Katie’s Dad 2.0

Yesterday morning I was thrilled (not really) to receive a snarky comment to a previous post regarding my contention that genetic studies regarding ability and intelligence should at the very least be on the table in any national discussion about immigration policy. Someone going by the name of “Dee,” the author of a blog called “Immigration Talk with a Mexican American,” had a decidedly inauspicious debut. She galumphed about a bit, then landed with this:

Please don´t pull a John Tanton on us…

She didn’t realize it, but I felt honored. As far as I’m concerned, anyone on Morris Dee’s enemy list is probably good company to keep. If I could have a small percentage of the positive impact toward conserving our nation’s resources and heritage in my lifetime as Dr. Tanton has had, I’d feel I’d made significant progress toward fulfilling my responsibilities as steward for future generations of Americans.

Our discussion went on for quite some time, and I did try to respond to most of her questions and accusations. As is typical when dealing with someone so bathed in their own ethnocentrism that they cannot recognize they’re being ethnocentric, she chose not to respond to many of my questions, suggestions and comments. She did, most typically, accuse me of xenophobia and racism a total of nine times.

At the same time that I was going back and forth with “Dee,” Peter Brimelow was commenting about a very telling statement by Congressman Lincoln Diaz Balart at a National Council for La Raza conference in Miami on Saturday as reported by the Washington Times yesterday:

The group backs bills to protect credit card users and make it easier for foreign-born workers to send remittances back home. The group also supports stronger assessment and accountability provisions when Congress updates the No Child Left Behind education bill, and it opposes efforts to make English the “official” language of the United States.

Speaking to delegates during lunch yesterday, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Florida Republican and a Cuban immigrant, urged them to help preserve Spanish.

“It is important that we emphasize the Spanish language and that we keep the Spanish language, and that we transmit that emphasis to our children and our grandchildren,” he said.

It seems more than a couple lifetimes ago, but I have a history with the Diaz-Balart brothers. On behalf of various causes, employers and clients, I actually lent a hand on some of their early campaigns, mostly by being a campaign check facilitator. It was about the time that I began to question the wisdom of our allowing a humongous, Machismo-centric Diaspora to root itself in South Florida. I had not yet spent any time living in Miami, but my work brought me to Dade County on an almost daily basis. It only took a couple of years for my opinion of “exile leadership” to evolve from being unimpressed with it to being appalled by it.

I doubt Fidel Castro’s nephew Lincoln Diaz-Balart ever paid heed to any of the words of Thomas Jefferson:

“…These principles, with their language, they [immigrants] will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

Having gotten to know Lincoln and his element fairly well way back when, there’s really not much that he can say that might surprise me. Cuban Republicans are seldom conservative in their opinions and positions, except when it comes to foreign policy directly related to Cuba or communism. Surely, the only culture a Cuban-born elected official (I try not to call them “leaders”) ever has an interest in preserving is a figment-culture; one that never really existed. It is one in which “Cubanisimo” powers an unfounded transmogrification of past failures to gargantuan, mythic successes. It seeks to “preserve” historical greatness and success that never really happened by imposing false artifacts upon the host nation. It has meant nothing but bad news for the South Florida communities that gave them refuge when Batista’s corruptions failed in manner that is typical manner for Banana Republics.

Brimelow wrote about Diaz-Balart’s lunacy over at VDare:

By calling for Spanish to be spoken by immigrants’ children and grandchildren, Diaz-Balart is in effect calling for permanent Spanish-language enclaves. Quite apart from the obvious madness of encouraging such enclaves when the U.S. has a revanchist Spanish-speaking neighbor, this would also materially disadvantage monolingual Americans, because of the inevitable pressure to hire Spanish-speaking staff.

Brimelow is right. But I have to add what I know to be true. The main reason why people like the Diaz-Balarts desire the creation of permanent spanish-speaking enclaves… the perpetuation of Hispanic Diaspora… is continued power. I don’t particularly mean that Lincoln and Mario would do it solely for themselves, although that is part of it, but in the grander scheme I think that all of our elected American representatives of Cuban descent want to maintain the power bloc created by Jorge Mas Canosa. If they can use multiculturalism and the political correctness that enforces it as a wedge, they will have no qualms about doing so. Their affinity for American heritage is absolutely zero.

While Brimelow was busy dissecting Lincoln Diaz-Balart’s lunacy, I was still engaged with my unwelcome commentor. Her affinity for the legacy my ancestors built may actually be less than that felt by any Cubans in Congress. Her final comments yesterday deserve a more public airing than they would get if they remained buried beneath an old post.

