Have you noticed how immigrants and/or Hispanics have become inseparable in the media mind from the cant phrase "the American dream," even when the implications are disastrous for the beloved Gang de Ocho? Last month, for example, the New York Times headlined its profile of Tamerlan Tsarnaev with "Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream."
And today, a headline in the current Washington Post:
Allegations of violence darkened Cleveland suspect Ariel Castro’s American dream
Q. What are they thinking?
A. I don't think they are thinking. They can't help themselves. The whole American Dream / Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor / Nation of Immigrants / Statue of Liberty thing has just become a Pavlovian reflex.
By the way, when did "American Dream" become a euphemism for "immigrant/ethnic?"
"American dream" didn't mean that when I was a kid. The classic literary example from my youth is the title of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 book: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Although Thompson is accompanied by his 300-pound Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo (actually, the radical Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, born in El Paso in 1935, disappeared in Mexico in 1974), Dr. Gonzo is derisive of Raoul Duke's obsession with finding the American Dream, a concept that he doesn't identify with:
Gonzo: : We won't make the nut unless we have unlimited credit.
Duke: Jesus Christ, we will, man. You Samoans are all the same. You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man's culture. ...
Gonzo: "But let's forget that b------- about the American Dream," he said. "The important thing is the Great Samoan Dream."
Update: Just as the NYT later changed their Tsarnaev's "battered American Dream" headline, The Washington Post has now changed their "Ariel Castro's American dream" headline to the more inoffensive (if inelegant):
Ariel Castro, Cleveland suspect, has a dark past that foreshadowed crimes he’s now accused of
But the URL still gives away the hilarious original headline:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/cleveland-suspect-ariel-castros-american-dream-darkened-by-allegations-of-violence/2013/05/11/61302bd8-ba44-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_story.html
So, at least there is some shame left that leads morning shift editors to try to cover their colleagues' tracks. But these events have been highly revealing of the Hive Mind.
Posts
45 comments:
Allegations of violence darkened Cleveland suspect Ariel Castro’s American dream"
oh jeez. Every day liberalism makes an utter parody of itself.
It would funny if it werent so dangerous.
What pray is Castros "American dream" - they make it sound each individual has his own version rather than the plain vanilla-making it big by your own wit,pluck and grit.
Apparently that is too mundane for Mr Castro-holding two gringas hostage for over a decade in degrading conditions, forcing himself them on them and impregnating them without their consent seems to be more to his liking.
Evidently, someone's American dream was others' nightmare.
Ahhh, it sounds so romantic...take in tempest-tossed tired, poor, huddled masses from circumstances unknown and turn them loose, unsupervised, to pursue their respective "American Dreams." Who'da thought we would get exploding cookware, teenage sex-slave harems and basement abortion clinics from the social refuse of foreign shores? Anyone? Anyone? Emma Lazarus? Emma? Emma?
Looking for "a vibrant torture chamber."
He was living the dream!
Norman Mailer and others did a good job of befouling the idea of An American Dream as applied to whites. Now non-whites own it.
much more on keynes:
http://www.keynesatharvard.org/book/KeynesatHarvard-ch09.html
All immigrants arrive here in a state of preternatural innocence, dreaming of becoming the right sort of wh^WAmericans, reading the NYT, raising their little boys to be trannies, and shopping at Whole Foods. Then the Hobbesian racist nightmare of Middle America kicks in, and the mystical influence of the wrong sort of white people turn the immigrants into... actually existing third world human beings, no better than the people who screwed up the hellhole they came from.
It's a mystery.
A. I don't think they are thinking.
You people very dangerously - suicidally - misunderestimate the Frankfurt School if you think that any of this is not completely intentional.
The Romanovs misunderestimated them, and were slaughtered for that kindness.
As a Canadian I remember Americans discussing their American Dream quite differently from the way the term is used now. I remember it meaning America was the place that best allowed its citizens to flourish as individuals and families. A native-born American who rose up from a dirt-poor farm or neighbourhood on the wrong side of the tracks was said to be living the American Dream. I remember immigrants being secondary characters in this drama. Immigrants were almost always just the parents of children who achieved the American Dream.
Rather than being about Emma Lazarus' poem, the American Dream was about the "the pursuit of happiness". I used to think that phrase was odd but I later learned that "happiness' in this case meant human flourishing, or what the Greeks called eudaimonia.
As a Canadian I found the talk of the American Dream to be a bit much - it's not like Americans are the only people who want to achieve goals or have their family prosper - but I do remember the term being used to refer to native-born Americans thriving. It did not mean that the US exists to make an immigrant's dreams come true; that's the job of Disneyland.
But Steve, isn't the new headline obfuscatory of something that is pretty important (Castro is a foreigner) but that the Times might want to cover up? The American Dream headline implied that this alleged criminal was an immigrant. Perhaps it was changed to suppress that inconvenient fact.
