A scholarly reader named Paul Westman (who was raised Protestant) has told me I am wrong, that "WASP" was invented by the sociologist Andrew Hacker. I relay his comments below.
I take a couple points from Westman. First, he agrees with me that one of my great themes here, the rise of Jews into the Establishment and the loosening of the WASP grip on same, is largely unreported. He thinks this self-divestment of power is unprecedented; and he seems to lament it. Myself I celebrate it, though I think the new elite needs to be interrogated in the same way that Baltzell interrogated the last one. Also, Westman dislikes the term WASP. He says it is the same as "kike" or "nigger," a slur. I just don’t know. A lot of WASPs don’t seem to mind the term, like my wife. Though it’s true that one prized virtue of the group is not showing their feelings… Once when I used the word WASP in an article for Spy Magazine, my editor, a white Protestant, took it out as offensive… What do you readers think?
On a personal note, I’d add that when I was at Harvard in the ’70s, I was fixated on WASPs because I thought they had all the power. That changed before my eyes. I remember a sociological Jewish friend saying, 10 years on, that the WASPs were all working in land trusts or in dad’s law firm, they had lost the drive and gumption that had made them topdogs. When I met my wife, a WASP, she said that in the ’70s it felt awful to be a WASP, to be the ruling class. I remembered a party I went to in Harvard Yard, where a guy wore a paper pinned to the back of his jacket, "I’m a Preppie; Hate Me". Poor WASPs. As for my group, the Jews, one big theme of my blog is most of us don’t want to accept our power in American society. We insist that we’re outsiders (a vanity; we’re not), or we self-segregate; we can’t deal with the religious/historical consequences of being members of the ruling class. A real crisis of identity. Get over it!
Anyway, here’s Paul Westman (who has given me permission to use his writing this once):
"WASP" is a racial epithet not unlike "nigger" or
"kike." And the Establishment did widely publicize and popularize the
term after Baltzell picked it up and utilized it to attack his own
people. The reputation of an otherwise obscure and insignificant, but
ambitious, academic was made.Baltzell published The Protestant Establishment
in 1964. However, the first known appearance of the slur in
print occurs in an article by a Jew, Andrew Hacker, "Liberal Democracy
and Social Control," American Political Science Review 51 (1957): 1009-26 at 1010-1011."These ‘old’ Americans possess, for the most part,
some common characteristics. First of all, they are ‘WASPs’–in the
cocktail party jargon of the sociologists. [Hacker provides no citation
for this statement. -PW] That is, they are white, they are Anglo-Saxon
in origin, and they are Protestant (and disproportionately
Episcopalian). To their Waspishness should be added the tendency to be
located on the Eastern seaboard or around San Francisco, to be prep school and Ivy League educated, and to be possessed of inherited wealth."Again, this is the first known appearance of the slur in print.
I asked Westman to elaborate. He did so in another email:
In Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), former Newsweek and Time
writer and editor Robert C. Christopher (b. 1924; since deceased, I
believe) wrote at the beginning of Chapter Two, "The Myth of the WASP":
"Though it was certainly in conversational use well before then, the
acronym ‘WASP’ had never appeared in print so far as I can discover
before 1962. I can still recall, in fact, how puzzled one of my
mother’s Yankee aunts was when sometime in the late 1950s I applied the
term to her." (p. 23)
In a footnote at the bottom of the page Christopher adds: "Credit
for coining the term ‘WASP’ is given to E. Digby Baltzell of the University of Pennsylvania, and it was indeed Baltzell’s use of the acronym in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment
that did most to launch it on the road to general acceptance. The first
use of the term in print, however, actually appears to have been in an
article that E. B. Palmore published in The American Journal of Sociology
in 1962 in which he carefully explained that ‘for the sake of brevity,
we will use the nickname "WASP" for this group, from the initial
letters of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.’"
Christopher, like Baltzell, celebrated the downfall of the WASP.
