Friday, August 14, 2009

The Angst of the Anglos

No, You Can’t Have Your Country Back
From the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony until the post World War II era, these United States were ruled and largely owned by white Protestant males. The advertising of their accomplishments is ubiquitous and needs no further celebration here. Far less bruited is that they made a series of historically disastrous decisions, the results of which their crestfallen progeny cannot bear.
They imported millions of Africans to toil as slave labor. They brought in tens of millions from other lands to keep down the price of wage labor. They grabbed a great chunk of Mexico and became the overseers of Latin America. They created a global empire whose upkeep and expansion requires not only constant wars but the inhaust of millions of the empire’s subjects. And, in the modern era, they were among those chiefly responsible for shifting our economy from production to peculation, erasing millions of jobs and plunging the nation into insolvency.
Taken together, these historic decisions turned Anglo-Saxon Protestants into a fading and falling minority in the country they once regarded as theirs alone. Because of the actions of the leaders they had freely chosen, they found themselves on the outside looking in at an increasingly diverse and money-centered America where globalism rather than patriotism is the password and where, unimaginably, the dread sin of miscegenation is rewarded by the accession of Barack Obama to the White House.
These ‘real Americans’ see themselves retreating while those with darker skins and funny foreign names are advancing. They are made heartsick and apoplectic at the sight of former thralls in positions of power, hometown storefronts with unreadable signs and alien wares, and a mass culture that mocks their piety and provincialism.
It matters not that their forebears had devised and that they had acceded in their own downfall. Even if it's self-induced, the pain is unbearable. To relieve it, WASPs have become the base of the fundamentalist right, joining together to demand that their country be taken back from the blacks, beaners, ragheads and liberals and returned to them.
But no matter how many town meetings they bust up, how many guns they store up, how many Palins they put up, they’re pissing in the wind. Even the completion of the corporate fascism whose interest they serve would not make their noxious nostalgia real nor restore their
superiority. Too much has changed.
No puede ser hecho.

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