The other night, my cab driver was a negrino, a black Italian. We had a wide-ranging discussion about family and Italy and discrimination as he drove me from Chevy Chase down to 14th and V Street. He was dad to some kids who had been his nephews. He has come back and forth to and from the US and Italy. He's on his way to get these kids, who would ordinarily be considered just 'black', their Italian citizenship. Because black people don't stick together over here. The conversation wasn't so cut and dried, but my job is to take a tangent from everyday life and wax philosophical.
I recall another Italian friend I made in the early 90s at Columbia U. We talked then about American provinciality. I was of the conviction that American society was immature and didn't deserve to be as rich as it was - that us winning WW2 was a fluke. So when my Columbia friend asked why Americans didn't bother to study the rest of the world, my answer was tinged, but I think truthful then as now. I said look at yourself. You came all the way to NYC from Italy to become a Columbia MBA because when you graduate, you'll be very close to truly rich Americans. You'll get a job on Wall Street and you'll be set for life. Me, I only have to take a subway and I'm here at Columbia, and I don't have to ask such questions in a foreign language. In my current argot, we're all peasants, but some of us live closer to the castle.
Nigel Farage has a low opinion of the president of the EU. Americans have no opinion of him, because as Farage states, we don't know who the hell he is. Nor do we Americans have any opinion of Belgium, the country from which he comes. Europeans on the other hand, have very specific opinions of Belgium. What was the joke? Belgium is full of child pornographers and chocolatiers. They only make the chocolate to attract the kids. It's hella funny but we don't get it. For us Yanks, Bruges is just like Prague, a cool place to make a movie that needs lots of old buildings to set the scene.
American fidelity has a great deal to do with who we can know. Where do we go for the hookup? And so naturally I think of black Americans as no different in this regard, even though I have more opinions about black Americans and I get the jokes. It's a matter of proximity, and I've got proximity. But to the extent that one doesn't get a chance to see over the walls to Wall Street or one's own English speaking guardian angel or angel investor, you're likely to be cynical about any hookup. I observe today two kinds of people. The people who don't ever, and the people who always seem to get into beefs with the guy behind the counter at McDonalds. It's the latter guy I'm talking about. Of course he doesn't stick together with black people. All he knows are the trifling people and he doesn't have his own hookup.
I told my cabbie that lots of Americans don't get out much. I'm not so sure Europeans get out much either. But getting around in Europe is not so hard as getting around in Texas, and whereas there's not much to see in West Texas, there are hundreds of years of history in West Switzerland. So naturally there's a reason for the Swiss to speak French. But the parallels pretty much break down after a bit. We're Americans and we're as difficult to know as Belgians, and our child pornographers can beat up their child pornographers. Try to explain USC vs Notre Dame to a Parisian. It's difficult. But when you look at who keeps winning the games, it's easy to find the hookup. Parisians will beat a path to USC - they'll learn the language of the Trojans. That's how it goes.
I think a lot of people conflate a polyglot ability with an elevated and worldly sensibility. Sorry but I just watched 'Inglorious Basterds' and I find it hard to believe that the right German accent from the Brit officer would have made him feel less emnity for the Bosch. Is mastery of French really all Algerians are required for their portion of Fraternite?
Americans ought to hang together a bit tighter. We tend to sell each other out for the blonder babe, for the taller baller on our team, for the corner office. Yeah that's competition and it brings out the best in some of us. But it also defeats some of the purposes of society. I'd be the last to suggest, now, that we're too rich for our own good and that some good old fashioned depression-era deprivation would bring us to our European senses - that we peasants would start traveling more fare and wide and picking up languages and cultures in our journey towards the castle. Maybe all of that is a distraction.
One of these days, if Kurzweill is to be believed, your cell phone is going to translate your voice in realtime to any target language you choose. It will be a revolution. When that day comes we will find a large number of barriers falling, and the same sorts of philosophical differences between us that we have always had no matter what language we speak. But there will be one less excuse to be made that suggests we are not fundamentally the same, one less difference to treasure and a lot of translators out of their jobs.
All of that is going to happen first here in America, because America is the nation built from scratch on ideas, and it will be the nation best equipped to render meaningless the origins of the other nations in blood and soil.
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