Want a CW-approved solution to the Great Not-Actually-Ground-Zero, Not-Actually-A-Mosque ‘Controversy’? Our Media Village Idiots are here to serve! Shorter Ross “Doubt That” Douthat:
History demonstrates that Real Americans(tm) will not accept those peculiar Muslim people as suitable neighbors until they stop flaunting their foreign-ness and accept the Velveeta-on-Wonder-Bread banquet of my gated-community fantasies. And who can blame us?
You think I’m exaggerating? Judge for yourself:
… During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.
__
The same was true in religion. The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream. Nativist concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.
__
So it is today with Islam…
It’s a sad, sad thing that Douthat was born out of his place and time — which, from his columns, would have been among the upper-middle-class Protestant grandees of William McKinley’s administration. But I can’t find enough pity in in my heart to think it acceptable for Douthat and the fReichtards, Talibangelicals, and Banana Republicans he cheerleads to drag the rest of us back to their dreams of a vicious and deservedly bygone era.
Redshift
Wow, that’s some concentrated Stupid!
Nick
I went to a wedding in Alabama when I was 17 and this old man asked me if we Catholics still cut up the babies nuns deliver after group sex with priests and used the flesh as the host and blood as the win at Mass.
I said only if the babies are girls.
GregB
I plan on stopping by the local falafel stand and demand that they start serving bacon double cheeseburgers.
Also those Muslim broads have to stop covering themselves up like Catholic nuns too. It’s anti-American.
Objective Scrutator
Douthat hardly goes far enough with his generalizations. Immigrants, speaking the languages of the ghetto, are also driven towards unilinguism by learning the values of success and hard work (that is, assuming that they vote Republican). The Japanese, who have been our allies for the last century and a half, were also originally barbarians, but then the firm hand of Douglas MacArthur guided them towards freedom. (Incidentally, Truman attempted to bring the Japanese back to barbarianism, yet failed; proof that conservative methods cannot be resisted by any but the most demonically possessed.)
Yutsano
The whole raison d’etre for conservatism’s existence, according to that
massive asshatscholar Wiliam F. Buckley, is for them to stand athwart the march of history forward and say STOP!! The fact that Chunky Bobo is choosing to align himself with such a backwards vision shouldn’t surprise us, as straight (snicker) white males want their power structure back by any means necessary. They can’t reverse demographics, so they’re trying to poison the well. All we have to remember is that the Irish weren’t considered white…until the southern Europeans started showing up. Many immigrants had very tough times on our shores, but many also thrived. Many went home, many chose to stay. We became a fascinating sociological experiment that will only stay successful if the framework of the Founders stays in place. Once you can deny a right to one class of people, it becomes simpler to deny to others. Chunky Bobo wants this because he benefits. That’s all there is to it.(edited to avoid breaking the Internets)
YellowJournalism
@Nick: That conversation said a whole hell of a lot more about the guy than it did about the Catholic religion. I’d never in my entire life heard of anything remotely related to the details in that question.
I would have thought it was due more to those cute commercials (“Optimism: Pass it on!”) and the offer of a free Book of Mormon. Why, yes, I am curious about what Jesus did after he was raised from the dead. I mean, where does a guy go from there?
Nick
This left on my Facebook wall;
There’s a mosque going up in Shanksville, Pennsylvania now?
Objective Scrutator
That’s where the Muslims SHOULD be building, if we are to allow Islam to remain legal at all. Islamists should have no rights to the most desirable real estate in America; they should graciously accept land we allot them in places such as Caliente, Nevada, or perhaps underneath the Gulf of Mexico. As Americans, that ought to come across as fairly welcoming for the Muslims.
Melissa
Them thare mormans were born rightcheer in the good ole US of A.
Yutsano
@YellowJournalism: It’s a huge ignorance of the actual history of Utah. The Mormon Church was in a large battle with the federal government over the status of polygamy in the territory. In order to gain statehood, Brigham Young held a council where it was decided that they would no longer officially recognize polygamy in order to become a state. If anything, the fact that they were even in Utah shows how amazingly bone-headed CB’s comment is here. But hey why let facts get in the way of a good rant?
