0 comment Tuesday, June 10, 2014 | admin
Peggy Noonan has written a column which almost sounds like she is opposing amnesty, but which is really a paean to immigrants; her usual gushing mixed in with phony tough talk.
I've interspersed my comments in bold and in brackets below.
Slow down and absorb
Why do people want to come here? Same reasons as a hundred years ago. For a job. For an opportunity. To rise. To be in a place where one generation you can be a bathroom attendant at a Brooklyn store and the next your boy can be the star of "Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour," with everyone in the neighborhood listening on the radio, or, today, "American Idol" with everyone watching and a million dollar contract in the wings. To be in a place of weird magic where the lightning strikes. Boom. You got the job in the restaurant. Crack. Now you're the manager.
[Sometimes Peggy is downright weird. Where does she get these ideas? From corny B-movies? And the allusion to 'Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour' -- few people these days even recognize that allusion, and what the heck does it have to do with the illegal invasion, Peggy? And by the way: I don't buy that today's immigrants have the same motives as my ancestors. They came to a wilderness and created a civilized society from scratch. That's a little different than sneaking into an established country illegally and asking for handouts. But let's let Peggy continue:]
I asked myself a question this week and I realized the answer is "Only one." The question is: Have I ever known an immigrant to America who is lazy? I have lived on the East Coast all my life, mostly in New York, and immigrants both legal and illegal have been and are a part of my daily life, from my childhood when they surrounded me, to an adulthood in which, they, well, surround me. And the only lazy one I knew was a young woman, a European, not mature enough to be fully herself, who actually wanted to be a good worker but found nightlife too alluring and hangovers too debilitating.
But she was the only one. And I think she went home.
Everyone else who comes here works hard, grindingly hard, and I admire them. But it's more than that; I love them and I'm rooting for them. When I see them in church, (it is Filipino women who taught me the right posture for prayer; Central Americans helped teach me the Bible) I want to kiss their hands. I want to say, "Thank you." They have enriched my life and our country's.
[Peggy lives in a dream world, truly, if she thinks that lazy immigrants do not exist, 'except for one.' I've known immigrants who had little work ethic, bad attitudes, and an entitlement mentality. Ask anyone who works in a social services agency. All immigrants are not plaster saints, except in Peggy Noonan's gauzy, glamor-lensed world of idealized 'hard-working' immigrants. And if she could not have learned to pray, or learned her Bible, without immigrants to teach her, that is sad. Just sad. Plenty of Americans managed those things without having our moral betters from foreign lands to show us. And if Peggy's life would not be rich without immigrants, how did our -- excuse me, my -- forefathers ever survive, without all those enriching immigrants? I guess their America was grey, dull, drab, and impoverished, before all the huddled masses arrived to enrich our lives, along with Peggy's grandparents. Immigrants to the rescue, huh, Peggy?]
[...]So what should we do?
We should stop, slow down, and absorb.''
[Peggy goes on to say that we should 'Americanize' the immigrants; start teaching the story of our country again, teach them why they are part of something good here. Fine, Peggy, but I have a suspicion that the kind of history YOU and your fellow liberals would teach them is 'America is a nation of immigrants; the Statue of Liberty embodies America, diversity has made us great, immigrants built America" and so on; the usual sentimental, maudlin, PC twaddle that has encouraged us to passively allow mass illegal immigration in the first place.
Then, Peggy cuts to the chase, saying:]
Here is the truth: America has never deported millions of people, and America never will deport millions of people.
It's not what we do. It's not who we are. It's not who we want to be. The American people will never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus. We wouldn't accept it because we have hearts, and as much as we try to see history in the abstract, we know history comes down to the particular, to the sobbing child in the bus. We don't round up and remove.
[...]We do the small discrete things a nation can do to make the overall situation better. For instance: "You commit a crime? You are so out of here." And "Here, let me help you learn English."
[No, Peggy, I guess we won't ever deport anyone as long as there are so many Peggy Noonans out there to protect the illegals and to stir up emotion over them. Our ancestors, though, would have done it; they knew that sometimes tough decisions had to be taken. Such is life. And by the way: why would there be sobbing children involved? If the whole family goes home together, and they would, then who would be torn apart? Peggy, here's a novel thought: deporting simply means to SEND THEM HOME. Since when is sending someone home the height of cruelty?
