Open Letter to Elizabeth Moon

[jimhines]

Ms. Moon,

I’ve been torn about writing this.  In part because “An open letter to _____” just sounds pretentious to me.  And partly because I know there have already been twenty-four gazillion responses to your 9/11 blog post, Citizenship.

I’ve recommended your blog on multiple occasions, for your thoughtfulness and perspective.  I disagree with

Comments

[sinboy]

A point I made elsewhere is that America, and Americans like Moon have engaged in hypocrisy when it comes to "assimilation" . We don't assimilate into other cultures. As long term guests in foreign countries, we resist assimilation with a stubbornness that would send Moon into hysterics if Muslims here did the same.

But beyond that, Moon's ideas about how Muslims in America should act are profoundly insulting. Perhaps we're a bit distanced from them by virtue of not being Muslim. We have the luxury that, if we were friends with Ms. Moon, we can remain so, because she didn't mean *us* in her tirade.

[colorlessblue]

in all fairness, most of the time I chose to speak in Portuguese instead of German, it was because I was going to say something stupid I didn't want others to understand (except for the person I was addressing, of course. Mostly I was commenting about boys.) But it's not that bad to assume that most people in Germany won't understand Portuguese, and you can't say the same about English. And I learned fast enough that if I really didn't want it understood, it was sure there would be an unknown Brazilian or Portuguese immigrant close by. Murphy's Law. ;)

[akiko]

That's true, and it's something I neglected to mention. There were plenty of people speaking languages I don't understand (Italian, French, whatever) on the subway, and they could have been saying really stupid crap, too. I don't know if other nationalities have the stereotype that Americans abroad do. (You know, the boorish, obnoxious drunkard who wants everyone to speak English to them, dammit.)

[tazlet]

Sorta, Germans, everywhere, are notorious for not bathing.

[akiko]

I thought that was the French... (cologne = French shower)

Then again, Americans have that idea about all Europeans.

[colorlessblue]

Tying a little wth the subject of the post, I was in Germany studying in a program for foreigners, in an university with a huge number of exchange students. Most students I had contact with were other Brazilians, and people from Australia and New Zealand, so if we were to speak other languages it was either Portuguese or English. Just anecdota, but another Brazilian girl and I (not white) were attacked in public for speaking Portuguese. We heard everything you'd expect, not assimilating, don't belong here, stealing our taxes and our jobs, and so on. If you ever watched Schwarzfahrer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFQXcv1k9OM), everything the old lady says, but screamed at the top of his lungs. We (brazilians) also had a few meetings with neonazis; nothing violent, just standing around looking menacing - the guy who yelled was more jarring. But none of our friends, who spoke English between themselves in public more often than we did Portuguese, had any similar

[akiko]

*nods* I heard my landlady (back in 1996!) say the same things about Turkish people (immigrants or their descendants, didn't matter) that the American bigots say about the hated minority of the day. They live high on the dole, they're lazy, irresponsible...

The situation of Turks in Germany isn't much different than that of Latin@s (or Muslims) in the US, except the US is a little more accustomed to immigration. Not that it makes Americans more likely to accept immigrants, of course. :P

[ext_222692]

This is a vast understatement. Admittedly, I say this from an oddball linguistic background: I pick up languages quickly, and English is not my first language (although it's the one I use most)... and that was really unusual among officers in the Carter and Reagan administrations.* Two specific incidents come to mind from my time as a CO in Europe - the stabbing over whether an English boy was being excessively forward in asking to "knock up after school" an American teenaged girl living in off-base housing within hearing of her senior-NCO father**, and a notorious incident on the Dutch/German border that resulted in four of my miscreants cooling their heels in the local jail until someone who understood colloquial German could explain to the police that the young thugs weren't really brazenly trying to smuggle their girlfriends into Amsterdam for... well, use your imagination, and it's actually worse

[barry_king]

God, yes. Trudeau's amnesty and the Vietnam War did more to liberalize Canada than any other factor in the twentieth century. I seem to recall the figure of 20,000 anti-war protesters in the prime of their lives bringing themselves and their families permanently north of the border.

[therealjae]

I can, actually. I work at a large Canadian university that employs a large number of immigrants from the U.S. in academic jobs (in fact, I am one). And a large minority of that group spends their lives in such an American bubble that after years and years here, they still know nothing about their adopted country. They spend every summer back in the U.S., their closest friends are all other Americans, they think of themselves as "expats" even after they have freaking citizenship, and if you were to ask them to name the four major Canadian political parties, they would not only look at you with a blank stare, they would say: "wait--there are more than two?"

-J