If there is a north american predujice against scotland, I think it must have something to do with the lockerbee(sp?) thing. It was the terrorists that requested trial in scotland, no? That makes americans suspicious of scotland.
Or do I have my facts all mixed up? I have been known to do that.
BTW, I believe it is true that scottish canadians are more scottish than the scottish are. I’ve read similar statements about the french canadians and the irish canadians. The french canadians beleive that european french language has become to americanized. The irish canadians speak forms of gaelic that are extinct in ireland. I believe I read both of these things in the national geographic.
However, I suppose these beliefs could be chaulked up to that arrogant english blood that flows in north american’s veins...we are better than the english we despised, and our non english british descendents are better than their british counterparts as well!...hehe. Perhaps in some ways we have become the english that we detested.
You have a point in there.
The people who came to America were, in a very real sense, Europe’s, and Africa’s and Asia’s - even Latin America’s - rejects.
Who came from England? There were always a few powerful bigwigs to rule everyone else, but Virginia was originally populated primarily with transported prisoners. Women were originally procured by rounding up English whores and forcing them off to the Americas. Before the English Civil War broke out, the detested Puritans fled into the American wilds. Once the Puritans won and Cromwell was established, the broken Cavaliers fled to Virginia. Maryland was founded as a place to dump off unwanted English Catholics. Georgia, of course, was a penal colony. The Enclosure Acts kept a steady population of the unlanded poor flowing into America. The Navigation Acts and Tarrifs and other rules broke the Ulster textile industries and began the 18th Century mass immigrations of the “Scotch-Irish” into the American wilds. The Catholic Irish, of course, who came over were the ones who were otherwise facing death in the Potato Famine or, later, were unemployed.
Which of the Scandinavians came? Not the landed and established? The surplus populations of the unemployed.
Among the Germans, first it was the unwanted Anabaptists and Brethren, hated for their religious beliefs. Then, later, it was the poor and unemployed.
The French experience was a little different, in that it was usually higher classes of people who moved to Protestant America. But they did so, again, because they were rejected in France: the Huguenots, then the nobility, especially the nobility of the Empire. French-Canada, of course, was actually populated by hand-picked colonists of good Catholic character, which explains the very different early experience of the Quebec colony.
And into this welter were injected the black slaves, the defeated of Africa’s tribal struggles.
And later, the Chinese and Japanese coolies, workers who had nothing in overpopulated China and Japan.
Today, it is not the well-establish landed class of Mexico that immigrates. It’s the poor laborers and Indians.
America has gotten the rejects, the dregs, of every continent. But the stones that the builders rejected have become the cornerstones of a greater nation than any of those left behind.
It is only natural that Americans should harbor a degree of rejection, a degree of contempt and a degree of scorn for Europe. After all, Americans are descended of people who were driven - oftentimes violently - from their homelands as rejects. America filled up with people Europe treated like crap. European states showed no loyalty or love for the debris of their society they offloaded in America. These people, and their children and grandchildren, built a civilization that is more advanced than Europe scientifically in every field of endeavor, that is wealthier than Europe and is more sophisticated financially as well, that is militarily superior to every armed force in Europe on an equipment level and on a unit-by-unit level. And they built an America which has successively destroyed 6 European Empires: the French (in the Americas), the British (in the Americas), the Spanish, the German, the Italian and the Soviet Russian.
There is no love lost between America and Europe, and Americans have no historical reason to treat Europe with respect. Americans’ ancestors were driven from Europe as “the wretched refuse from a teeming shore”. No thanks to Europe, at all, they built the greatest civilization the world has ever known in North America, and then reached out and ended European world domination, establishing their own.
Some of us still have strong ties to Europe, but not very many. For most there is a sense of an emotional tie to some distant “Homeland”, be it in Africa, in Asia, or in Europe. However, closer acquaintance with any of the ancestral homelands causes most Americans to thank their lucky stars that their ancestors were badly beaten up by these ancient lands, such that they left, dregs all, and made a better world in the New.
It is unsurprising that Europe and America do not really get along well, and never have. America is in a literal sense a rejection of Europe.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
- Inscription on the Statue of Liberty, New York harbor, USA.
(By the way, it is not as though all Europeans are oblivious to this. ‘Twas France that was inspired to give the Statue of Liberty to America, apres tout.)