Cap’n Den Beste’s at it again — floatin’ perfectly phrased micro-nuggets out into the cyber ether (de-lish with a honeymustard dipping sauce, them micro-nuggets):
What are the purported goals of multiculturalism? To understand other people and how they live, to accept them for what they are. What would be the best test of that? To actually live among them and to blend in, wouldn’t it be? So what group of Americans are the foremost multiculturalists of our time?
The Green Berets, of course. Could anyone from Marin County uproot and move to Afghanistan at a moment’s notice and blend in the way they have? They’ve been wearing native clothes, they’ve often eaten the local food, and they even participate in local sports. Can you imagine anyone from Marin County participating in a game of buzkashi?
Priceless! I have a former Lit Theory professor who would…well, why kidglove this? — she’d drop friggin’ dead if she happened to read this extra-academic meditation on an empty stomach. Or at the very least she’d stumble around a bit, eventually throw a shoe, maybe even spill a fat goblet of Johannisberg Riesling all over her monogrammed leatherette writing journal (before collapsing — Scah-lett O’Hara-like — from “the va-puhs”). Green Berets? As multiculturalists? Why, I can hear her sputtering now, her old engine grinding down, nuthin’ but fumes left in the tank of her rapidly fading importance: “B-b-but…Green behhrrrets…they’re [cough cough]…well, they’re sol-diers, aren’t they?” (she’d say “soldiers” like a nun’d say “rectum”). God Forfend. Soldiers. Time to pull onto the shoulder, Prof …
True story: this same woman once told me — with a big straight moonface and with nary a hint of irony — that I “couldn’t possibly read Kate Chopin” (she gave the name “Chopin” some frenchified drawl, even sneaking an “l” in where there couldn’t possibly be one) until I’d “familiarized myself” with some nineteenth century slavery codes and a glut of old Louisianna legal statutes pertaining to Creoles. Now, this claim proved ridiculous on several counts, not the least of which was that I’d just finished reading a few of ol’ Kate’s short stories and had thoroughly enjoyed ’em; and I’d even somehow managed to figger out what was goin’ on without recourse to ancillary materials. Hell, the stories weren’t even annotated!
Which is only to say that, like those Green Berets playin’ buzkashi in Afghanistan, I, too, can remain unburdened by the mental lard of infinitely regressive contextual analyses. “Yo, pass that goat’s head over yonder, quick! I’m open!”
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