Headline 13th June, 2012 / ''Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor''

"Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor"

Frances Trollope missed nothing. She was a master skeptic who understood fully well that without this skill, the grasp of any reality is going to be at best superficial and ones ability of challenging prevailing myths nonexistent. So, Frances applied her skill to the primal American myth, the immigration experience, and found it wanting.

Give me your tired, your poor, Emma Lazarus would later write, and if you work hard and keep your nose clean you will strike it rich. The reality, Mrs Trollope soon discovered was much more brutal. She herself sank into destitution while other immigrants, particularly the Irish -whom she found even more wretched than the African Slaves- were ruthlessly exploited for cheap labor and did not even earn subsistence wages.

After the so-called aliens did all the dirty work, they were indignantly told to go home and stop taking jobs away from real American citizens. This pattern has been repeated many times --as, for example, with the Chinese after they built America's great railroads -- and then it was the Latinos turn to be sent home after picking the crops, nannying the children, and mowing the lawns. Meanwhile, the terminology went thru transformation, in lock step with increasing greed, which even Mrs Trolllope, who always considered Americans as money grabbing, would find shocking.

The American people, once deemed citizens, are now ''consumers,'' consuming the lion's share of the world's resources. After all old-fashioned imperialism operates under euphemisms such as ''globalisation'' ''outsourcing'' and my favourite 'spreading democracy' justifying situations in which Asian and Latin American Slaves, who are not called ''slaves'' sew and stitch clothes and assemble American household appliances that transmit the American Dream, a vision of universal prosperity that somehow always excludes images of the ubiquitous sweatshop.

Which by natural logic and extension brings us to the Media, everyone's favorite scapegoat for the escapist, myth-promoting, reality denying tendencies. Plugged into his entertainment console, the isolated, air conditioned suburbanite wanders through a maze of alternative realities into a wilderness of nested electronic hallucinations until he loses his sense of identity as well as his sense of reality. True! See ya all on the next awesome post. Always make time for adventure! Hahha!

Good Night & God bless!

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