Peggy, you are old enough to remember when occasionally some immigrant fell afoul of the law: some Mafia figure or sometimes even a petty criminal -- and they were put on a ship to the Old Country. Did that break up families? Maybe; but our society was tougher then, and we weren't the handwringers and weepers that we are today. So we sent people HOME. And guess what? Life went on. America survived and was the better for it. The deportees survived, presumably, back at HOME. With their relatives and friends and kin in the Old Country. And the sky did not fall, and the Statue of Liberty did not shed tears.
But back to Planet Peggy:]
Let's take some time and find out if the immigrants who are here see their wages click up and new benefits kick in as the endless pool stops expanding. It would be good to see them gain.
[...]Digest, absorb, teach. Settle in, settle down, protect our country.
Happy Memorial Day."
It would be good to see the immigrants gain? Really? I would call it a good thing to see Americans gain. There are plenty of Americans whose wages have been depressed by immigrant labor; there are too many Americans who have lost jobs and livelihoods because of immigration, legal and illegal. I want to see Americans gain, Peggy. Let Mexico worry about Mexicans, let Somalia worry about Somalians, and China about the Chinese. My place, and yours, in a just and sane world, is to take care of our own.
What a radical concept.
Peggy Noonan is one of those people who is labeled a 'conservative' -- someone please remind me why? What conservative principles does she uphold or embody? In all the important respects, this woman is a liberal flibbertigibbet. She is forever gushing about immigrants, and telling us about her Irish immigrant roots and her warm and wonderful life in multicultural Manhattan.
Yes, I know she was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and later, George Bush the elder ,and unless I am mistaken, she was the one who crafted some of Bush père's loopier phrases, like "a thousand points of light".
She is a good writer in a sort of fluffy, twee kind of way, but give me the plainspokenness and common sense of a Phyllis Schlafly any day over Miss Noonan's cotton candy nonsense. Peggy would probably be a crackerjack fiction writer; she could crank out lots of corny melodramas involving hard-working immigrants enriching the drab lives of dull whitebread Americans.
The Peggy Noonans of this world are the reason WHY we give in to all the demands made on us by the world. The sentimentalist, bleeding-hearts like her, who see everybody as just wonderful, are the reason why Western countries are being overrun by immigrants and riven by social division and conflict: because weepy-eyed sentimentality is stripping us of our common sense and natural self-protective instinct. Our countries now have a dominant group of soft-hearted, soft-headed, compassionate-to-a-fault, do-gooders and pollyannas. These people, whether or not they acknowledge it, are enabling the cynical corporate interests who want mass immigration.
And many of these busybody, we-are-the-world liberals are Republicans. Where is the party that represents the old, muscular, don't-tread-on-me America? Instead we have immigrant-besotted liberals like Noonan wanting to kiss immigrants' hands. What is it with Noonan and the hand-kissing? She wrote that same phrase about immigrants in a column about last year's confrontational Mexican-flag-waving protests. Bizarre. The immigrants are marching with Mexican flags and angry slogans about gringos going back to Europe, and Peggy wants to kiss their hands.
Peggy Noonan, far from convincing me that we should welcome all those immigrants, has only convinced me that the Republican party has far too many goofy people like her, who want to rescue and 'thank' all those colorful immigrants, and she has convinced me that unless we find an alternative to the GOP, we as a country are sunk.
No offense to anyone from New York, especially lifelong New Yorkers, but living in a city which is so very much unlike the rest of America tends to lead to an acceptance of multiculturalism. I am truly convinced that many lifelong New Yorkers truly do not see what the rest of us see: the drastic remaking of America. Those of us who grew up in what many New Yorkers call 'flyover country' remember an America which bore no resemblance to the polyglot, United Nations atmosphere which New Yorkers live and breathe. Maybe to New Yorkers it is a natural and desirable thing to be a minority in 'your' country, but the rest of us are decidedly uncomfortable with that; we don't want the America we know and love to be changed, without our consent, into something different and something in fact hostile to us.
If this country breaks apart due to this massive social engineering experiment being performed on us, we may see the country divided on an urban/rural basis, with big multicultural, heavily ethnic cities versus heartland, traditional America. I know which one I would prefer to be in. Noonan and her fellow xenophiles can live in the teeming cities with hundreds of nationalities and languages if they like, but me, I like my America American.
Peggy and her ilk can look down on me and feel superior to me all they want to; I know where my allegiances are: to my forefathers and my kin and my heritage. She and those who swoon over immigrants are free to dwell among them; in my America we believe in freedom of association. Her America does not.
