I ask, only because this is a phrase I think we are likely to hear a lot in the coming months from our good friends on the right. Friends like Kathleen Parker who, in her infinite wisdom, has decided that Obama may very well lose the election because he isn’t a “full blooded American” like Hillary Clinton or John McCain, and doesn’t understand what full blooded Americans know in their deeply American gut. What’s a full blooded American, you ask? And how do you know if your birthright qualifies you for that noble and superior status? Good questions. Maybe I should let Kathleen speak for herself on those points:
WASHINGTON — “A full-blooded American.”
That’s how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren’t racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with “someone who is a full-blooded American as president.”
Whether Fry was referring to McCain’s military service or Obama’s Kenyan father isn’t clear, but he may have hit upon something essential in this presidential race.
Full-bloodedness is an old coin that’s gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.
Ah, I see, full blooded Americans are not people who won’t vote for Obama because they are white racists. They won’t vote for him because they are patriots. In fact, they are better patriots than non-full blooded Americans, because they have a “heritage’ and “core values” that give only full blooded folks like themselves the proper perspective on our nation’s history, a perspective that all those faux “multicultural” type Americans sadly lack.
It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.
Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Josh Fry’s political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically — and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century — there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.
We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there’s a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice. […]
Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday’s Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal-immigration fiasco. It isn’t necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.
Yet, white Americans primarily — and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially — have been put on the defensive for their throwback concerns with “guns, God and gays,” as Howard Dean put it in 2003.
You see immigrants don’t count as real Americans. Why even the second generation or third generation progeny of immigrants don’t qualify for this exalted status. They don’t have the heritage, the history of blood sacrifice, the legacy of Anglo-American history which is permanently infused into their bones with the milk (or American made Simulac) which they sucked up from the wholesome breasts of their white, pioneer bred mothers.
Now at this point you might reasonably ask, what about those so-called Native Americans? The ones who were living here for thousands of years before these “full blooded” Americans arrived on their eastern shores from Merry Olde England? And what about all the people descended from a mix of Spanish and Native American stock many of whom who can trace their roots in America back much farther than the good folks Kathleen Parker has chosen to honor with the appellation of “full blooded Americans?” However, as Kathleen might say, don’t get distracted by such insipid arguments.
Native Americans (or “Redskins” and “Injuns” as true full blooded patriots like to call them) were a bunch of heathens whose lack of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (of the proper protestant variety, of course) and barbarism stood in the way of the core values of hard work, progress and faith. They had no real values, no real patriotic feeling for their country. They were just a bunch of illiterate tribal groups lacking any forms of higher civilization. They’re damn lucky that all of us full blooded folks (and I count myself in their number, having had an ancestor who migrated here from England 70 years before the Revolution) came here to convert them to the one true God, educate them in our ways and civilize them. The sad fact that most of of them died during our heroic effort to bring them our freedoms is just more proof that they weren’t cut out to own or rule over this great land of ours.
As for those Mestizos or Hispanics or Latinos or whatever they call themselves these days who made their homes in the American West long before we showed up, let me just remind them that they were conquered by us full blooded types back in 1848, and to the victors go the spoils. Besides with all the in-breeding they did with the local barbarian tribes, it would be a mistake to consider them as anything but an inferior mongrel race. Not to mention that they’re all a bunch of Papists (i.e., followers of the great Whore of Babylon, as Pastor Hagee, John McCain’s spiritual guide, would say)!
And don’t get me started on all the Jews, Italians, Slavs, Poles, Muslims, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Indians (from India) and other assorted races who have polluted immigrated to this special place of liberty and justice for all that we Anglo Saxon whites fashioned with our bare hands and unrelenting toil from a rough hewn wilderness between 200-400 years ago. Sure, some of us had the assistance of a few million African slaves, but we treated them decently for the most part, and even gave them our religion. Besides, as we all know from our great history, black people don’t really count as real Americans. Hell, they’re just lucky they got freed by that negro loving bastard President Abraham Lincoln. We even allow them to vote (at least some of them) which, to be honest, many full blooded Americans still think was a big mistake. They do make great football and basketball players however.
So, it’s no wonder that us full blooded Americans are up in arms about the prospect of a mulatto half breed man whose father came to America from deepest darkest Africa and whose mother was a Marxist atheist gal. Not to mention that he was educated in a Muslim school, went to Harvard, and has a pastor who hates America. Why we’d rather vote for that Hillary woman (at least in the primary) than let this partial “American” get within walking distance of the White House.
At least, that’s what Kathleen Parker would have said, had she only had the testicular fortitude to be upfront about how “full blooded Americans” really feel about how our country is going to hell in a hand basket because of all the not-white, and not good enough Christian, people who seem to believe in this stupid thing called equal rights fro everyone even illegal immigrants and colored folks. Certainly that’s what I read between the lines of her column on “Full Blooded Americans.” Here, read for yourself and see if you disagree with my interpretation of the salient points of her “white paper.”
What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.
Republicans more than Democrats seem to get this, though Hillary Clinton has figured it out. And, the truth is, Clinton’s own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to. She understands viscerally what Obama has to study.
That God, for instance, isn’t something that comes and goes out of fashion. That clinging to religion isn’t a knee-jerk response to nativist paranoia, but is the hard work of constant faith.
Now I admit I’ve been a little over the top with my satirical response to Ms. Parker’s execrable column, so I’d like to turn serious for a bit, if you don’t mind. I’m married to a woman who wouldn’t be considered a “full blooded American” because her parents immigrated to the United States from Japan in the 1950’s. And my two children, who share half her genes wouldn’t qualify as “full blooded Americans” either according to Ms. Kathleen Parker, despite my own ancestral credentials and very pale skin.
So let me just say this to the dishonorable Ms. Parker: go take your racist, nasty, screwed up ideas about what real “full blooded” Americans stand for and stick them up the orifice where fecal matter exits your small minded, bigoted body. There are no “full blooded Americans” whose core values and blood sacrifice entitle them to a superior status among the many people who live and work and play and die in this country of ours. There are only one kind of Americans, and neither the color of their skin, their heritage, the number of ancestors they can count who landed on Plymouth Rock or fought in any of our innumerable wars, nor the faith they practice (or don’t practice) has anything to do with their relative importance vis-a-vis each other under the law of our land.
And for you or anyone else to say different is not only a lie, it is a pernicious, perfidious falsehood of the worst kind, all too similar to the ones that the Nazis fobbed off on their followers in Germany when they spoke of the superiority of the Aryan race and the need to keep it pure. And if you’re offended by comparisons to mass murderers and racist ideologues who killed and burned millions of innocent people merely because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political views or religion, well too damn bad. In your case the shoe fits all too well.