I subsequently photocopied Erdman B. Palmore’s (b. 1930) three-page
Research Note (for so it was designated), "Ethnophaulisms and
Ethnocentrism," American Journal of Sociology
67 (1962): 442-45, and so can vouch for his use of the term. (In
subsequent years Palmore pontificated about "ageism," among other
things.)
"Ethnophaulism (derived from Greek roots meaning to disparage an
ethnic group)," Palmore writes in the article, is a neologism proposed
by psychologist A. A. Roback, author of A Dictionary of International Slurs
(1944), "to refer to group insults." (An enumeration elsewhere
of Professor Roback’s publications and organizational activities
indicates that he was an ethnically-conscious Jew. -PW)
Palmore’s thinly-disguised aim is Newspeak-style psychosocial
engineering: "[L]abels used in a culture influence the perception and
thinking of its members." Implicitly, Palmore suggests that selectively
eradicating the subset of ethnophaulisms (ethnic slurs) utilized by
"WASPs" against non-WASPs might lead to the diminution–indeed,
eradication–of an important prop of WASP ethnic consciousness: "We may
discover that ethnophaulisms are essential for the
existence of such forms of ethnocentrism as chauvinism, pejorative
stereotypes, scapegoats, segregation, and discrimination." (Emphasis
added.)
Palmore’s agenda, widely shared, has proven itself a smashing success in the decades since.
In a society permeated with racial hypocrisy, it is fitting that
Palmore slyly employed the term "WASP" in the very course of ostensibly
preaching against slurs. One would expect nothing less. Hacker invoked
the pejorative acronym once in his article, otherwise falling back
on the phrase "old ruling class"; Palmore employed it six times in the
span of three pages.
After I elsewhere cited Christopher as authority for the proposition
that Palmore rather than Baltzell was the first to employ the term
"WASP" in print, I received an e-mail from a reader stating that David
L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, in The Macmillan Book of Social Science Quotations
(1991), p. 84, cited the Andrew Hacker article I quoted yesterday as
the first known use of the term in print. It was that e-mail, five
years ago, which prompted me to check the article in question. (I’ve
looked at both Sills and Merton and Hacker’s American Political Science Review article; the quotation I sent you yesterday is from the article itself.)
Robert Christopher deserves credit for one thing: despite
enthusiastically cheering WASPs’ destruction, he does acknowledge that
Baltzell’s thesis was fundamentally flawed, in that WASPs did not
forcefully defend their elite status. On the contrary, they rather
quickly and proactively surrendered their advantages to Jews and
others. (Just to be clear, personally I regard this as a fact but not a
virtue.) Years later, independently of Christopher, essayist Joseph
Epstein arrived at the same conclusion. He termed the strange
phenomenon "the Wasp self-divestment of power":
"The Wasp old guard put up the white flag without a shot being
fired. Suddenly bars began to drop: in formerly restricted
neighborhoods, in previously elite country and city clubs, in once
white-shoe bank, law, and investment firms. Once-snobbish institutions
loosened up, opened up, disappeared. The closest thing to an
aristocracy that America had known was now most prominently in evidence
in the magazine ads of a small grey-haired Jewish designer named Ralph Lauren
(ne Lifschitz). Perhaps the best analogy to the Wasp self-divestment of
power is that of the British giving up their empire. Both may have felt
that the need to do so was inevitable–and quite possibly it was–but
each came away diminished, disliked, even a little despised for having
done so. To this day in America, the Wasps are the one group about which-in a politically correct atmosphere–jokes can be made with
impunity." –Joseph Epstein, "In a snob-free zone," Washington Monthly (June 2002). link to findarticles.com (adapted from his book, Snobbery: The American Version.)
Although I am now a white, Anglo-Saxon Catholic, I was a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant for 59 years (well, except for about ten years when I was a white, Anglo-Saxon communist). I think it's just ridiculous to compare WASP to racial and ethnic slurs like the n word and the k word. It is the same sort of absurdity addressed by Louis Pittman in his June 3 Miami Herald column that has earned him a flood of insults and death threats from neo-Nazis and their ilk … in which he told whites who feel oppressed: "Cry me a river."