Redshift
While the general theme of “discrimination is what turns furriners into Americans” is pretty appalling, it really kicks it up a notch to brush all the “fair means and foul” under the rug as “persuasion,” conveniently avoiding even thinking about everything that includes.
flavortext
@Nick:
Is it not suspicious that all the (intended) targets of al-Qaeda in the U.S. have been in cities with mosques in them? The connection is clear: you let
terroristsmuslims build mosques in your city, YOU’RE GONNA DIE!Batocchio
Lessee, the Constitution, local laws, principles of common sense and the social contract on one side, and Douthat’s wounded sense of white privilege on the other. Gosh, that’s a hard call.
Anne Laurie
@Melissa:
… ‘Cept for the ones whut run off ta Messico so’s they could keep their “plural wives”. Like Mitt Romney’s grampa!
“Doubt That” Douthat would no doubt endorse this as an excellent multigenerational method of Thought Correction, since there isn’t a shinier, cleaner, more conscienceless example of a modern Banana Republican in politics than our very own Mitt. Who will probably release a “Shape up or ship out, Muslims!” political ad as soon as his marketing department has sufficiently message-tested all components its creation…
West of the Cascades
@Yutsano: Yes, indeed, why let facts get in the way of a good rant, or a good zinger? Like the fact that Brigham Young died in 1877, but Utah became a state in 1896?
It was actually the 1890 Manifesto, signed by one of Young’s successors (Wilford Woodruff) which disavowed polygamy and facilitated statehood in 1896. It came after nearly 50 years of pressure from the federal government on the Mormon-dominated government of the Utah Territory to outlaw polygamy.
Remember also that when the Mormons founded Salt Lake City in 1847, it was actually Mexican territory … so your point “that they were even in Utah” somehow shows how bonehead Douthat’s post is … the Mormons had to literally leave US territory to avoid the persecution they’d fled in NY, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. It’s not as if Utah was some federal government-sponsored bastion of religious freedom – it was a desolate chunk of Mexico without any real government at all, the perfect place for a despised religion to set up shop.
Douthat is an asshat on almost everything (and I can’t read his whole posts without gagging) but he’s right in his thumbnail sketch of how the federal government got the LDS church to conform one of its key teachings to popular will. But the fact that he’s factually correct doesn’t answer the normative question whether the federal government was RIGHT to do that, which I generally think it was not (and – more to the point – government would not be right to force Muslims and other minority religious groups to conform to some “American common denominator” affirmation of faith).
Joey Maloney
@Nick: A few years ago I was having dinner with some grad students who were a few years younger than me. One girl related a story from her undergrad days at some school in Bumfuck-middle-of-nowhere, Missouri. Her freshman roommate, upon finding out this girl was Jewish, lifted the hat off her head and felt around for her horns.
This would have been in the late 1980s. The late 1980s.
Joey Maloney
@Nick, again:
Oh, those nefarious Muslims are much, much more evil than that – Google “shanksville memorial crescent” for a heapin’ dose of crazy (hint: a blog entry from Michelle “Anchor Baby” Malkin will be one of the top results).
burnspbesq
It annoys me no end that a Harvard education, that might have gone to someone deserving, was wasted on Ross Douthat. Just shows that even the best admissions offices make mistakes.
Sly
@Joey Maloney:
I was once asked by a young, self-identified evangelical woman (at a bar at 1:30AM, no less) if I planned on raping her and cutting her up into little pieces, then dumping said pieces into the Potomac River, once she figured out I was an atheist. My response was: “On a school night?” The conversation then ended rather abruptly.
I also once knew a bloke who adamantly believed that he would never get AIDS, even if he bathed in HIV-infected blood with several open wounds on his body, simply because he was Irish Catholic. Not just Catholic, mind you, but Irish Catholic. Upon hearing this for the first time, I was disappointed that I lacked the facilities with which we could test this hypothesis.
Both events occurred in the late nineties.