I've interspersed my comments in bold and in brackets below.
Slow down and absorb
Why do people want to come here? Same reasons as a hundred years ago. For a job. For an opportunity. To rise. To be in a place where one generation you can be a bathroom attendant at a Brooklyn store and the next your boy can be the star of "Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour," with everyone in the neighborhood listening on the radio, or, today, "American Idol" with everyone watching and a million dollar contract in the wings. To be in a place of weird magic where the lightning strikes. Boom. You got the job in the restaurant. Crack. Now you're the manager.
[Sometimes Peggy is downright weird. Where does she get these ideas? From corny B-movies? And the allusion to 'Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour' -- few people these days even recognize that allusion, and what the heck does it have to do with the illegal invasion, Peggy? And by the way: I don't buy that today's immigrants have the same motives as my ancestors. They came to a wilderness and created a civilized society from scratch. That's a little different than sneaking into an established country illegally and asking for handouts. But let's let Peggy continue:]
I asked myself a question this week and I realized the answer is "Only one." The question is: Have I ever known an immigrant to America who is lazy? I have lived on the East Coast all my life, mostly in New York, and immigrants both legal and illegal have been and are a part of my daily life, from my childhood when they surrounded me, to an adulthood in which, they, well, surround me. And the only lazy one I knew was a young woman, a European, not mature enough to be fully herself, who actually wanted to be a good worker but found nightlife too alluring and hangovers too debilitating.
But she was the only one. And I think she went home.
Everyone else who comes here works hard, grindingly hard, and I admire them. But it's more than that; I love them and I'm rooting for them. When I see them in church, (it is Filipino women who taught me the right posture for prayer; Central Americans helped teach me the Bible) I want to kiss their hands. I want to say, "Thank you." They have enriched my life and our country's.
[Peggy lives in a dream world, truly, if she thinks that lazy immigrants do not exist, 'except for one.' I've known immigrants who had little work ethic, bad attitudes, and an entitlement mentality. Ask anyone who works in a social services agency. All immigrants are not plaster saints, except in Peggy Noonan's gauzy, glamor-lensed world of idealized 'hard-working' immigrants. And if she could not have learned to pray, or learned her Bible, without immigrants to teach her, that is sad. Just sad. Plenty of Americans managed those things without having our moral betters from foreign lands to show us. And if Peggy's life would not be rich without immigrants, how did our -- excuse me, my -- forefathers ever survive, without all those enriching immigrants? I guess their America was grey, dull, drab, and impoverished, before all the huddled masses arrived to enrich our lives, along with Peggy's grandparents. Immigrants to the rescue, huh, Peggy?]
[...]So what should we do?
We should stop, slow down, and absorb.''
[Peggy goes on to say that we should 'Americanize' the immigrants; start teaching the story of our country again, teach them why they are part of something good here. Fine, Peggy, but I have a suspicion that the kind of history YOU and your fellow liberals would teach them is 'America is a nation of immigrants; the Statue of Liberty embodies America, diversity has made us great, immigrants built America" and so on; the usual sentimental, maudlin, PC twaddle that has encouraged us to passively allow mass illegal immigration in the first place.
Then, Peggy cuts to the chase, saying:]
Here is the truth: America has never deported millions of people, and America never will deport millions of people.
It's not what we do. It's not who we are. It's not who we want to be. The American people will never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus. We wouldn't accept it because we have hearts, and as much as we try to see history in the abstract, we know history comes down to the particular, to the sobbing child in the bus. We don't round up and remove.
[...]We do the small discrete things a nation can do to make the overall situation better. For instance: "You commit a crime? You are so out of here." And "Here, let me help you learn English."
[No, Peggy, I guess we won't ever deport anyone as long as there are so many Peggy Noonans out there to protect the illegals and to stir up emotion over them. Our ancestors, though, would have done it; they knew that sometimes tough decisions had to be taken. Such is life. And by the way: why would there be sobbing children involved? If the whole family goes home together, and they would, then who would be torn apart? Peggy, here's a novel thought: deporting simply means to SEND THEM HOME. Since when is sending someone home the height of cruelty?
Peggy, you are old enough to remember when occasionally some immigrant fell afoul of the law: some Mafia figure or sometimes even a petty criminal -- and they were put on a ship to the Old Country. Did that break up families? Maybe; but our society was tougher then, and we weren't the handwringers and weepers that we are today. So we sent people HOME. And guess what? Life went on. America survived and was the better for it. The deportees survived, presumably, back at HOME. With their relatives and friends and kin in the Old Country. And the sky did not fall, and the Statue of Liberty did not shed tears.