I certainly don't think "wasp" is a slur. I'm more or less a Wasp, (actually half Irish Catholic, but one side always predominates) and my closest colleague is a Mayflower descendant, and we use the term all the time. It's descriptive, especially the adjective "waspy.' Wasps shouldn't try aspire to victim status, and but perhaps more consciously recognize that at its best the Wasp establishment was capable of infinitely more wisdom than the more mixed current group. It would be progress if the Iraq debacle does as much damage to the current, very Jewish influenced, establishment as Vietnam did to the old Wasp establishment.
We Italians have our families. The Jews have their tradition. The niggers have their music. But what do you have?
WASP: We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
Lee Smith,
Are you the same Lee Smith that published this article on Michael Totten's blog?
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001481.html
Some of my best friends (and relatives) are WASPS. They never seemed to mind the use of the term as they know that aside from the stereotype about being emotionally expressed it is imbued with personal descriptors that are considered by most to be socially positive. I've always been attracted to WASPs as friends and partners. I can recall my father telling me that we were "Jewish Wasps" and that was meant to be a good thing. It meant (to him) that we had "class" and that we weren't like the gold chain wearing Jews, Italians, and fighting Irish that populated the area I grew up in. There were quite a few "waspy Italians" as well, and they were considered to be more reserved and displaying less bravado.
I am not sure the relationship between WASPs and ethnic Ashkenazim is something new and unprecedented.
In Commonwealth Poland ethnic Ashkenazim (or Slavic-speaking proto-Ashkenazim) were with few exceptions not part of the Szlachta (nobility), but they generally had liquid assets, were well educated (or at least literate), and ran distribution throughout the Commonwealth. It gave them power even if ethnic Ashkenazim did everything to look powerless.
One can find impotent fulminations of the church hierarchy about Jewish influence especially during the 14th and 15th century when the ethnic Ashkenazi mercantile elite often placed younger daughters as mistresses to the high nobility — Esterke, who was mistress to Kazimierz Wielki reached the pinnacle of Polish power.
The Polish Szlachta like Prussian Junker of the 19th century were tremendously enmeshed with the ethnic Ashkenazi or German Jewish elite — the House von Bismarck even intermarried with the preeminent Prussian Jewish banker family, the Bleichroeder.
The hostility that such relationships engendered was a factor in the decline of both the Polish and Prussian nobilities and in increasing popular hatred toward German Jews or ethnic Ashkenazim.
During WW1 Weizman had tremendous access to the British political elite and managed to help subvert British policy toward Zionist ends.
In the Soviet Union ethnic Ashkenazim were until the founding of Israel effectively the quintessential Soviet Class, and the Soviets used the political, media and academic access of ethnic Ashkenazim during the 20s, 30s and 40s for the purpose of Communist subversion.
In these cases, like the present situation, education, liquid assets, expertise in distribution, ability to craft and use financial instruments creates tremendous power.
Short Comment on Redundancy
It is probably an indication of the pedant in me, but I always find the term White Anglo-Saxon Protestant irritating.
I have never met a non-white Anglo-Saxon.
[ link to takeourword.com
makes the same complaint, and explains why Peruvian was an anti-Jewish slur in 1890s South Africa. ]
Shouldn't Anglo-Saxon Protestant (ASP) be sufficient?
As 1/2 White Anglo Saxon Protestant and 1/2 Catholic, I think it would be fantastic if "WASP" could ever be an insult that could offend anybody or if we had to go around with hyphens attached… "Anglo-Americans" or something like that.
Among hyphenated Americans a silence still descends when somebody says that their ancestors reached America in the 17th century (if only as indentured servants). "Class" and money do go together of course, but it has always been "classier" to have money without working much for it and that usually takes a few generations. The German-American Jews are dripping with class.
