Text 20115, 62 rader
Skriven 2011-06-25 06:41:40 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
  Kommentar till text 20092 av Björn Felten (2:203/2)
Ärende: Foreign misconceptions of the USA (was: The sad cynicisms...)
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Björn Felten wrote to Robert Bashe on Friday June 24 2011 at 14:09:

[To Michiel van der Vlist]
RB>> For reasons best known to you, you still appear to believe that
RB>> everyone can live together like brothers and sisters, regardless of
RB>> their cultures, attitudes and religions.

BF> Wasn't that exactly what the "American Dream" was all about up until a
BF> century ago?

No. _That_ was about everyone, regardless of background and beliefs, becoming
AMERICANS and living together as such. And about all them having an equal start
(but no guarantee for equal success). The old "bottle washer to millionaire"
mantra, which actually still exists if you look at various success stories.

It was NEVER about everyone doing their own thing and acting as if they were in
their country of origin, speaking their own native language and following their
own customs not only at home, but _everywhere_, behaving in public as if they
had never left their own countries. It was about becoming AMERICANS, merely
with different backgrounds.

You appear, once again, to have some strange misconceptions about the USA.

The whole basis of the country is unity regardless of diverse backgrounds. And
any ethnic problems that currently exist started when an excess of tolerance
that began in the late 1950s led people to think this was no longer necessary
or even desirable.

BF> You mean to say that it was just a dream that could never come true?
BF> How sad...

Sad that you, as a Swede with no personal experience in integrating yourself
into another society, should presume to tell others how this should be done.

RB>> I think that's naive.

BF> As opposed to your cynicisms then?

Realism is not cynicism except to a starry-eyed idealist with his head in the
clouds and feet well off the ground.

BF> (A side note: is 'naive' the commonly accepted spelling in US English?
BF> In English Proper I think it's still spelled 'na‹ve'. Just to show
BF> that not all English versions use 26char-only...)

;-) Thanks for returning to a productive plane. No, naive is correct. The
letter with the umlaut (or in this case, more correctly, the dieresis) is not a
part of the standard English alphabet, and is not commonly used. The only one
who ever insisted on that (and after all, it was in his own name), was Noel
Coward (think of that with two dots over the "e", as I can't type it here).

Incidentally, you'll find much greater simplification in American English (and
possibly British English) elsewhere. For example, flowers that were called
crysanthemums in my youth are now just "mums". People are lazy, and you see the
results fairly easily if you look for them. This extends to German, where, for
example, you sometimes see things like "Lehrer und Lehrerin" (the male and
female versions of "teacher" written as "LehrerIn" (note the capital "I").

Cheers, Bob

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