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| We have many goods for export, Christian morals and old port...--Brendan Behan |
No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.– Job 12:2.Back in the old days before Malabarista was born, children, Elektra and I used to teach English in the fair city of Cologne1, in what used to be called West Germany. The fact that it was called West Germany meant that we couldn't visit East Berlin without paying DM 6,50 per day, and if we did, the police over there would want to know about it, lest we spread what a late and unlamented historical figure used to call the bacillus of democracy. So, dutifully keeping our ideological germs to ourselves, we imparted bits of knowledge to future translators, business people, and the German military. In this way, we made NATO a safer organisation. I mean, if somebody yells, 'DON'T fire the rockets!', we want to make sure that no mistakes are made in the heat of the moment2.
We must have been successful. After all, World War Three singularly failed to break out. The Wall: our part in its downfall.
When I wasn't telling the German Air Force that 'Happy Cadaver' was not the real name of the Corpus Christi holiday, I was filling in over in the German department, telling the Indian students that, no, I wasn't allowed to speak English to them, the Turkish students that no, we couldn't celebrate Ataturk's birthday3, and the Greeks that I didn't care that they called it Constantinopolis, Istanbul belonged to Turkey now, and they should get over this after more than 500 years.
Elektra was teaching Commercial Correspondence, which meant that she was training school leavers to take their places in the world of high finance by writing letters in English ('My Dear Professor Dr Dr Hagenschmidt, In regard to yours of the 15th inst…' I kid you not.) according to time-honoured formulae devised in the days of Charles Dickens. We suspected that the textbook, although attractive in its soft blue cover, had been penned, literally, by a retired office manager for Tellson & Co, somewhere before the invention of the typewriter. Thus it was that I, returning from the kitchenette with a fresh cup of coffee, found Elektra in the living room (all right, the only room), doubled over on the sofa bed, laughing until she cried. I inquired mildly.
'Look at this!' She pointed to the illustration in Chapter One. 'Look at this commercial map of the world!'
I looked. I saw what she meant. On this map, trade routes were marked. Remarkable trade routes, leading from all the world…to London. Strategically located, was London. I chuckled.
'What would you expect? It's an English book,' I said. 'Besides, they did ask us if we could teach British English, and we said yes. All except for that Swiss guy who's going to New York.'
'Yeah,' protested Elektra. 'But do they really think London is still the centre of the universe?'
I shrugged. 'I suppose some people do. Where do you think it is?'
Elektra thought. 'I dunno. It isn't New York or L.A. Or Philly, for heaven's sake. Maybe Hamburg, for Europe. It's a big port.' She rallied. 'But I think these people are just being snooty. They want their empire back.'
I grinned. 'They can have it. Better than the US and the USSR. Anyway, it'll make the Germans laugh.'
Our German students liked to play with stereotypes – everybody likes a joke now and again – but they did not suffer under the delusion that they were true. I spent some time with Claudia, a gifted translator, making sure she learned to say 'something' rather than 'zumzink', because her Canadian cousins told this sweet, caring girl that she sounded 'arrogant'. I told her it was a question of Auslautsverhärtung, and we moved on. German young people in the 1980s were learning that yes, they had a culture, and no, they were not the sum total of their country's history. They were Europeans, durn it, and they were part of the world. Stereotypes be damned.
When is everybody else going to learn what my translators knew? Okay, kilt jokes are funny in spurts, but there is far more to Scotland than that. How many times are the Parisians expected to laugh politely when the Tower Warder makes that remark, 'History is written by the winners. That explains the blank pages in French history books.'?4 And when are European commentators – particularly h2g2ers, who should know better – going to wise up and stop trying to saddle people in North America with a 'national character'?
I spent years sighing and putting up with the word 'Yank'. The word Yankee has a particular meaning where I come from. It denotes those who live in the Northeast US. This is historical. When I brought Elektra to meet my Tennessee grandfather, he confided to me that he really liked 'that Yankee gal', and hoped he'd see more of her. Quite the gentleman, my grandfather. I didn't take it amiss that Europeans thought the term Yank applied to all US people. It was just…confusing to the social identity.