BTW, Joachim Martillo has an interesting point about Jewish people having been insiders before. Certainly the two most disastrous experiences in post medieval Jewish history, Spain and Germany the disaster struck precisely when Jewish power and influence was at its highest… That is precisely how it happens. Macro-encephalic without a strong popular base… envy, hostility await their chance.
Phil knows my view that only the US Constitution guarantees the safety of the Jewish people, not the Covenant, not Israel and its atom bomb, not money or power or influence, as all of those things can and have triggered antisemitism…
Only the rule of law under the US Constitution protects the Jews. That is why it seems so tragically stupid that AIPAC and the neocons have supported Bush and Cheney who are doing so much to erode the US Constitution… perhaps it is too WASP of me to harp upon a difference between "clever" and "intelligent".
"I have never met a non-white Anglo-Saxon""
Most African-Americans are Black Anglo Saxon Protestants in fact and it is a hugely important distinction.
On the expulsion from Spain –
The expulsion of Jews from Spain may have connected with the conquest of Byzantium in 1453. By the 15th century Jews whether of Ibero-Berber, ethnic Ashkenazi or other ethnicity are not has heavily represented in the Slavic slave trade as they were two centuries earlier, but there are still many Jewish slavers in this trade, and Jews are doing very well in the finance and medical support aspects of slavery.
Once the main route for Slavic slaves into the Christian Mediterranean was shut down, the Spanish government, which was already dubious of religious diversity, had much less reason to tolerate the presence of an Iberian Jewish population.
Once the conquest of Byzantium and the later Wars of the Reformation completely shut down the trade in Slavs, Europeans and European colonialists in the New World looked for other sources of slaves and turned to Africa.
The trouble with us WASPS is that we make for lousy joke material. I'll throw one out there now to illustrate my point. Two WASP guys playing golf together, and one says in an uncharacteristically pensive way as they're carting down the fairway, "Dick, you and I grew up in the same tidy suburban neighborhood and went to prep school together, we were in the same fraternity in college, our families go to the same church, and we even grill steaks together. But you've never asked me how I'm REALLY feeling, or what I'm REALLY thinking… you know — how I'm REALLY doing." So George says, "Well OK Dick, how do you really feel, what do you really think and uh, how are you REALLY doing?" To which Dick stops dead in his tracks for a few thoughtful moments before finally responding, "fine."
WASPS are just not very exciting folks. But having researched my own southern American roots back to Scotland, I don't see a whole lot in common with the traditional WASP lifestyle, even though my earliest New World ancestor came over to America as an indentured servant to the British in the 1600's, similar to Mr. Seaton's statement above.
Mostly of my ancestors always seemed to be fighting over one issue or another — if it wasn't religion, it was independence or liberty (why they fought against the British in the Revolutionary War and against the Yanks in the War Between the States) or to defend the American way of life in two World Wars, or, if they didn't have a nation's cause to fight about they would fight with their neighbors over land, livestock, or women. Quite a few of them died violent deaths.
Even today I joke with my cousins that all this family research still gives us no inkling of our genetic predisposition toward lifespan, for we can't find anyone who died a so-called natural death. As far as I can tell, I'm only the 2nd pacifist in my paternal line for having chosen the Peace Corps over the War Corps when it came time to serve my country. The only similar ancestor I've found so far is a great-grand uncle who deserted from the Confederacy after escaping from prison in the Civil War, changed his identity to avoid arrest, and fled to California to make a new start. Having assisted an army surgeon during his prison stint, he hung out his shingle and became a successful physician. There's an ancestor deserving of my admiration…
Happy American Independence Day!