TBogg
Douthat stuck to his tried and true format: present a reasonable argument for both sides before declaring the conservative one way awesomer regardless of how retarded it sounds.
asiangrrlMN
@TBogg: TBogg, I take back my comment on your site. Now that I’ve read some of the article, I see you were doing me a small mercy by not quoting it at all.
Douthat is also wrong in that it took earlier immigrants a long time to assimilate, much as the process goes today. It wasn’t land on the shores of America and boom! All traces of your heritage disappears. A strong Muslim presence in America is fairly nascent, and like all other cultures, it’s gonna get shit on a lot until it is ‘persuaded’ (to use Douthat’s oh-so civilized word) to assimilate. Besides, WTF does any of that have to do with building the community center?
@Yutsano: Hey, hon. You still around?
P.S. A friend posted in support of Muslims on FB, and one of her FB friends gave each fucking talking wingnut point. I couldn’t believe it. “There are no churches in Saudi Arabia! We shouldn’t have any mosques here until they allow churches there! We are a Christian nation!” I listed my points calmly and rationally while other people did the whole, “We’re supposed to be better than that”–which, as we know, doesn’t work. I was just left shaking my head.
Mustang Bobby
Shorter Ross Douthat: “There’s always room for bigots.”
Joseph Nobles
@Joey Maloney: Yes, you got it. The Shanksville Crescent Memorial hysteria is the concentrated source for Ground Zero Mosque, just like “anchor baby” is the mainstream version of birtherism.
Ah, so Muslims should give up building mosques to help smooth their assimilation into the American mainstream. How the hell do American norms assert that an Islamic community center can’t be built in a former Burlington Coat Factory?
homerhk
Speaking as the son of immigrants to the UK – and leaving aside Douhat’s ignorant column for one moment – the whole assimilation, integration multicultural thing is extremelydifficult.
One thing I’ve always noticed in travelling to the US is that yes it is quite multicultural and diverse (in urban areas in particular) but the different cultures do seem to be historically relegated to one area or another – Little Italy, the Jewish quarter, Harlem etc. – although those are changing as demographics change and more immigrants move in. In London, however, that regional banding together – although still there – is much less pronounced. Funnily enough the so-called Jewish area is also an area where there is quite a concentration of middle eastern immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. (probably because of shared food preferences).
Unquestionably it is those immigrants that assimilate and integrate the best that thrive the best. That’s not to say that you totally throw off your cultural heritage, but it is to say that you reach a balance between integration and maintaining your culture. Anecdotally, a lot of the frustrated sons and daughters of immigrants who are more likely to be radical are that way because their parents appeared to them to integrate too much.
As my Mum always says if you’re going to emigrate to a country than rather than imposing your values on that country, you strike a balance between maintaining your values while respecting the country you’ve emigrated to. I have very little problem in the UK, for example, instituting rules that immigrants should learn to speak English. That’s good for the immigrant and good for the country as well.
As ever, there is no black or white answer to this .
Sm*t Cl*de
Clearly it is time to revive Philip Dick’s idea of “Active Assimilation”.
myleft
HA HA! Wait, lemme get this straight —
So that pudgy virgin’s column aside for a moment, what the great philosopher Anne Laurie is suggesting, in her grandly educated and subtle sophisticated wisdom (I’ll bet she even went to one of them Ivy League skools!) is that immigrants SHOULD NOT assimilate to the culture they immigrate to?
This is a serious question — Anne’s position is that an immigrant has every right to maintain his “illiberal tendencies” in the new society, and not conform itself to its mores at all? And Anne’s commentators, and presumaly El Jefe Cole (who seems never to have met a president he didn’t worship, at least for a while — he’s a fickle lover) agree with that?
So if I’m a right-wing Southern Christian fundamentalist, and I immigrate with a bunch of like-minded people to, say, a liberal zone of Canada, then that part of Canada must accomodate my hatred of homosexuals, desire to replace Canadian law with Biblical law, etc?
That’s what Anne Laurie and her herd really believe?
