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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Appreciations |
| 2008-06-25 |
| Jay Nordlinger's "Impromptus" at National Review -- It is a great cliché for journalists to report on their conversations with cabbies. I don’t care. Was in Milwaukee and had a cabbie with one of those white Muslim hats on — those Muslim beanies. I asked him where he was from. He said Somalia. And he said — utterly unprompted by me — how grateful he was to be in America. For one thing, his native country was war-torn. And then he said, “This is America, the land of opportunity” — and he said it with such a sweet sincerity (in that lilting, musical accent). Very odd that I should have mentioned Anne Sofie von Otter earlier in this column. She is a Swedish mezzo-soprano, and she features in an episode I have discussed in Impromptus before. Years ago, she was in Carnegie Hall, and she had occasion to refer to America as “the land of opportunity.” (I won’t bog you down in details now.) And many in the audience laughed — laughed because they thought ASvO was being sarcastic or ironic. Instead, she was being perfectly sincere. Anyway . . . Friends, I am a restrictionist, when it comes to immigration. Even so, I sometimes think — when I meet such people as that Somalian — that immigrants will be the salvation of us all. White, liberal, secular America is tired, clouded, and unappreciative. -- A final vignette, or scene, or mood from the Midwest: I was in a small town in Illinois — a village, really. A farming community. The sky seems bigger there than in the East — broad, long, and huge. The clouds are enormous, and impossibly white and puffy. The cemeteries are filled with German names, and the earliest tombstones are engraved in German. Yes, they are part and parcel of the American story. Through my windows in a gracious old home wafted soft, warm breezes — “What is so rare as a day in June?” Also through those windows wafted churchbells and train whistles — lots of train whistles, which is such an American sound. President Reagan ended his second inaugural address with that phrase, that idea: the “American sound.” (And he was from small-town Illinois, incidentally.) What is my point? None, really — just appreciation, and I’ll see you real soon. |
| Posted by:Mike |