"Wasp" is not a slur. It is descriptive,not even mildly hostile. Only somebody who has never been on the receiving end of a real slur could think otherwise. I have an Irish name and had three Irish grandparents and one Jewish one and was brought up as a Protestant(long story-only in America) and I know whereof I speak. I grew up in a polyglot working class CT town in the fifties and sixties where racial and ethnic
insults were par for the course. Believe me, the anti Jewish and anti black and to some degree anti Italian insults hurt a lot more than the mild criticisms of WASPs or the Irish. The Irish enjoy harking back to the prejudice they met on arrival here but in my experience they experienced no difficulties whatever. Judging by what I see and hear, that kind of prejudice has greatly declined since my childhood. I can go years and never hear an anti Jewish remark, for example, let alone any of the other kinds of open racism and prejudice. That is a real and too little celebrated accomplishment of American civilization. It is real. People have no idea of my complicated background and speak in front of me. It just is not there anymore. By the way, most Wasps are doing fine,even if they no longer have undisputed political and cultural hegemony. Most don't seem to care.
We WASPs are also bad tellers of even bad jokes, as anyone who reads my Dick & George joke above can easily see since I screwed up who was talking to whom. I'll try just one more… this one with a different ethnic flare.
God confronts a Jew and a Greek about their worst sins and says to the Greek, "the next time you obsess about sex I'm going to send you straight to Hell" and in the next breath He says to the Jew, "next time you obsess about money I'm sending you straight to Hell." Well the Greek happens to be walking behind the Jew about that time when suddenly the Jew spots a penny on the sidewalk, bends over to pick it up and BAM! there goes the Greek, straight to Hell…
We WASPs still can't hold a candle to a Jew in the joke dept!
I googled "kill the wasps." The first ten hits are all about insects.
I look about as waspy as you can get. No one has ever attacked me shouting anything about wasps.
My grandfather was a WASP. Our great xxxx times grandfather was on the mayflower. the old eccentric rich. My grandmother decscribed going to a party at alfred hitchcocks house. she said he was incredibly ugly but had cool albino tigers.
unfortunately for him, he had to leave his thriving textile business to go drop bombs on german cities in ww2, then he had to deal with FDR's anti-capitalist new deal when he got back. he never got over what he did to those cities and he drank himself to death.
that's my WASP tale. not that anyone asked for it
If WASP isn't offensive merely because it is descriptive, then that eliminates such epithets as Nigger (which means "black", from the latin "niger") or WOP (which described how many Italians arrived from the old world without passports or papers), both of which are descriptive terms, literally.
Everything is a slur if you want it to be one and benefit from controlling the dialog by creating minefields of taboo works.
American Jews of west European origin who came here first called unpolished poor Polish Jews who came later – "Kikes" because their last names ended with "-ki", as opposed to German Jewish names -man, mann, -berg, etc., and Russian Jewish last names that ended with "-sky". So "Kike" is a intra-tribal slur! Poor Gentiles, who I am sure, believe that they invented it are completely innocent!
In Russia the derogatory word for Jews is "Zhid", while the neutral word is "Evrei" (from the root "Gebrei, Hebrew"). The slavic word "Zhid" that was just a way south and west Slavs pronounced the Yiddish word "Yid" was never deragotory and even now is the correct, literary word for Jews in Poland. But try to use it in Russia and you may get yourself a black eye right on the spot.
The idea is to create a minefield of words and terms that would make outsiders silent and therefore respectful and submissive. Same method of signals, taboos, "unthinkables" is used by criminal world to divide and control prison population and keep outsiders out of criminal neighborhoods.
I am very saddened to hear that WASPS joined the club. I thought they were above that crap.
The origin of "kike"
http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/Dictionary/kike.htm
The idea that "WASP" is equivalent to "nigger" or "spic" is absurd, if only because for a slur to really gain steam, there has to be the baggage of discrimination (usually in the context of being a minority) that goes with it.
This is why, for most whites, even obvious slurs like "cracker" are sillier than anything else. (The exception here being a white kid going to school in a predominately black school or living in a black neighborhood.)