But back to Planet Peggy:]
Let's take some time and find out if the immigrants who are here see their wages click up and new benefits kick in as the endless pool stops expanding. It would be good to see them gain.
[...]Digest, absorb, teach. Settle in, settle down, protect our country.
Happy Memorial Day."
It would be good to see the immigrants gain? Really? I would call it a good thing to see Americans gain. There are plenty of Americans whose wages have been depressed by immigrant labor; there are too many Americans who have lost jobs and livelihoods because of immigration, legal and illegal. I want to see Americans gain, Peggy. Let Mexico worry about Mexicans, let Somalia worry about Somalians, and China about the Chinese. My place, and yours, in a just and sane world, is to take care of our own.
What a radical concept.
Peggy Noonan is one of those people who is labeled a 'conservative' -- someone please remind me why? What conservative principles does she uphold or embody? In all the important respects, this woman is a liberal flibbertigibbet. She is forever gushing about immigrants, and telling us about her Irish immigrant roots and her warm and wonderful life in multicultural Manhattan.
Yes, I know she was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and later, George Bush the elder ,and unless I am mistaken, she was the one who crafted some of Bush père's loopier phrases, like "a thousand points of light".
She is a good writer in a sort of fluffy, twee kind of way, but give me the plainspokenness and common sense of a Phyllis Schlafly any day over Miss Noonan's cotton candy nonsense. Peggy would probably be a crackerjack fiction writer; she could crank out lots of corny melodramas involving hard-working immigrants enriching the drab lives of dull whitebread Americans.
The Peggy Noonans of this world are the reason WHY we give in to all the demands made on us by the world. The sentimentalist, bleeding-hearts like her, who see everybody as just wonderful, are the reason why Western countries are being overrun by immigrants and riven by social division and conflict: because weepy-eyed sentimentality is stripping us of our common sense and natural self-protective instinct. Our countries now have a dominant group of soft-hearted, soft-headed, compassionate-to-a-fault, do-gooders and pollyannas. These people, whether or not they acknowledge it, are enabling the cynical corporate interests who want mass immigration.
And many of these busybody, we-are-the-world liberals are Republicans. Where is the party that represents the old, muscular, don't-tread-on-me America? Instead we have immigrant-besotted liberals like Noonan wanting to kiss immigrants' hands. What is it with Noonan and the hand-kissing? She wrote that same phrase about immigrants in a column about last year's confrontational Mexican-flag-waving protests. Bizarre. The immigrants are marching with Mexican flags and angry slogans about gringos going back to Europe, and Peggy wants to kiss their hands.
Peggy Noonan, far from convincing me that we should welcome all those immigrants, has only convinced me that the Republican party has far too many goofy people like her, who want to rescue and 'thank' all those colorful immigrants, and she has convinced me that unless we find an alternative to the GOP, we as a country are sunk.
No offense to anyone from New York, especially lifelong New Yorkers, but living in a city which is so very much unlike the rest of America tends to lead to an acceptance of multiculturalism. I am truly convinced that many lifelong New Yorkers truly do not see what the rest of us see: the drastic remaking of America. Those of us who grew up in what many New Yorkers call 'flyover country' remember an America which bore no resemblance to the polyglot, United Nations atmosphere which New Yorkers live and breathe. Maybe to New Yorkers it is a natural and desirable thing to be a minority in 'your' country, but the rest of us are decidedly uncomfortable with that; we don't want the America we know and love to be changed, without our consent, into something different and something in fact hostile to us.
If this country breaks apart due to this massive social engineering experiment being performed on us, we may see the country divided on an urban/rural basis, with big multicultural, heavily ethnic cities versus heartland, traditional America. I know which one I would prefer to be in. Noonan and her fellow xenophiles can live in the teeming cities with hundreds of nationalities and languages if they like, but me, I like my America American.
Peggy and her ilk can look down on me and feel superior to me all they want to; I know where my allegiances are: to my forefathers and my kin and my heritage. She and those who swoon over immigrants are free to dwell among them; in my America we believe in freedom of association. Her America does not.
Labels: Amnesty, Gop, Illegal Immigration, Media, Melting Pot, Multiculturalism