Jon Carroll { Stranger in a strange land }

We often talk of ourselves proudly as "a nation of immigrants." Even politicians who are opposed to further immigration, especially the illegal kind, mention in their stump speeches how their Lithuanian grandfathers opened a tiny cricket store in suburban Buffalo and today are the world's largest purveyor of noise-making insects.

My grandmother spoke nothing but Greek. My great-uncle Eddie sold Turkish sausages to people who didn't want sausages. My grandmother worked for the richest ladies in town, sewing the legs of their silk undergarments closed. Oh, we all started at the bottom. It's the American dream.

Of course, some people managed to stay at the bottom, but that's just because they sold inferior crickets.

Last weekend was rainy and lazy, and as such it developed a theme, as such weekends often will. On Saturday night we watched a long TiVoed copy of "The Namesake," a splendid movie (really, go netflick it or something) directed by Mira Nair, based on the book by Jhumpa Lahiri. It's a story of a young family that travels from India to America to pursue economic opportunity and finds itself staying 25 years, its children growing up American but also not American, Ivy League but also Bengali.

It stars Kal Penn, who is currently on the television program "House." He's really good, but the show is stolen by the actress playing his mother, unfortunately named Tabu, who is the center of the tale. I of course cried about nine times, but I cry a lot at movies, particularly movies about families, particularly movies about home.

In the movie, it turns out that being part of a nation of immigrants is not an unmixed blessing. . . .

So this guy thinks this is new? Does he forget that plenty of Europeans not readily considered “white” originally weren’t and that ethnicity was once as much of a divider as race? Does he forget about the sweat shops and coal mines and the work that even children under 10 did to support their families, turning all of their income over to their parents? Live is bittersweet. You can let the bitter get you down or you can chase the sweet. Letting the bitter get you down rarely leads to anything good.

It is common to portrary immigrants as losing in spite of winning. Part of it is good, old American anti-Americanism by liberals, wanting some validation of their own hatred of the country. But another part is the common denial that life involves trade-offs. Immigrants in particular have been led to believe they can have everything positive about their original culture and leave behind the negative by coming here.

But culture is a two-edged sword and you often can’t separate what made that culture miserable in another setting. Take, for instance, the virtue of family cohesiveness. It can be a wonderful thing and a life-saver in many cases. It can also, however, lead to tribalism, gangs and party loyalties above what is best for everyone else. Those who don’t understand that concept end up bringing the problems with the benefits when they uproot and come here. In some ways, I think immigration is easier if it doesn’t occur in waves since it forces the immigrant to assimilate quickly or suffer the consequences. But in spite of cute names like “Chinatown”, or “Little Italy”, or “Little Tokyo” or “Little Saigon”, we can’t be clones of those places and the sooner people accept that and decide what is worth preserving and what isn’t, the sooner people see the American promise for what it is, and isn’t. That old joke about the man who claimed to be perfect as proxy for his wife’s first husband is true here. It doesn’t help the present.

Of course, it doesn’t help that liberals are very actively fighting against the notion of trade-offs or consequences, and Obama is leading the parade right now. Too many believe we can be promiscuous without consequences on longlasting relationships, we can dispose of babies without affecting the moral health of the nation, we can endlessly support the indolent at the expense of the productive, we can have all the goodies of socialism without its costs, we can intervene in the free market system without monkeywrenching it, we can reward bad behavior without decreasing the incentive for good behavior. Until we get that connection between choice and consequences, including the choice to immigrate, we will be a forever dissatisfied people.

“My grandmother spoke nothing but Greek.”

I went to see the stage show The Rat Pack is Back (Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Bishop imitators). It was great and reflected the easy going humor of the 50s or 60s. Being Italian, I especially enjoyed this joke told by the Joey Bishop impersonator:

A loud argument broke out in the bar between and Italian and Greek about who gave the world the best culture.

The Greek said, we have the best architects. Look at the Parthenon. The Italians says are you kidding, look at the coliseum.

The Greek says we gave the world the best philophers Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. The Italian says pfft, we gave the world the stoics, cicero...

Ah the Greek says, BUT we invented every known position for making love known to man!

So says the Italian, we showed them to women!

“The Betrayal” ends because the film is over, not because the story has been told.

Still waiting for the “The Betrayal” movie about how the whole world got sucked into WW2 to liberate Poland only to give it away to one of the two conspirators(Germany, Soviet Union ) to invade it.

And the “The Betrayal” of hundreds of thousands, not to mention the millions in the captive nations of our eastern European fighter allies abandoned by the US and Britain to be tortured to death or left to waste away in the gulags of the Soviet Union.

Talk about “betrayal”.....

Does he forget that plenty of Europeans not readily considered “white” originally weren’t and that ethnicity was once as much of a divider as race?

He has an TV guide sense of history. The second and greatest re-invention of the Ku Klux Klan was built upon the fear and resentment of not only blacks in the south but of Eastern and Southern European immigrants in northern cities

They were not considered as white by Anglo-Saxon standards, as you pointed out, but also the new immigrants were overwhelmingly Catholic and Hebrew. If that wasn't bad enough, top it off with the fear of radical politics(Marxism). The KKK membership exploded in the industrialized North fueled by anti-immigrant resentment. Early film clips of the KKK marching in front of the US Capitol were made during this era.

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