As I pointed out last year, when discussing the census, the US is fast approaching the moment when citizens of European extraction will be vastly outnumbered. So-called 'white' people in this country are becoming a minority. As this happens, the general outlook is definitely going to become less Eurocentric. This, I find, is a very good thing. I'll still be interested – I'm a Germanist with Scots-Irish ancestors – but public opinion here will become less accessible by European models.
I think it is high time we woke up, smelled the coffee, and recognized scientific fact. There is no such thing as race. That 'race' business was cooked up by Europeans, whether they lived in Europe or not, as a self-serving way of explaining the variety in people – to wit, people were just born that way, and our way was better. At least as late as the human genome studies, that myth has been exploded to blazes. There is no such thing.
Back in the ugly days of Social Darwinism, this race idea went so far as to say that certain genetic combinations – certain 'races' – were just naturally supposed to lead everybody else with their great cultural institutions and wisdom. Cecil Rhodes thought so. That's why he founded the English-Speaking Union. From a personal view, I am heartily sick of this, because I know what a shabby trick got played on 'my' people, the Scots-Irish. Even though these people believed that the 'English race' was superior to the 'Irish' and 'Scottish' races, they dangled the idea in front of us that we were sort of honorary Englishmen, and if we toed the line, we could participate in the glory of Englishnesss. That sucks, people. That was stupid.
Now, none of us did that. Not you, not me, not my neighbor next door, who happens to be African American. But we get trickle-down ideas from all this nonsense. We need to sweep them away. We need to tell the ghost of Cecil Rhodes to go and peddle his wares.
I don't think what I think because it's in my genes. If I'm smart, I also don't think what I think because it's on the online newspaper/television/Twitter/Facebook chat. I don't think it because some famous person said it. I think it because I've thought it over. That's my job as a human being.
Thinking things over is hard. It takes work. Most of us are so busy trying to make a living these days that we don't have a lot of free time to do this thinking about the world. We slip up. We listen to the radio. We make mistakes. When we do, it helps that somebody who has thought it through, and who is willing to take the time and make the effort, shares what they learned. With footnotes and sources, preferably. This is why we write for the Approved Guide. This is why I'm writing now.
What we don't need – and this is the rant part, so you can look away if you like – is somebody trying to scapegoat a whole population, or segment thereof, as a way to make themselves feel better. 'Moslems hate America.' 'Christians are all hypocrites.' 'Americans are ignorant bullies.' 'White South Africans are racists.' Pah. You know better than that. If you don't, don't talk to me.
My brother-in-law drives a truck. He owns at least one firearm. He is a deer hunter. He wears baseball caps and t-shirts with sayings on them. He likes country music and lives on a farm. I suspect he votes for people I wouldn't vote for. He likes cute animal pictures, and he attends church regularly. He also plays classical music to his students, juvenile delinquents from the city, because he thinks it will help them get better from the disease of modern life. An Earth Science teacher, he keeps animals in his classroom so that the kids can learn to appreciate the nature around them. He's smarter than his predecessor – and braver, too – because he would have known not to overfeed those boas, but he was able to relocate the bloated 80- pounder the other guy was too terrified to remove from the barrel in the storage area….
Put all that in your demographic and smoke it.
Sorry about the rant. But I'm sticking to my guns that this 'national characteristic' business is:
- A product of the racist thinking of 19th-Century Social Darwinists, and
- The reason why we can't get to the heart of a problem. Because we're too busy trying to scapegoat each other.
What's the good of teaching multiculturalism if somebody's only going to come along and say, 'Hold still. I need you for a straw man'? Cut it out. Do your own thinking. Place blame where it is due. We are a global community, and the problems are global.
'No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were..– John Donne
'I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.'– Socrates
'If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.'– Albert Einstein
'Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism.'– David Cameron
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