No, she doesn’t. That’s the thing about this argument. It’s just facile Douthat-bashing, just to sort of shore up her identity as a good mainstream middle-class pwoggie. Deep down, she doesn’t believe it.
Kathy Kattenburg
Anne Laurie,
Could you please tell me what CW stands for?
Thank you.
matoko_chan
@Kathy Kattenburg: conventional wisdom.
could this be….the straw that breaks the camels back for TNC and Sully in their nauseating pimpage of that slimy misogynistic creeper? /she says wistfully.
matoko_chan
dayum, guess not Sully.
at least he is isn’t going to torture us with Weigel and Frum this time.
muffler
The opinion piece is based on the “right wing” interpretation of pseudo American history. The Muslim segment of the US population is smaller than the Jewish one. The pressure to conform today is not the same as when our population was half the size or less and based in small communities. Today is very different then the late 1800s.
Ross also leaves out so much context that it’s stunning in the way he cherry picks to match the point he wished to make, but he fails to mention that the downtown NYC Muslim community has been there for 40 years and are Americans.
dmsilev
@Nick: Don’t you remember the coordinated wingnut freakout over the memorial that was being planned for that site? How there was a hidden crescent in the design, and something about being pointed in the vague direction of Mecca?
Reality has lapped your satire.
dms
kommrade reproductive vigor
Alternate Shorter: Ross Douchehat: Act like we do or we’ll beat the shit out of you!
The man is nothing more than an ignorant slut.
Steve
Ok, so America has a “Judeo-Christian” tradition which demands that everyone else adapt to it, gotcha. So a Buddhist temple two blocks away from Ground Zero would be a big deal, I guess? Maybe not.
It’s like Douthat forgets entirely about 9/11 and Islamic terrorism, so he can pretend that what’s going on here is nothing more than good old everyday “speak English dammit” Archie Bunkerism. Demanding that each individual Muslim say the magic words “I reject Hamas” before being welcomed into American society isn’t exactly the precise parallel of getting the Mormon Church to reject polygamy.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I got out of the boat.
Does the porcine dipshit have any schtick that doesn’t boil down to: Well, sure the people I’m rooting for may SEEM to be bigots and brutes, but the passion and concern that drives the bigotry and brutality is something we should acknowledge.
I just figured it out. Ross Douchehat is Jonah Pantload with a better hairdresser.
kay
Well, except it’s a community center, with a swimming pool and public meeting rooms, and that would tend to go towards assimilation, not towards isolation.
Once again, a conservative leads with the assumed wrong-doing (they don’t want to assimilate!) and crafts a narrative that “proves” the charge.
An elaborate, tissue-thin justification for his own despicable behavior, one that unfairly slams the same people he’s discriminating against, and accepts no responsibility.
This is Number Two in a series, right? He’s explained away his own bigotry and intolerance towards gay people, and now minority religious. What’s Three in this series? I can’t wait.
It’s the duty of every person in this country to justify their existence to conservatives, and assuage their (many, many) fears. These people thought they were building a community center. They didn’t know they were issuing a direct challenge to conservatives, who are, as always, offended.
Amir_Khalid
What’s disappointing to me is not that Ross Douthat doesn’t make sense in his columns, but that his editors can’t be bothered to insist he make sense. I blame them for that. Just as I blame them for printing nonsense from the Over-aged Mean Girl and the Man who Interviews Cabdrivers.
matoko_chan
@Amir_Khalid: those guys are the best the other side has, and a matchup of one doesnt sell pageviews.
that is the sad thing about conservatives……even their smart people are retards…..and they know it.
conservatism==selection for stupid
bemused
First up on Morning Joe, during the discussion of the mosque, I believe it was Richard Haass who used the phrase “american style” Islam more than once and no one in the group (Joe, Barnicle or Charles Blow) picked up on that. I sure would like to know what “american style” Islam is.
Nick
@bemused:
I’ve been to Turkey…I’d say it’s like that, but there were billboards there too racy for Americans.
Sm*t Cl*de
concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy
That was funny enough to bear repeating.