Will Michele see her family see her or let herself get adopted by the DeJesus family?
What will Amanda Berry do next?
How exactly can being beaten in the stomach kill the baby and what were all the possible outcomes? Doctors weigh in.
Who was the girl there when Michele arrived and what happened to her?
What was the meaning of RIP?
For answers to all these questions, stay tuned for, "Ariel Castro's American Dream", America's #1 drama
For over a decade, Ariel Castro got away with holding three teenager girls as prisoners in his house and raping and beating them. That WAS his American Dream. He's only sorry it had to end.
Similarly, Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived his American Dream: came to America, married a rich man's daughter, made her a submissive Muslim, and lived off her earnings and the public dole. Finally, went out in a blaze of glory showing his hatred of the decadent American society. A rich and full life for the young psychopath.
My American Dream, that we keep these kind of people out of our country, is not destined to be realized.
I submit to you that, in 2013, it is actually impossible to imagine the phrase "American Dream" applied (at all) to any native-born White person by (what Steve calls) the "Prestige Press".
I pity the poor immigrant
Who wishes he would’ve stayed home
Who uses all his power to do evil
But in the end is always left so alone
That man whom with his fingers cheats
And who lies with ev’ry breath
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise, fears his death
I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood
Who knew Dylan got it right in 1968?
Paraphrased from memory:
Fry: "Are you people satisfied? This gentle visitor is dying! And we'll never know why he came..."
Dying murderous Bender: "I'll tell you why! I came here with a simple dream...a dream of killing all humans [Americans, whatever]! And this is how it must end? Who's the real 7-billion ton robot monster [bomber, sex-slaver, spree-shooter] here? Not I...not I..."
These MSM headlines just keep reminding me of that scene from Futurama.
A. I don't think they are thinking. They can't help themselves. The whole American Dream / Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor / Nation of Immigrants / Statue of Liberty thing has just become a Pavlovian reflex.
It's the left's equivalent of Patriotism. As in, "scoundrels, last refuge of."
A drowning man reaches for whatever is at hand and tries it out, no matter how absurd - chainsaw, anvil, giant butterknife.
A "journalist" with the duty to make immigration look good and tell the story of the Tsarnaevs or Mexicans, is drowning.
The url is going to be a pain to change steve, plus there are all the links already sent out that would have to be changed, it would be effort.
The American Dream--even better than an ideology, it's an evocative feeling! Who can argue with that?
All the nice white ladies will sigh. And free credit! No money down! Cheap mortgages! Impress the girls! Ah, the smell of debt as far as the eye can see, now there's a nice solid income stream... just add bodies.
He was living the dream of every beta/omega nonwhite male (which is most of them, despite the thug posturing)
He had not one, not two, but three white girls (...chained in his basement as sex slaves...) at their peak attractiveness.
And he was grooming a six year old girl, his own daughter by one of the slaves, to be a fourth.
I am sure entire villages have been slaughtered and burned in retaliation for crimes far less heinous than this
Was his home enabled by 'ownership society'?
This is a very sad story, but it seems like real conservatives have been kidnapped, hog-tied, and locked inside the cellars by the elites of this country.
I assume these headlines are intentionally ironic, perhaps slightly subversive wrt their professed beliefs.
Most journalists are dull and conformist and not very bright people, only capable of writing trite, hackneyed prose. That is why all observers are "on the ground", why stories (or dramas, or tragedies) "unfold", why violence "erupts", etc. "Time" and "Newsweek" set the standard for such insipid, juvenile writing.
The "Hive Mind" Orwell nailed years ago:
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question."
We live in Orwell's worst nightmare made still worse, more sinister by its enforcement through Huxleian techno-infotainment means, a regime of enforcement which makes the nightmare's enforcement not only invisible to but also a point of supreme pride for those who enforce it; a regime which gulls those made to suffer its enslavement by presenting its hegemonic dictatorship as not only innocuous, but also as supremely moral, superlatively pleasurable, and exclusively desirable - yet a regime which punishes pitilessly anyone who dares to mention, question, or oppose its aim, method, and consequences. This regime is our "cognitive elite" at its "moral" work.
This is how a People is deceived into enthusiastic complicity in and mindless advocacy for committing its national and civilizational suicide by enthusiastic, rapturous Jonestownian guzzling of the poisoned Kool-Aid on a mass scale.
