I've had a busy blogging day today, and there's going to have to be more to come, but I'd be very surprised indeed in anything I do is remotely as good as me merely having provoked this comment, in response to a Samizdata posting on the subject of immigration. I said something along the lines of "multi-culti isn't nearly as strong as the cultural DNA of the USA". And Jim (of Jim's Journal fame) immediately came back with this personal description of what that very USA-DNA consists of, which is so good you can hear the Aaron Copland trumpetting away in the background of it. Seriously, we've all read this kind of thing before, but have you ever read it better? Once the comments have died down over at Samizdata, I'll probably stick it back up there as a separate posting, assuming no one else does. (By the way, I've removed one paragraph, which was in parentheses in the original, and which consists of a question about Britain rather than of any addition to Jim's main theme.)

Brian, I think you are right about "multi-culti diversity crackpottery." That is something for fuzzy liberal college administrators, Democratic politicians, and professional do-gooder types.

I grew up in a very Italian neighborhood in a small city in upstate New York -- my friends' grandparents spoke heavily-accented broken English, some spoke only Italian; my friends' parents spoke English, some with accents, some without, seasoned with a few Italian words or phrases; my friends all spoke standard unaccented English (well, yes, the accent of an upstate New York blue collar neighborhood, but no Italian accent), and only used Italian for cursing.

That is the exact pattern followed by every immigrant group in the U.S. Sometimes it takes a bit longer, sometimes a bit shorter.

America has been called a "melting pot" for the way a multitude of foreign cultures merged together. Oh, we keep our unique cultural heritages, but we share them with everyone. When they paint a green stripe down the middle of the street for a St. Patrick's Day parade in a U.S. town, it's not just the Irish who are celebrating -- the saying is that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day. And a Greek Orthodox church may have a huge Greek festival weekend, attended by thousands of non-Greeks to enjoy the music and the dancing and the food (and the church may be able to cover its mortgage payments for the year with the income from that weekend festival).

I now live in Rhode Island where it seems as if every week there is some ethnic group having a festival -- last week I think there was a big festival celebrating the Cape Verde Islands independence day -- but we're all Americans.

And we all inter-marry and end up as members of many ethnic groups. I'm part English, part Irish, part Scot, part French, part Dutch, and maybe a couple of other things... my wife is half Irish and half German. One of the current debates is over census statistics -- people had always been asked to select a racial category, which upset many people of mixed racial background -- but allowing people to identify themselves as "mixed" upset the professional politicians who wanted to be able to proclaim themselves as leaders of large communities of whatever racial minority. What is Tiger Woods' ethnicity? More and more Americans are of mixed racial backgrounds and don't want to have to pick one kind of "diversity" label.

We're all Americans.

Sometimes we've had strife to end injustices. We fought a bloody civil war to end slavery. In my youth we went through civil unrest to end segregation and then to secure civil rights for all Americans. I knew that battle would be won the day I walked into our living room and saw my father cursing at the television news program that was showing the voting rights march in Selma, Alabama. My father (a man nobody would ever call a left-winger) was saying "They're Americans demanding their right to vote and that's their goddamned right to do that!"

I mentioned that I live in Rhode Island. Providence is by far the largest city in the state and it has a population from an amazing variety of ethnic and national backgrounds. The current mayor of Providence is half Italian, half-Jewish, fluent in Spanish, and openly gay. He was elected by a landslide vote.

I once met an Iranian who lived in Oslo. He was an educated computer professional who spoke excellent English (I couldn't say if his Norwegian was accented or not) and had a good job with a good company -- but he didn't feel at home in Norway and said his wife was really unhappy living there. Go back to Iran? No, that was out of the question; what he wanted to do was to emigrate to America.

Jim