“The Expert On Everything” (a novel / see www.TheExpertOnEverything.com ) “Privacy Doesn’t Exist Anymore” – Described as “Catch-22” meets “Three Days of the Condor,” this techno-political thriller focuses on realistic technological details and takes the reader on a journey into an uncomfortable future that is becoming a reality.
“Quarter, Quarter, Dime” (screenplay / see www.LuLu.com ) Musical bio about the life and influence on rock and roll of Marion “Little Walter” Jacobs. Arguably the greatest blues harmonica player ever, he practically invented the concept of the groupie. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met when Richards was carrying a Little Walters album which drew Jagger to introduce himself.
President Obama has said that a “tribal attitude” surfaces in tough times.
The President is onto something but he comes at the right concept from the wrong direction.
Plainly put, I proudly belong to the American Tribe – and to puncture a hole in any anticipated “diversity” style attack let me point out that my four grandparents were Irish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Russian-Jew which makes me…an American. No hyphens.
My definition of the American Tribe is this: it is the only tribe you can join by simply wanting to. This country comes with a book of instructions, called the Constitution, and fealty towards our Constitution makes you a member of our Tribe. Simple, isn’t it?
You just have to want to be an American and you are one. No other requirements of race, gender, sexual preference apply. All are welcome. Ex Pluribus Unum. Look on a U.S. coin, it’s there. It’s Latin for “out of many, one.” That’s the point. We used to have an allegory that described our country as “a melting pot” to explain to ourselves how immigrants came to join and blend into “America”, while still maintaining their original cultural identity. It was an attitude, an intention, a choice.
I remember reading an op-ed by Shelby Steele that contained the following paragraph which I wrote down:
“…the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.”
This is about, simply put, a lack of “cultural confidence” which we would be wise to rediscover and reaffirm.
Today, we find ourselves burdened with an Administration that tries to divide us, sub-culture by sub-culture and attempted to pit the American Tribe against itself. This is known as “divide and conquer” and it works…if you let it. I would go so far as to consider it an attack on our American Tribe by the Obama Administration and it’s time we “snap out of it”. There is no shame in the fact that the American Tribe has been the most progressive catalyst for personal freedom that has ever existed on this planet.
President Obama’s attempt to re-cast our single American Tribe into a fractured, segmented, controllable population of specific interest groups – usually cultural but also agenda-driven – will fail.
We the people, the American Tribe, are culturally unconquerable and will again demonstrate our unique “American Exceptionalism” – by turning back this current attempt to divide and conquer us, election by election.
Kings come and go, as do American Presidents. We are in charge of our destiny. Nothing is written.
EDG