The whitewashing of Castro's criminality as his pursuit of the American Dream gone passively awry is, of course, the equivalent of the regime propaganda that the Tsarnaev bomber brothers went awry because they were - passively - "radicalized." Under our Orwellian-Huxleian regime non-whites and non-Christians are bereft of Free Will - absented, excused from human agency, and can only be victims of the external power of White racism/sexisim/any-ism-you-care-to-make-up-to-enforce-the-regime. Under the regime only Whites and Christians possess human agency which, the regime's orthodoxy drumbeats, they use comprehensively to oppress the "Other" who is the passive victim.
"Daybreaker said...
Norman Mailer and others did a good job of befouling the idea of An American Dream as applied to whites. Now non-whites own it."
Mailer's literary excuse for his own murderous impulses.
These days, this sort of thing makes me feel like a martian. At some point, anger subsides and bewildered alienation sets in. Increasingly, the consumption of mainstream journalism induces the same vertiginous sensation that I get from reading the words of the literally insane.
-The Judean People's Front
Malcom X's grandson dies in a Mexico City brothel while hanging out with an immigration activist next to a tranny bar called "Divercity". You can't make this stuff up.
I'm trying to figure out how one adult male could maintain control of three adolescent females. The two brothers must have helped at the beginning, at least until the victims were sufficiently weakened and brainwashed. Also, I suspect all of the victims might have been mentally handicapped.
My real disappointment is in comedians; there is so much comedy to be mined out of these absurdities, but comedians are all too afraid to tackle it.
Imagine a skit where a torture chamber is criticized for lacking diversity.
I'm reposting this under a more active thread because I think it is relevant to the recent thread on Jennifer Rubin and deserves to be seen.
Jennifer Rubin and Mickey Kaus discuss an alleged difference between the American Dream and the Israeli Dream:
RUBIN. The reason they won't recognize Israel as "the Jewish state" is that they are refusing to give up on the right of return, the right of every single refugee, their children and grandchildren, to return to Israel. Translated into parlance it means they are going to destroy Israel if not by the bullet, at least by demography.
KAUS: Why don't they believe in open borders Jennifer? It seems that is your position.
RUBIN: [laughter]
KAUS: These people are willing to go to Israel to work and why are they putting these impediments in their way? It's almost as if they are like Tom Tancredo.
RUBIN: Well, it's because they haven't been coming there to work. They've been coming there to blow up pizza parlors and kill children.
KAUS: But even if they came there to work, there would no longer be a Jewish state.
RUBIN: Well, they certainly could. Right now they have people who are coming through checkpoints. Every country in the world, and especially in the Middle East, have people who are coming for work permits and then return. So the issue is not where they are working. The issue is not the labor issue. The issue is, do these people want to kill the inhabitants, which they've been doing.
And we forget the major success and I've got to tell you Mickey this is the greatest argument in the world for building the wall. The greatest success, the greatest help toward defusing violence in the Middle East came when Israel built its wall, it's green [great?] wall....
KAUS: Really?
RUBIN: Tall walls make good neighbors.
KAUS: Walls work. And let the record also show that you are willing to restrict immigration to preserve the ethnic identity of a state and which you would never tolerate in America if Anglo Saxons said, you know, we don't want to become a Latino State, we want to be a non-Latino State, so we have to restrict immigration. You would never tolerate it.
RUBIN: That's because the difference is, America is founded on a different principle. Israel is founded on the principle of being a Jewish state. The Arabs have 22 or 23 of them, or 29 of them, I lose track. Israel was founded on the premise, that's what Zionism is--a state of the Jews. And people don't like it, but that's what it's about. America is not founded on the principle of America for White People or America for Europeans. It is founded really on an idea. And that idea, if people are willing to assimilate, and I'm a big advocate of assimilation, should not be restricted on the basis of race or religion or language, as long as they are willing to eventually learn English and be part of the body politic. It's a completely different situation bw the United States and Israel.
From the podcast John Marzan posted. Discussion begins after 50:00.
RUBIN: That's because the difference is, America is founded on a different principle. Israel is founded on the principle of being a Jewish state. .... Israel was founded on the premise, that's what Zionism is--a state of the Jews. And people don't like it, but that's what it's about. America is not founded on the principle of America for White People or America for Europeans. It is founded really on an idea. And that idea, if people are willing to assimilate, and I'm a big advocate of assimilation, should not be restricted on the basis of race or religion or language, as long as they are willing to eventually learn English and be part of the body politic. It's a completely different situation bw the United States and Israel.
This is really an absurd argument for immigration to the United States, or, conversely, for immigration restriction to Israel. But what is the best rebuttal to persuade the crowd? The argument can obviously be attacked for its factual and normative premises. Instinct, however, is suggesting to me it might be best not to even dignify the argument by getting into the factual or normative particulars, but essentially ignore its structure and to counter with a wholly different frame or idea in favor of immigration control (or in favor of a Gentile right of return to Israel).
Thoughts?
That's because the difference is, America is founded on a different principle. Israel is founded on the principle of being a Jewish state.
