“Multicultural”

A news writer for The New York Times, Peter Baker, in typical journalism guild, misstated American culture in an interview with the left-wing network PBSWashington Week With the Atlantic, as excerpted by The Wall Street Journal.

One of the things that they’ve [the Trump administration] been very successful at, and I would expect to see more of, is their war on DEI, on the notion of diversity, equity and inclusion, the notion that diversity is an admirable goal, even if you don’t necessarily want quotas. They have managed in just a very short amount of time to create a new culture in the country—not just in the government, across the board—where private employers feel the need to retreat from DEI. And you’re going to see, I think, an acceleration of that in the second year…. I think the question, though, is in a multicultural country, at some point does that begin to go too far for people and by the midterms?

Leave aside Baker’s blithe assumption that there’s nothing intrinsically racist or sexist in DEI, which favors approved races and the approved gender at the direct, deliberate expense of disapproved races and the disapproved gender. Those favoring criteria, however far down the selection tree they might be, are explicitly and by design racist and sexist.

More than that, the United States is not a mix of race, of old-world cultures, of religions, or of whathaveyous. The Unites States is a nation of a single culture, one unified by a common belief in a basic system of intrinsic rights: to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness and of a limited government granted to which by our nation’s sovereign citizens only enough power and authority to protect those intrinsic and basic rights.

Baker’s bald claim that the United States is a multicultural country is as cynical as it is wrong.

Even that queen of European identity politics, Germany’s ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, ultimately recognized that multiculturalism is an abject failure. And that’s something that Americans have known since our inception, if unevenly put or kept in effect.

Happy New Year

Originally published in 2012, I repeat it here.

This blogger hopes for increasing prosperity for all in the new year just begun.  Following are some additional thoughts, from those better than me.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
–William Makepeace Thackeray

New Year’s Resolution: to tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
–James Agate

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution.  Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise, and thou art happy.
–Akhenaton

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.
–Cavett Robert

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury –
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
–Thomas Hood

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
–Ellen Goodman

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
–Mark Twain

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve.  Middle age is when you’re forced to.
–Bill Vaughn

This bit of ’70s-style wisdom:

A year from now, you’re gonna weigh more or less than what you do right now.
–Phil McGraw

And finally,

Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.
–Goran Persson