Hmmm... I can see how you might be bothered by that if you took it the wrong way. (Perhaps I should say if you took it in what I consider to be the wrong way, since I don't know who the author actually was/is.)
I don't think it is necessary to see us as either "multi-cultural" or as having a "singular" American culture -- as though there is nothing in between balkanization and the Fourth Reich.
Unfortunately, balkanization is precisely what multi-culturalism has come to mean in many very influential quarters in this country.
When I was a kid, we learned about the "melting pot" -- we all become as one, so to speak.
By the time I hit college, the metaphor had changed to "gumbo" -- limited mixing, but retained individual group identities.
Now, I am told, what is taught on our campuses is the "salad bowl" theory -- wherein we all live bunched together, but remain separate and retain our separate cultures.
This is nothing more, nor less, than a recipe for complete disaster.
Yes, we have our own culture, the American culture; a culture which has given the world a vastly disproportionate percentage of its greatest achievements over the last 225+ years.
We happen to speak a European language, and many of us trace our roots there, but that certainly does NOT make us Europeans. The whole reason our founding fathers came here was because Europe sucked so bad they were willing to risk their lives to escape it. When we came here, we threw out all that royalty crap, but that Locke dude, and that that there other fella, Rousseau, they had some darn good ideas, so we kept them, and made them our own, as we became Americans.
As each new group of immigrants arrived, they carried with them their cultural baggage -- both good and bad -- and those who came before adopted those aspects they found to be good and discarded those they found to be bad. And those who came here accepted this, partly as the price of admission, and partly because of the kind of people they were -- people who were not satisfied with the status quo, and who were willing to pay a price to become part of a better society.
My mother's grandfather, who was from some peasant town near Genoa, Italy, not only insisted that his children speak English at home, he made them come home from school every day and tutor him as well. Why? Because he was PROUD to be an AMERICAN. He was proud that in the time it had taken to sail from Genoa to San Francisco, his family had gone from hundreds of years of landless poverty, ignorance, and the brutal rule of the wealthy landed class, to education, wealth, and freedom that his fellows back home could not really even dream of.
I don't know if this is going to make any sense to you, and it's late, and I have to be up early to sit in paralyzed terror in front of my computer screen all day, so I'll leave it at that for now.
(:
augie
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