And on that note, here's the funniest thing I've seen about Wasps, ever:
http://www.teapartay.com/Gateway/?Lang=en-us&BrandId=SO&RefUrl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.teapartay.com%2fTemplates%2fStandardContentTemplate.aspx%3fNRMODE%3dPublished%26NRNODEGUID%3d%257bD847164C-4C87-4DA2-BCC0-58B22ED6E923%257d%26NRORIGINALURL%3d%252f%26NRCACHEHINT%3dGuest
P.S. Here's a youtube link in case the above doesn't work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0
Sean –
Hilarious!
Thank you so much!
The reason WASP isn't an insult is that WASPs aren't insulted by it. They see it as pretty accurate. People who used the term (academics and old Marxists) think they're striking a blow against the ruling class when they work WASP into their morning peroration. A real wasp just says "And good morning to you, sir."
I was merely trying to refute the notion that the descriptiveness of an epithet somehow makes it an un-slur (as some earlier posts averred). However, in re: WASP, WASPs may not be offended (as it is part of the nobility of the breed to be unflappable, or at least it used to be), those who use (and invented the anagram) detest the WASP. It is not, as Mr. Weiss points out, used as a term of endearment.
Shmulie is wrong on both counts: "wop" is most likely from "guapo", and "nigger" is a lazy pronunciation of "negro."
Unlike "wasp," those terms have been used by people who meant to hurt their targets.
Fascinating. As a half-Lebanese, half-WASP, I am very intrigued.
Re: whether WASP is a slur – if it is, I've been using it unwittingly for a while.
Because of the assumptions people make about me based on my Lebanese surname, I do enjoy dragging out my WASP ancestors. I have this hyper-Arabic name; I also do indeed have ancestors via my WASP mother who arrived here in the 17th century. Not on the Mayflower – they came to Norfolk, and they were not aristocrats but not servants either. I just enjoy messing with people's assumptions and expectations of what or who an ARab-American is.
I know what you mean Leila
It is really not an issue of intent. One may actually intend to be wounding to use the term "WASP" but it doesn't wound anybody. By contrast, Jews or African Americans are really hurt by the standard epithets whether the user really intends pain or is just being thoughtless and stupid and would apologize if he thought he had inflicted pain. I suppose it has to do with recent harm, in historical terms, inflicted by prejudice against the group in question. Nobody of English descent has ever suffered harm on account of that ancestry, in this country anyway. Therefore, an expression of prejudice against such ancestry need not be taken seriously by the person who is the object of such prejudice. It just seems odd. Irish Americans are also now in that situation though the prejudice against them was real enough a long time ago, say 150 years ago. But it has ceased to matter, except to politicians and intellectuals seeking to promote a victim mentality among Irish Americans or support for the IRA. But such appeals seem more absurd with every passing year. The situation with Jews and blacks is obviously otherwise. Thus, however well off an individual belonging to either group may be, he connects an expression of prejudice with actual physical,psychological or economic harm suffered by other members of his group and is hurt by it.
There is one other paradoxical point about this issue, namely that as actual prejudice declines in the US,as measured by opinion surveys and intermarriages of all kinds, people seem more and more interested in talking about group differences. At some point someone will notice that there are tens of millions of children growing up in this country who belong to no identifiable group, except generic American, or to several.
Peter:
Heat wave can be cruel. But beware of too much Kool-Aid. :)
Your argument "…the term "WASP"… doesn't wound anybody. By contrast, Jews or African Americans are really hurt by the standard epithets….." basically states that things are real if they are REALLY real and not so much if they are not.
I attribute that one to the heat wave.
Your last words, the "At some point someone will notice that there are tens of millions of children growing up in this country who belong to no identifiable group, except generic American, or to several." – this is definitely the Kool-Aid.
Some comments: I'm a WASP and I do find it somewhat offensive, perhaps because of the implication that we are like irritating insects. I think I'd prefer English Protestant to be more accurate, or possibly European Protestant because all those Lutherans who Garrison Keillor talks about are certainly what most people think of as WASPs.
