So, coming down here has been an eye opener, and if nothing else, it's given me a whole different perspective on American history and the present U.S.A. It's definitely not what I'd been led to expect -- having never been in this part of the country before.

It's kind of weird to someone like me, but a lot of folk out there seem to think the "Founding Fathers" came out of a vacuum and then disappeared back in to one. That was the culture here at the time. The culture continued -- it's the one I was born into, in fact -- but so many immigrants arrived here during the 19th and 20th centuries, that we kind of got forgotten.

Back in the 1840's, when Memphis was founded, there wasn't anyone around here except Indians, as was the case in most of the South -- and the Mid West, for that matter. All the issues that are commonly associated with the South are actually the issues of those recent immigrant groups who came here to settle -- the Italians, Greeks, the refugees from the Irish potato famine, Eastern and Northern Europeans ... Up in the North Eastern U.S., among the people who had already been here for a couple of hundred years before the Revolution, slavery was already a distant memory to a lot of people, and on its way out with the remainder. Indians were so much a part of mainstream society that Powhattan's ideas became the Constitution. And so on.

(For those who don't know, Powhattan was Pocahontas' father. He united the tribes along the Eastern seaboard into a nation, and his ideas formed the basis for both the Iriquois Confederacy and the U.S. Constitution. Also, Pocahontas married into Pictish/Celtic/European royalty when she hooked up with John Rolfe. Their marriage was as much about politics as any has ever been -- they understood one another, which gave them a great deal of common ground they would not often have encountered in their lives, and they also understood the importance of their marriage as an example for their respective peoples.)

Anyway -- the people who came here for religious freedom weren't all obsessed with "opportunity" or becoming rich the way later immigrant groups were -- and continue to be. The 1800's basically turned the U.S. into Latin-America-All-Over-Again, complete with Conquistador mentality. ("Denigrate the natives at every opportunity; exploit and/or enslave everyone you can, or come as close to it as is legal; steal the land along with anything else you can get your hands on; generally pillage, loot, rape ... then run back to the Old World with the loot. Or stay here. Either way, live wealthily ever after on the backs of the natives.) Slavery may be illegal officially, but that's just a technicality, and it's certainly got nothing to do with race. Whether we're talking massive plantation owners of the mid-19th century, Carpetbaggers, Robber Barons, modern day Real Estate tycoons or any part of Corporate America, we're talking Old World mentality. We're also talking recent (let's just say "post-Revolutionary War") arrivals to this country.

Even the most educated Europeans of the 19th century thought the French Revolution was the same as the American Revolution. Of course, it wasn't -- but we still have people trying to impose the ideology and politics of the French Revolution onto the U.S. A prime example is the the "separation of church and state" issue. What it was and is about in France simply is not what it was and is about here. Nor should it be.

It's taken me most of my life to figure a lot of this out. I don't know why, since it's so obvious. After all, the facts are right there. Concepts like anti-Semitism or segregation were totally alien to the environment I grew up in. I really did have to learn what they were when I began realizing such things even existed. The way I was raised, it simply didn't make sense. Where I come from, the very worst thing you could say about someone -- the biggest insult you could throw at them -- would be to call them "a businessman." Seriously. And I know it's because I'm 17th generation American.

The culture I come from is the one that gave the world the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Then these waves of people came here with all kinds of preconceived notions about "America" that they subsequently insisted on imposing onto us, without ever bothering to find out if their fantasies were even remotely close to our reality. (Which they aren't, by the way.) People come over now and stick with their own: their own family, their own nationality, their own religion. Forget about "When in Rome do as the Romans." It's more like "When in America, turn America into Rome (or whatever your place of origin may be.) The current American culture isn't even remotely close to the one I come from.

The movie "Gangs of New York" totally ignores the culture I grew up in, but so do most modern history books and movies. . Most Americans in the U.S. today have no idea it ever existed -- and yet it's the culture that, as "Americans," they think they belong to.

The thing is, a lot of people never made it in to the U.S. Not really.

Yeah, well. That's the sort of stuff that's been on my mind lately. It would be great to be able to go into this some more someday, like in a book or something. However, it's unlikely that I'll have the opportunity to write, ever. There's no New World to escape to anymore. Maybe in another hundred or so years, the U.S. will begin to turn around and become the U.S. again. Lord knows, it took some of my folks a couple of hundred years of being on American soil before they caught a clue, and there's no reason anyone else's experience in this country should be all that different.

At least in Memphis there are still people who remember what the U.S. was at one time. That's probably why it's better here for me than the North East was. Hardly anyone up there has ever even heard of it, ironic as that may be.

Take it easy guys. Hope this wasn't too dreadful to wade through.

Muffy

Still loving Memphis!

Welcome back. Glad you are doing well in Memphis. WHat you wrote was interesting...

Peace muff, that is a very intersting post. I'm from N.E. but spent some time at a great hostle in Memphis.-That has since burnt down. I always got the impression that I would have rathered been a slave down south that to work as a Union Electrician up north. To bad that hostle is gone or I would be heading back that way.