I´ve read Washington´s farewell address. You continue to refer to the archaic definition for nation and old writings that don´t apply today. We have evolved. We are in the 21st century. This is not the 1700 or 1800´s. I know you long for the days of your plantation and obedient darkies. Those days are long gone and they will never, ever return. Snap out of it and come back to reality. Oh, that´s right. You moved to the Aryan Nation.

Here, my commentor displays a complete and utter ignorance of conservative thinking. In her mind, the only way that I could possibly hold the belief that my heritage and my language should be preserved is by attachment to a plantation mentality. What I consider to be “prescriptive,” she considers “archaic.” The cultural goods that I cherish make me worthy only of membership in the Aryan Nations. On the other hand, she demands that the cultural goods offered by her ethnic brethren must be merged with America’s traditions, and in many if not most instances supplant them. It would never occur to her that she is an interloper.

Whenever I think about this stuff, I’m often reminded of the words of Russell Kirk, the primary architect of conservative rebirth after 1950. wrote:

[T]he conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to he gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.

Dee will be continually hung up with her insistence in conflating stewardship with xenophobia and remain quick to be judgmental when she mistakes the wise sort of prejudice that Burke advocated for politically incorrect bigotry. Since, apparently, there is a vacuum in her brain where most people store their natural human conservative tendencies, she persists offering up the radical.

I find it amazing you do not recognize your own xenophobia and racism. You don´t see the Chinese Labor Act or Operation Wetback as exclusionary, racist or xenophobic. You don´t recognize the exclusionary immigration policies of the past as advancing what you term as “Mexifornication.” You xenophobes brought this upon yourselves.

Obstinate opposition to acknowledging that there are reasons other than forms of bigotry for the human desire to carefully pass along culture and its artifacts to future generations appears to be an endemic trait in those fully gripped by the La Raza mindset. Dee sure has no qualms about stepping out on that slippery slope. Again, I’ll refer to Kirk to help address this:

Change and reform, conservatives are convinced, are not identical: moral and political innovation can be destructive as well as beneficial; and if innovation is undertaken in a spirit of presumption and enthusiasm, probably it will be disastrous. All human institutions alter to some extent from age to age, for slow change is the means of conserving society, just as it is the means for renewing the human body. But American conservatives endeavor to reconcile the growth and alteration essential to our life with the strength of our social and moral traditions. With Lord Falkland, they say, “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” They understand that men and women are best content when they can feel that they live in a stable world of enduring values.

While it did take a bit of prodding, I was able to get Dee to take off her mask and reveal what lies beneath and motivates her:

The reason times have changed is due to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960´s. Having grown up in these times, you should know this.

The rate of Hispanics will not diminish. We are CITIZENS and our numbers are growing You cannot stop this. Your Northern European policies have brought us to where we are today. Now, with the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement, we have learned we are, in fact, equal. What you don´t understand is, your side will not win. You are on your last stand. It is time for you to embrace multiculturalism or move to Idaho and build a wall around yourself. You may be able to live out your days in your exclusionary retreat. You might just make it.

Dee ends up not even a tiny hop, skip or jump away from the thoughts of Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, and based on her preferred reading (provided in one of her comment) list, I’m sure she can quote him from memory. He said:

The border remains a military zone. We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we’re a new Mestizo nation. And they want us to discuss civil rights. Civil rights. What law made by white men to oppress all of us of color, female and male. This is our homeland. We cannot—we will not—and we must not be made illegal in our own homeland. We are not immigrants that came from another country to another country. We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population.

There are common threads expressed both by my commentor and by Representative Diaz-Balart. When examined through the lens provided by conservative thinkers of the Western tradition, there exists an abundance of absurdities promoted by Hispanic ethnocentrists and all of them are wrapped up in insisting that only evil lives in the hearts of those who want to preserve and steward America’s traditions and heritage for future generations. So, not only will La Raza promoters do everything they can to insulate themselves from “evil” American tradition, they will do everything they can to undermine it.  It does not matter that nothing they offer to impose in its place has ever proved successful in a first world nation, they will just go on believing that everything that they have done is better. So as far as Dee and Diaz-Balart and their idealogical kin are concerned, replacing “our” heritage with “theirs” is the only intelligent and fair thing to do.

I realize that my conclusion promotes favoritism for Americans of Heritage, but considering that the artifacts of my ancestor’s successes form the core of what we are arguing about, then I’d be a fool not play favorites.  Most importantly, Hispanic ethnocentrists lack the standing to make similar claims, unless of course, they make them from within and about the nations their ancestors founded.  Not here.

American History, Assimilation, Conservatism, Immigration, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Racism, Sovereignty