That is one of the things that beats me about the fear of Fundamentalism. Even few conservative Christians truly aspire to theocracy, because it goes against the American grain. I think even a lot of Americans do not realize how deeply ingrained these cultural differences are. De Toqueville was able to distinguish a distinctly American character well before the Civil War, and it is still recognizably true!
When I was in Paris last summer, I stayed in a budget hotel in the Opera district, near the Folies Bergere. It was an area that was strongly marked by a North African Jewish presence, so that there were many restaurants, including pizzerias, advertising themselves as kosher. I also observed some Arabs and some Africans. The thing that struck me was the comparative social isolation of immigrants. To give a slight example, my wife had to go to a laundromat, and had to ask which coins were needed for a machine. She addressed an older black African man. He was very thrown off by the way she spoke to him. Her French is poor, so she had to use Franglais, but I doubt that was the problem, since there were a lot of hotels in the area. She had the impression that he was not used to a white person talking to him unselfconsiously.
Back home, I happened to find a French/Vietnamese restaurant run by a family that had lived in Paris for a number of years, then moved to the States. Talking to the proprietor, I got the sense that there was a much more acute racial consciousness, and far less of an attempt to define Frenchness in non- ethnic terms. How do you pursue assimilation if being French is a matter of blood, not culture? |
