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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (10089)	3/30/2001 10:19:56 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

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?