Roger Moore
@asiangrrlMN:
As they say on TBogg’s site “always trust the shorter”. You really don’t want to risk your brain trying to read the stuff he’s summarizing.
And what many people forget is that the assimilation really does go both ways. The majority culture needs a chance to get used to the immigrants’ ways of doing things as much as the other way around. The most obvious example of this is our food ways- Americans’ eating habits are very different from what they were 100 years ago or even 50 years ago because of immigrant contributions to our national cuisine- but it happens in all walks of life. Americans will be much more accepting of Muslims once they find a Muslim holiday that provides a convenient excuse to throw an ethnically themed party.
Amir_Khalid
@matoko_chan: It’s not Douthat being a conservative that bothers me. There is such a thing as intelligent conservatism, even if Ross Douthat is not its poster boy. What bothers me is the consistent sloppiness of his arguments, which the New York Times’ editors let slide every single time. The NYT caught a lot of grief for running Bill Kristol’s ignorant nonsense. Why haven’t they learned from that?
Zach
“The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream.”
This whole narrative is somewhat counteracted by the fact that Mormonism is the most American religion practiced in America. Also, interesting that he talks about abandoning polygamy rather than abandoning abject racism. Of course, abandoning racism was a result of wanting to expand to Brazil and elsewhere as much as a response to American pressure.
kay
Assimilation won’t be enough.
It’s all birtherism, really. You hand a conservative the birth certificate, they’ll hand it back and demand the long form.
me
No, but god know you’d try.
Joey Maloney
American-style Islam: decapitated Christian babies eaten with processed cheese food instead of fresh goat feta.
Steve
@Zach: I don’t know what religion the Native Americans practice, but I’m going to be PC and go with that one as the most American religion.
soonergrunt
@Nick: There is a Muslim Chaplain at the Pentagon, so why not a mosque in Shanksville, PA?
Alwhite
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
I grew up Protestant in a Catholic neighborhood & got the shit beat out of my several times by Catholic bullies. And here all that was needed was for me to take a more illiberal stance I guess!
But I bet we can find some Catholics that got the shit beat out of them by Protestant bullies and the occasional time or two that Catholics and Protestants joined together to kick a few Jews . . .
I guess what Asshat is telling us is that it was those beatings that made America great & we need to keep it up!
Steeplejack
Ross Douthat–youngest Old Dead White Guy ever!
Zach
@Steve: Doesn’t count… remember that George Bush recognized Indian sovereign because it means that they’re, you know, sovereign.
dmsilev
@bemused:
Based on the example of American Cheese, I’m going to go with “Individually wrapped in plastic, and completely lacking in taste.”.
dms
Nutella
Douthat’s all nostalgic for the good old days of the 20’s? I’d say he made a mistake but really he probably would like the 20’s with its vicious racism and nativism. Children were beaten by teachers for speaking anything but English then, but Douthat would say it was good for them and good for America. Considering that the 20’s were followed by the first Great Depression I don’t think anything about that decade should be taken as a model for what we should do.
Smurfhole
@myleft:
I do. Tolerance includes tolerating people I think are intolerant bigots. As long as they’re not breaking any laws with their bigotry (terrorism, whatever), anyone can believe whatever they want to believe. There are millions of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, etc. whose freedom to roam the streets bears that out. As long as the immigrant in question isn’t explicitly here to destroy the United States and isn’t a present or former member of the Nazi Party or Communist Party or some other “enemy organization,” they should have every right to come to America and practice an intolerant religion. What’s the alternative, inserting the government into religion and let it start sorting out which religions are acceptable and which are unacceptable?
I don’t know Canadian law. Does Canada have a First Amendment?
MikeBoyScout
I’m not a Mormon, but this jumped out:
“The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream.”
Now, whether you like and/or accept 21st century Mormonism or not, it takes quite a bit of literary smoothing to come up with a statement like that.
Mormons were not gently persuaded and cajoled by their fellow Americans in the early 19th century. Practitioners in the faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were routinely burned out of their homes and killed for their beliefs.
Of course, if DoughHat gently whitewashes our history the lessons needed to be learned are much simpler, if deadlier.
