The English and the Irish, maayeb. It hasn’t been so long since people were putting money into collection cans at pubs for “the Cause”. For that matter, the English-German antagonism got a lot of play in this country, espeically around WWI. Nebraska went so far as to outlaw public instruction carried in German. My point is that we have all the European antagonisms inside us. We just deal wioth them differently, prettty much in the way bonobos do.

Oscar was a dear old snob. He thought a (young) American’s place was with his ass in the air and his face in the pillow.

Jim: I think it was Oscar Wilde who said “America’s youth is its oldest tradition.” I don’t think this is a question of youth vs. age. It’s that European nations grew up in such a tight package that they warped and deformed each other in the process, as well as teaching and refining each other. Who in American history is the equivalent of what Germany is to France? Canada? Mexico? Cuba? The Indian tribes? To use another family metaphor, they’re like a family of 12 and we’re an only child. It makes a difference.

And Alsace was taken by France in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Some 90% of the population had been killed in the Thirty Years War and Louis XIV proceeded to repopulate the region with Catholics from France and Switzerland. The original Lutheran population that remained suffered under French religious repression and many emigrated. So the whole history goes back quite a bit further.

There is a custom in the Army of adding up all the years of experience represented in a working group, so if you have, say, three sergeants major, you can easily have 75 or 90 years of experince in that group. That’s how it is with this country. This is the oldest nation on earth.

Except for those of us Americans who are of mixed French and German ancestry, or as is much more common, mixed English and Irish ancestry, mixed English and German ancestry or whatever. We understand them and their failures perfectly. We are the Europeans who gave up on being European because we were tired of being losers – on the wrong side of genocides, tired of starving now and then, tired of having no chance to be anything but a serf, whatever. If we don’t understand, it is because we have willed ourselves to forget.

They are not beyond hope though. There are signs that some of them, especially under 30 or 35, are getting tired of their stagnation and disunity, under that mask of unity.