demagogue on 20/7/2011 at 21:19

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At least "American" isn't the name of a race.
Not many other countries have made that leap yet.

Most peoples are still under the ridiculous illusion that somehow land "belongs" to a race or nationality, an ideology which every country should do its part to eradicate by eliminating all (non-security related) immigration restrictions and considering any person that's been naturalized & speaks natively to be a full-on French, Japanese, Chinese, German, Irish, Turk, etc, etc... (Along with the helpful eradication of all races on earth by inter-breeding everyone into a single mongrel race, but that's another thing.) Until your home country can do that, its "politeness" to foreigners is fucking sham travesty joke. If they politely help me with my trash with that fake ass smile one more time, never mind I'd lived there over a year... fuck them. Seriously, fuck that. I'd rather be treated aloofly like I belong there and am one of them than always "treated well" as if some perpetual alien.

Edit: I'm distinguishing between new immigrants, which have a sharp learning curve and years of work ahead of them to really "go native" and you can expect a bumpy road to really fit in, from an old immigrant that is for all purposes like a native. I'd rather a country absorb the old immigrants entirely than be too soft on new immigrants because they don't comprehend the person trying to be one of them.

Or to put it another way: I think the harassment of new immigrants in countries like America is because the expectation is you are there to *become American*, and people aren't going to let you just slide in. When you're becoming American, you need to work on your pronunciation so you don't sound stupid. In Japan or China, the very idea of becoming Japanese or Chinese is incomprehensible so you get soft-footed as a perpetual alien until the end of time. Again: fuck that. If I ever end up living in Japan, I'll be there to become Japanese and I don't want to be soft-footed with the politeness offered to aliens that can never be one of us.

Edit2: This is not to diminish the insular thinking of most Americans either. A lot of it probably is just knee-jerk anti-foreigner-ism... unfortunately. But in my experience, for the enterprising immigrant, if they really work hard to Americanize themselves, most younger Americans anyway are ready to treat you like anybody else.

CCCToad on 21/7/2011 at 03:31

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Its not even that complicated, its simple "dems not liek us...." Ever tried living in the south while not being a baptist/methodist and having a last name that isn't smith, phillips, or williams?

demagogue on 21/7/2011 at 05:36

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Yes I'm from Texas thank you very much.

You're missing my point a little though.
Even if it's simple, it's still worth pointing out there's different flavors of "they ain't like us". That was my point.

In the US, people will take offense if an immigrant doesn't try to speak better English or have Baptist values or whatever. (But if the immigrant does assimilate them, I mean the Baptist churches around Texas I know these days seem to be bending over backwards to welcome black & Mexican & Laotian members that are into God as much as they are. And let's not forget that canned American culture is now decidedly brown skinned.)

In Asian countries, OTOH people seem to take offense if you *do* try to speak their language better and absorb their values. In the US, the expectation is, you should really try to become like an American if you're going to live here. In Asia, well first of all, my race isn't even white person, it's "foreigner", so I couldn't try to become Chinese or Japanese to begin with... And the Shinto gods apparently don't even exist for me. But if I did try to absorb it, because heaven forbid if you choose to live in a country, you feel obligated to integrate with its people & values ... always you're met with that same perplexed look in their eyes: "but you're racially foreign??? :confused:
What do you mean trying to be Japanese? You can't change your race..."

Two different flavors of "they ain't like us". And I think the US has the better flavor, because at least it's equal opportunity. Anybody can be American, and anybody gets equally laughed at when they fall short. Not so in the so-called "polite" countries.

Martin Karne on 21/7/2011 at 11:27

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I think you're correct on preserving cultural heritage, meanwhile on most places of the planet we rape it (read sodomize it) a plenty for that supposed "advance" or "progress".
Unfortunately you don't know what you have lost until its too late to recover it back.

demagogue on 21/7/2011 at 13:37

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I don't know. I can't see many people respecting "cultural heritage" anymore anywhere without doing it ironically and with incredibly bad faith. But my whole take is I think it should be respected. You just have to take the racial element out of it. (Generally I think disillusionment is the first step to any kind of respectable moral outlook. Doesn't matter what way of life you were raised in, you should alienate yourself to it, not just to promote "Western culture" through the back door; all of it should be disillusioned. Then you can come back to the culture of wherever you live and absorb it in the right spirit.)

Having lived with a Japanese myself for a while now, I'm pretty conservative in Japan too. It shouldn't be that you don't want white devils mucking it up. You don't want people that don't know they have to scrub themselves clean *before* they take a bath (other people are using that water), that you *never* pass food to someone with chopsticks (unless you want to remind them of their dead grandmother), that don't know when to bow or how low... I mean, my girlfriend has worked hard to become Americanized, get the accent right & the values, and it's great that she's been able to and people have responded; a testament to how low the bar is I guess. And she'll be the first one to roll her eyes at a fellow immigrant that acts like assimilating is impossible and don't even try. But when we live in Japan, I'm breaking my back to get the accent perfect and learn the values... I wished people would respond to it and give me credit for trying to absorb their values.

As for China, I was just thinking about a blog about a westerner that's lived there for like 20 or 30 years now, and says he still, 30 years later, gets treated like he just arrived yesterday, with special treatment, and great politeness. The only time he felt he broke through was when he had a bad accident and the hospital had him wait on a stretcher for half a day, and his friend said, at last China is treating you like one of its own... Sort of grim lengths he has to go to.

I wasn't mixing Japan & China together!
The cultures are pretty polar opposites in a lot of ways.
It's just from what I know & hear from friends they overlap on this point.

Edit: Other country my friend tells me about is France. He's French-born, parents from Korea, no matter that his French is native, he says a lot of people don't grok that he considers himself French. Maybe you could go through every country like that ... But each has their own flavor to it, that was my point.



It doesn't matter what it starts off as. After an immigrant has been a member for 5-10 years they're assimilated, and for their kids the question doesn't even come up. And maybe that's applied to every immigration group that's ever become Americanized in history. It's not like a magic line potion you drink. It really is smoke and mirrors I think. People want to look like they're open to others because in America or in the bible we're all supposed to be equal or whatever, then a few years pass and people forget why they're accepting the guy he's been around forever and he's assimilated.

Yeah where did the OP go? I'm sure he has opinions on all these matters too. I just guessed a Japanese background because of "tomoyo"...

Edit:


As for white extremists ... Since my dad moved out to a ranch, the people I've met out there are on the farther end of yokel. But they go to church, and when they're at church they have to put up with the soft-rock praise band and their wives chatting like everybody else... And if there's an immigrant kid playing guitar really well, and they listen to him being humbly awesome every week, he doesn't brag about it, quiet, in my experience people soften to stuff like that, reluctantly maybe. It's just very American in the small-d democratic sense that nobody gets special status. When you're in line at McDonalds you stand before the checkout guy as an equal, no matter how privileged your background... That kind of thing. Their wife is going to say "isn't that little brown boy just wonderful", and they're going to throw her a bone and have to warm to him, and two years later they just take him for granted as one of them.

And if there are holdouts even after all that, they're not getting married & being dragged to church and prayer groups and having their neighborhood suburbanized, that's a vanishing breed if I'm reading the demographic air right. It's all getting suburbanized, even the countryside & inner-cities.