What am I, chopped liver?
Sep. 17th, 2008 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI keep hearing the McCain campaign, in the voice of Sarah Palin, and her sympathisers and supporters, saying that she has some secret insight to, "real America" by virtue of being from someplace not contaminated by urbanity.
I, it seems (and those like me), somehow don't count as a real american. Never mind the summer I spent digging ditches, and stripping paint and shingling roofs. Nope, manual labor doesn't cut it.
Ignore sixteen years in the National Guard (and a tour in Iraq, and duty overseas in Germany, Korea and Ukraine). Ignore my father the Marine (1964-68 active, and another eight years in the reserves). Forget my grandfather who was in WW1.
Nope, not good enough.
Helping my folks start a small business (still going strong 24 years later). Nope, not good enough.
I, you see, like most americans, live in a city. I, therefore, am somehow not quite the real thing when it comes to being an American.
About a year ago someone at Obidian Wings saw the same thing, and wondered the same sort of thing I'm asking about now,
"When do I get to be one of the "American people?"
I, it seems (and those like me), somehow don't count as a real american. Never mind the summer I spent digging ditches, and stripping paint and shingling roofs. Nope, manual labor doesn't cut it.
Ignore sixteen years in the National Guard (and a tour in Iraq, and duty overseas in Germany, Korea and Ukraine). Ignore my father the Marine (1964-68 active, and another eight years in the reserves). Forget my grandfather who was in WW1.
Nope, not good enough.
Helping my folks start a small business (still going strong 24 years later). Nope, not good enough.
I, you see, like most americans, live in a city. I, therefore, am somehow not quite the real thing when it comes to being an American.
About a year ago someone at Obidian Wings saw the same thing, and wondered the same sort of thing I'm asking about now,
"When do I get to be one of the "American people?"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 09:22 pm (UTC)Well, yes, love, ignore it. In this context, ignore it. And all the rest of it.
You're a citizen of the US and therefore you are a real American. Don't get distracted into defense, or into putting up a rival definition narrower than that.
One thing I have learned from paying attention to media manipulation and propaganda – and from years of watching feminist communities get torn up over who is Real – is this: it's very hard to tell people what to think. It's disturbingly easy to tell them what to think about. And getting people to start lining a group up into Real and Fake in their heads is an all-time winner if you want to split the ranks of your opponents.
The harm this shit does is less in the answers than in way it frames the question: getting people thinking and worrying and arguing about who is Real is just as satisfactory to the bastards as getting them to swallow the definition they want to sell you. Anytime they can get you to focus on who is Real they've distracted you from asking who the Hell they think they are to suggest that some Americans are Realer than others.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 12:10 am (UTC)Well, that's what I was trying to do...
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 01:41 am (UTC)