Is it strange I should change?

The land of Jefferson and Jackson, McKinnley and Roosevelt, Pulaski and Eisenhower, Cagney and DiMaggio, Louis B. Mayer and Meriwether Lewis has become the land of …

… Mutombo and Hamzehloui?

Fox News reports:

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP)—The NBA and Orlando Magic on Monday banned for the season the fan whose alleged racial slur incited Houston Rockets center Dikembe Mutombo at a preseason game last week.

Season-ticket holder Hooman Hamzehloui allegedly called Mutombo a “monkey” Thursday while the Rockets were playing the Magic. Mutombo—a native of Zaire, which is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo—yelled back at Hamzehloui and gestured from the court.

- end of initial entry -

Jeff writes:

I fail to see the (or your reader’s) point of your emphasising of this news item. Surely the man who insulted Mutombo was acting like a nasty a******e.

Surely Mutombo was just retaliating to abusive comments. Surely you can’t equate Mutombo with his abusive attacker. There is no excuse for that type of nastiness. You may not like blacks’ presence in the United States but I assume you would not advocate verbal abuse of them. This said by one of U.S. black culture’s fiercest critics (me), especially in regard to violent crime, yobbish behaviour, absent fathers, sexual promiscuity etc. In addition, despite all the flaws in black culture, some blacks have made significant contributions to the American mosaic past and present; from Martin Luther King to Oprah Winfrey to Robert Johnson to Billie Holliday to Michael Jordon to Thomas Sowell.

LA replies:

My intention here had to do with their alien names. People’s names express the identity of a culture. The occurrence of names like Hooman Hamzehloui are as much an index of our Third-Worldization as any other factor. By my list of historical American names I was suggesting the expanding Anglo-European character of America over the centuries: English, Dutch, Scots-Irish, Irish, German, Polish, Italian, Jewish, and then contrasting them all with the names in this story. It is about the drift, against our will and desire, from our familiar, Anglo-European America to a strange and alien Third-World America. My quote of the Neil Young line was meant to convey that feeling: “Is it strange [we] should change?”

Ted S. writes:

That ain’t nuthin yet. Just wait for what future generations - the children of our multi-racial, multi-cultural, all-inclusive universalism - do to Mount Rushmore. The myriad of faces one will see on that monument…

Howard Sutherland has an important and disturbing insight:

In his comment, Jeff misses the elementary distinction that King, Winfrey, Johnson, Holliday, Jordan and Sowell are all native-born Americans, while Mutombo and Hamzehloui pretty obviously are not. To many across the pond, I guess, Africans are Africans, whether they are from the Congo or Cleveland.

Jeff may have a problem that I have encountered in other Britons and Europeans. Many do not really see America as a fellow Western nation. I think that among the reasons for this are America’s large black population, a perception reinforced by black GIs in Europe since WWII; the constant presentation of America as a “land of immigrants” cum Wild West with Red Indians; and American popular culture, which does have a material black (and now, Latin American) component. Of course, as America becomes more Latin American, that perception is reinforced even further. It is a problem for us because many Europeans find it difficult, if not impossible, to see America as a prime defender of Western civilization. In their (skewed and secularized, to be sure) view, America is one of civilization’s mortal enemies. They are, to put it mildly, unmoved by the prospect of America’s losing its white majority; they have never quite thought of America as a white country. America transformed by immigration does not seem different to them; they have always perceived America as a mixed-breed, immigrant-fed, mélange. Rather like a paler Brazil, but your bien-pensant Euro probably finds Brazil more attractive.

Perhaps because of their explicit ties to Great Britain, my impression is that Europeans think of Canada, Australia and New Zealand as much more within the fold than America. Of course, they don’t resent Canadian, Aussie, NZ power in the way they resent the American “hyperpower,” either!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 31, 2006 06:29 PM | Send