burgeoning inequality--but he doesn't really do class resentment.
On the GOP side, there's Mike Huckabee, who seems emotionally
balanced; Mitt Romney, who only fakes resentment; and John McCain,
whose caustic bent seems to derive more from a hot temper than any
broader enmity. The only major candidate clearly moved by gut-level
tribal loyalties and resentments is Rudy Giuliani. That, I think, is
why so many people find the thought of him in the Oval Office so
scary.
Any successful politician needs to maintain a healthy awareness of the
ethnic, race, and class insecurities that bedevil this great country.
When liberals in the past let their awareness slip, they did long-term
damage to their own cause--the era of busing that my family lived
through being a prime example.
But the real danger today is not liberals ignoring the voters'
resentments but conservatives playing to them. Rudy Giuliani is the
most worrisome because he shares those resentments. But all the GOP
candidates, even those with reasonably healthy psyches, are having to
tailor their words and positions to a Republican Party base that is
increasingly like Norman Podhoretz--belligerently fearful and
aggrieved and thereby prone to horrible judgment. This country can't
afford another four years with a president who sees his job as serving
the psychic needs of these people.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Wa****ngton Monthly Company
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group
|