Founders schmounders. Isn't the guiding principle in public policy to follow what is good for the members of the polity? So, in the case of the United States, what immigration policy is good for Americans and their progeny?
In the case of Israel, what policy is good for its residents, including those who were made refugees to surrounding areas?
That's because the difference is, America is founded on a different principle. Israel is founded on the principle of being a Jewish state.
Emma Lazarus was not a founding father. Where in the Constitution does it say that the Federal government, the States governments, or the People, are not permitted to control immigration into their territory?
Don't you people understand? It's not about what happened in that basement! An American Dream was--pause for effect--darkened. Let's get our priorities straight, people.
I am sure entire villages have been slaughtered and burned in retaliation for crimes far less heinous than this.
One thing I have been startled by in the coverage of the Ariel Castro atrocity is the lack of rage. Everyone is calm, cool collected. There is concern lest members of Castro's immediate family be stigmatized. Let the process proceed. I would be satisfied with even 25 percent of the rage directed at George Zimmerman, "the worst man in America."
I'm trying to figure out how one adult male could maintain control of three adolescent females.
He collected them one at a time and probably only freed one at a time from her shackles. He also played horrific mind games on them to make them fear resistance.
They've been cleared. Don't you think the girls would have implicated them if they had been involved?
He was living the dream of every beta/omega nonwhite male (which is most of them, despite the thug posturing)
He had not one, not two, but three white girls (...chained in his basement as sex slaves...) at their peak attractiveness.
And he was grooming a six year old girl, his own daughter by one of the slaves, to be a fourth.
I am sure entire villages have been slaughtered and burned in retaliation for crimes far less heinous than this
Two white girls, one "hispanic."
But yes, that's why the "coverage" of this story has been all about the (relatively) sociopathic black "hero," and not the "hispanic" immigrant sociopaths who enslaved and raped two white girls for 10 years. I'm going through the "coverage" on the 'net right now, and it just keeps getting more and more pathological.
Malcom X's grandson dies in a Mexico City brothel while hanging out with an immigration activist next to a tranny bar called "Divercity". You can't make this stuff up.
Imagine a skit where a torture chamber is criticized for lacking diversity
Yep. Diversity, multiculturalism, tolerance, immigration - entire continents comedians and entertainers refuse to explore.
Because bankers don't want them to.
One thing I have been startled by in the coverage of the Ariel Castro atrocity is the lack of rage. Everyone is calm, cool collected. There is concern lest members of Castro's immediate family be stigmatized. Let the process proceed. I would be satisfied with even 25 percent of the rage directed at George Zimmerman, "the worst man in America."
That's what the editing room is for. The "man on the street interviews" of the wrong sort of people expressing torches and pitchforks sentiments toward the Puerto Rican scum in Cleveland wind up on the floor.
It's all about the heroic black guy and the white women he heroically saved. A real feel-good story!
Wapo has changed the URL, too, but not yet the tweet. Grab a screenshot before it's gone.
Wapo has changed the URL, too, but not yet the tweet. Grab a screenshot before it's gone.
Isn't it funny how one's own "American Dream" is, for some of us in certain media contexts, the very center of being and aspiration? I mean, forget how Mr. Castro's actions affect, I don't know, his standing with God, with the rest of humanity, with his miserable self--and I bet you won't find a single feature article musing on the consequences of his guilt, and what that means--no, we must make time to assess the damage, not to his soul (and ours), but to his pursuit of that amorphous, tantalizing substance, the "American Dream".
Not a serious country--but a desperate one.
Um. pardon the pedantry, but the term "American Dream" has nothing to do with immigration. An historian called James Truslow Adams coined the term during the Great Depression (after the serious and effective laws restricting immigration were passed in the 1920s).
Wikipedia does a good job describing the time and birth of the phrase.
"...the term "American Dream" has nothing to do with immigration. An historian called James Truslow Adams coined the term during the Great Depression..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream
"In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth."
Uh oh...
"...the California Dream of instant success. ... the California Dream spread across the nation..."
"... traced its use in American literature ranging from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin..."
So "American Dream" used to mean the dream that life could be better for Americans. Now it seems to mean the dream that America can make life better for everyone else.
Another secondary tragedy: Mr. Castro's Pursuit of Happiness was hampered.
Oh the humanity!
Culturally I think a turning point was that Don Bluth mice=Russian Jews movie but within the press the trope dates back before the 70s. The antibiotic-resistant cliche about all foreigners following their foreigner's dreams inside the U.S., hence "The American Dream" was very common with sports journalism, though you'd also see in works about starstruck Midwestern hicks trying to get on Broadway. I can't be alone in suspecting a connection between socially approved fame-obsession and needing to import more illiterate helots
Post a Comment