Bulworth
Discrimination as tough-love virtue. Whoda thought it?
toujoursdan
@Smurfhole:
Canadian concepts of free speech are different than in the U.S. (i.e., hate speech via the public airwaves is banned because the victims have the right to be free from it. You can say whatever you want in private conversation though.)
Canadians would generally say that myleft could practise Biblical law, hate homosexuals, think women should be barefoot and pregnant to his heart’s content. He just can’t impose his beliefs on others. I would imagine that this is similar to the American response to conservative Islam. As long as people do it of their free choice (i.e., not coerced), don’t attempt to impose it on non-believers, and there is no objective harm, then go for it.
joe from Lowell
You need to get out more. There are something like 10 million Muslims in this country. They go to work, join the army, send their kids to school, and go to the mall just like everyone else.
toujoursdan
American style Islam seems to be what you’d find on Muslim blogs like this (where they came out against Prop 8 even though Islam condemns it):
http://goatmilkblog.com/?s=gay
I would imagine that an American (or Canadian) Islam is far more comfortable with pluralism and modernity than Islam in homogeneous parts of the Middle East.
Smurfhole
@toujoursdan:
Good point. Unless, of course, we were to radicalize it by discriminating against Islam in direct contravention of the Constitution and every principle upon which this nation was founded. But that’s absolutely fine to the wingnuts who wish that America was led by a Christianist-Randroid equivalent of Putin (as cognitively dissonant as that sounds).
Ban Islam, then ban atheism- the religion of Marx, Lenin, and other crypto-Satanists. Then ban Satanism. Then find other minority views to ban. Wasn’t there some asshole at one point in American history who was a Unitarian? Sorry, Unitarians, but you can’t practice your religion either.
Catholicism’s dangerous, because it’s very large. So we might have to tolerate Catholics, for now. But ideally, we’ll deal with them too. I’m sure there’s some quote where Washington or Jefferson or Hamilton said something bad about Catholics, and we can use that to justify shutting them down, too. At least in the old Confederacy, which is the new America.
Hob
@myleft:
Hmm.
Hmm. Ah, the seriousness.
bemused
@joe from Lowell:
Huh? I was struck by the tonelessness of that phrasing. I wasn’t actually asking how american muslims live, for pete’s sake.
Svensker
I hope Douthat writes a column about those Hassids assimilating. They really bug me, walking around with those big wool hats and wool coats when it’s 97 degrees outside, and they have put up eruv wires in a buncha communities that they have colonized, plus they walk on the streets on Friday nights making it hard for the RealAmericans to drive their cars, and they have too many children and the women wear very odd hats.
That column is probably in the pipeline, don’t you think?
maya
OMG! Press #1 for Farsi, is just a matter of time.
cursorial
Many things struck me as stupid when I made the mistake of following the link to that column. That an ordinary weekend, even in RealAmerica, might include chinese takeout and salsa dancing clearly demonstrates our history of monolithic assimilation. That the column makes much more sense if you substitute “evangelical Christian leader” everywhere Douthat says “American Muslim leader.”
But then I see that next to the column on the Times page, presumably paying for it, is a Google AdWords ad for “Women’s Muslim Swimsuits” and sit back satisfied that Ross has already lost this particular battle with reality.
LongHairedWeirdo
Have any of these “Not right there,
motherfuckersfriends, somewhere else!” offered to find another site and find a buyer for the old Burlington Coat Factory or otherwise make up the difference in costs?Because if they’re just going “not there! Not there!” then I don’t want to hear another word about how it hurts their delicate sensibilities, but they’re not bigots. If they were truly not bigots, no one would have thought to screech “Not there! Not there!” without having an eye towards “where”.
Bill Murray
The lack of Chinatowns and Little [fill in ethnic group here] in US big cities shows how well these groups assimilated initially.
The land that is now Utah, was de facto US property after the surrender of Alta California in January 1847, although it wasn’t officially US territory until the Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo.
US Catholic pressure was the reason Vatican 2 happened. Who knew.