How anyone could think of the blacks as Anglo-Saxon is beyond me. Surely the writer realizes that the Anglo-Saxons were a real Germanic group that conquered much of England, displacing to some degree the indigenous Celts. (Recent DNA analyses have shown that the English, Scots, and Irish are all mostly of ice-age island stock.) The blacks should be called Black African Protestants … BAP's?
As far as the European Protestants voluntarily giving up their dominant position in the establishment … I think that is because the mass of EPs felt that they had a subgroup that took care of that sort of thing. The rest of us got on with a normal life. But there were fewer of those "leader" people than there were of Jews, and the Jews just displaced them by weight of numbers. The rest of us never knew what happened. Many of us still don't. To the bad fortune of our nation, vide., for example, immigration, West Bank Settlements, and Iraq.
I think what happened to poor WASPs is that they never believed that their beloved "free press" can be so easily bought and turned around into a huge propaganda machine by a very dedicated, vocal and educated minority.
I saw in a film (I think it was about Nixon administration) how a character was talking angrily about the takeover of NY Times by some "European gold traders" and the tone of his voice was more like "how dare they!" rather than "how could we?"
Basically democracy easily allows for public opinion manipulation by whoever is eager to sacrifice the luxury of la dolce vita on tennis courts and yachts decks and instead invest the energy and riches into long and tedious process of changing the societal value system as long as such system does not contradict the "Bread and Circus" paradigm.
I don't think it's la dolce vita, it's who has the drive and motivation. The WASPS (the middle and lower classes, at least) didn't even think there was a contest. And there were too few of the upper classes who perceived the contest.
When I was in high school I was a military brat, my father was a high-ranking officer, and I didn't even know that Jews existed. No one was interested in going to the Ivy League, everyone went where their high-school classmates went. So there could be very little political pressure.
If there is no contest, did the winner really win?
Yes …
Robert –
As a son of a military man you must have known that there is always a contest. And as an American you should have known that there is always a competition.
And as a boy you should have known that there is always a fight. :)
But that is the past. Now the amateur chutzpa crew got stupid, clumsy and too carried away and this is dangerous for all of us. This is the real test – will the founders of the country stand up and take the helm from the hands of drunken guests?
There are too many threads here … but just one point. The military, from George Washington to this day, has been fully committed to civilian control. And it is correspondingly non-political. Or was till recently.
It assumes that the political leadership has the country's interest at heart. It has not contemplated that there is an ethnic "contest" inside the country for political leadership that might not have the best interests of the people at heart.
Many citizens have interests other than power or fame. They enjoy family life, general intellectual growth, making a contribution to their immediate community, camping, fishing, etc.
Robert – I would take Mr Chaihorsky with a grain of salt. He grew up in the USSR not the USA. I don't think most of those nice Jewish boys were thinking that they had to wrest control from the EPs. I think they were thinking, not unlike the Asian-American and Indian-American college students and young professionals today, how do I realize the American Dream and become a professional and build up some capital so I can support my family. That many American Jews took an interest in Israel is not surprising. Actually, the opposite would be surprising. If 50 years ago the Vatican was under seige by communists in Italy, you can bet American Catholics would have sent money and advocated for our foreign policy to be supportive of the Vatican. To not do so would be strange. I've personally found my Jewish friends to be much more interested in and committed to issues relating to social justice and civil rights than Israel, which they are often quite crticial of in regards to it's policies in the occupied territories.
Let us also not forget that not so long ago there continued to be a high level of discrimination against Jews in the elite EP circles. Jews were often denied membership in EP country clubs and in white shoe law firms. CBS, although owned by a Jew, was known as the Christian Broadcasting Network, because of the dominance of EPs in positions of power.
There is no such thing as a hyphenated WASP. You either are or you are not and every WASP knows that.
Handle -
How typical of WASPy you. If you cannot address the argument, then its the race. If not race – ethnicity. If not ethnicity – place of birth. Of course a guy who grew up outside of the US cannot be taken WITHOUT a grain of salt! Argument dismissed!
May it is precisely that lazy, ignorant attitude of first and foremost looking at peoples' skin, ace, ethnicity, religion or the place of birth instead of substance and logic of their words and arguments that allows neocons their easy victory. You couldn't have provided us with better example.
Dear Robert:
1. Just before the Iraqi war I spent several days at West Point teaching the staff some fine points of using a unique equipment I make (nothing really saucy, no need for Mossad to get excited) and I had an opportunity to chat with some pretty well-starred fellas. I was devastated. There were no signs of worry. They did believe in the cakewalk!
Your first argument is difficult to accept because if military would have seen what was coming, its submissiveness to civil powers would still be not an excuse to bring the Army and the Country to recent defeat. THEN, the right thing to do would be massive resignation of top brass. If they DID see the trap they were lead to and did not do that – they compromised their honor, which is far worse for the country than a lost war in the Middle East.
2. When people use camping and fishing as a legitimate excuse for not standing armed on the wall while their country is taken away from them I am tempted to say that may be their generation does not deserve to have a country of their own.
A more diplomatic guy, being on my place, would remind himself that he, being foreign-born, despite being a naturalized US citizen, should still be careful with such words, but the problem is – I took an oath or allegiance to the US Constitution (if the Oath would include any word like "State, people, republic, government" I would have remained a resident and would not become citizen) and I am bound by honor now to its(Constitution) protection "against all enemies foreign OR DOMESTIC", disregarding of some feelings that I may hurt in doing so. Not the country, nor its government, but the Constitution. And so I am trying to do, with my meager resources.
But as a gentlemen, I do sincerely apologize if my words upset you.
Finally, in my humble opinion, too many Americans are willing to dance too many a political waltz with their conscience to avoid their first and foremost obligation – the protection of US Constitution. But then, again, majority of Americans in schools pledged allegiance to the FLAG (and to the Republic), but not the Constitution.
And yes, family life, camping and fishing are fun. Especially if there is no draft.
Respectfully -
Um, Robert Hume, I understood the Black Anglo Saxon Protestant remark to refer to the fact that most African-Americans descended from US Slaves have plenty of Anglo-American blood. I think it was Cornel West who found out he was better than 50% European. Why can't he be a Black Anglo-Saxon Protestant? He's as WASP as I am, 50%.
Now commenter Laurie up thread says that nobody can be a hyphenated WASP. Sounds like a WASP attempt at keeping The Wrong Sort Out. Too late, methinks. The Wrong Sort has taken over the country. I find that my half-Waspishness gets me treated like a full-blood WASP in the multicultural Bay Area, as if WASPdom were a dominant gene.
Anyway. All African-Americans from the South have European ancestors (and I understand that conversely, many white Americans, including white Southerners, have one or two African ancestors closer than 30,000 years back). "Black Anglo Saxon Protestant" probably describes the genetic and cultural mix quite nicely.
When I first read Black Anglo Saxon Protestant, I assumed member of protestant churches that originate in the British Isles. While African American Catholics were the norm in Maryland and parts of Lousiana, I have the impression they were rare elsewhere, and I have also read that a few Jewish slaveholders raised children that they had by African American slave women as Jewish, but in general in the USA there have been few African American members of protestant denominations with origins in Germany, the Nordic countries and Switzerland.
Nice mention of Jews as slaveholders there Ajami. Very sly. Any chance to make Jews look evil. You are a master propogandist. Goebbels would be proud.
Now be a good little propogandist and insert an article on how Jews were responsible for the slave trade, but make sure to not mention the role of Arabs in slave trading. It's a little too current of a problem, yes?
The term "wop" came about as an abbreviation for Italian undocumented aliens "Without papers." Franky, why can't we all just say were Americans, our ethnic background being irrelevant today.
I think that the Holocaust had a great deal to with "the Wasp self-divestment of power". It was the beginning of self-doubt and white (or should I say WASP) guilt.