Hildegarde

So, okay, I’m usually pretty good at keeping up with the news.

In fact, I’m usually something of a cable news junkie, the kind of personwho has to see all three twenty-four-hour-channel reports of any situation, and then the commentary shows on the same situation, just because…just because.

Never mind.  There isn’t a because.  This obviously comes from the same place inside me that really likes chocolate.

Yesterday, though, I had a pretty cramped day, so that I not only didn’t watch my usual round of stuff, but I didn’t even listen to Ed Flynn on the radio when I was driving around.

Or rather, I did listen to Ed Flnn, but only for a couple of minutes, and he was talking about dogs.  Ed Flynn is our local talk radio wing nut.  He’s been on a local station for about thirty years, and he makes Glenn Beck look positively left wing.  He must hae said something about Obama getting the Peace Prize, but I didn’t hear i.

What all this means, of course, is that I didn’t hear about Obama getting the Peace Prize until I started getting e-mails fairly late in the evening, and then I was just too tired to deal with them.

And what I want to talk about isn’t exactly the Peace Prize.  The Peace Prize, like the prize in literature, has become so politicized by now that it doesn’t mean much of anything I can tell.  On a couple of occasions, I’m fairly sure it was given out–Jimmy Carter especially, but also Al Gore–to insult the Bush administration in particular or the United States in general, and I’ll never forgive Carter for going to Stockholm and bashing his own country.

Some of the right wing pundits I’ve been able to catch since I’ve heard about this say that Obama was given the Price because he “apologizes” of America when he gives speeches overseas–in other words, for the same reason Carter and Gore were given it, which makes me wonder if Moore is going to get Peace or Literature when the time comes.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think it may have been something else.

Americans are always being castigated–sometimes deservedly–with knowing nothing of what is going on in the rest of the world.

In the case of the issue of immigration into Europe and immigrants living in Europe, though, I think the problem is not so much lack of knowledge as excess of history.  Americans have generally done well with immigration, at least in the long run.  The Irish came, the Italians came, the Jews came–and in the end, each group ended up not only assimilating, but establishing a whole new style of “being American” that the rest of us tended to enjoy.

What’s more, our present immigration problem–the millions of largely  Latino immigrants streaming across our Southern border–looks to be headed in the same direction.  Whatever the problems we may be having with it in the short run, the children of even our illegal immigrants speak English, and their children tend to speak only English.  California got rid of bilungual education in its public schools largely because Latino parents, not just Anglo ones, opposed it.

It gets better than that.   The children and grandchildren of our illegal immigrants, and a fair number of new legal immigrants themselves, join the armed services at higher rates than the people whose families have been being born here for many more generations.  America takes immigrants and turns them into Americans, and the immigrants themselves seem to be very enthusiastic about taking part in that process.

For that reason, a number of writers–including Christopher Caldwell, whom I mentioned here a few days ago–tend to compare the immigrantion problem in Europe not with  American immigration, but with American problems with race.  I don’t think that will work, either.

In spite of the Jeremiah Wrights–and Jimmy  Carters–even the inner city kids I meet don’t view the country as being irrepably evil, and most of them get indignant when they read or hear things that suggest we are.   Jimmy Carter’s claim that the resistance to Obama’s administration was mostly about racism got my black students even more angry than it got my white students. 

What’s happening in the huge, growing and largely Muslim immigrant “communities” in Europe has no precedent in the United States, not even during Jim Crow.  In several countries (including Sweden, where Obama will go to accept  his prize), there are large no-go zones in and around the major cities where the police don’t dare to enter and the law does not apply.

The result is always disastrous for two groups of people–women and Jews.  In some neighborhoods in London, Birmingham and Leeds, even non-Muslim women wear the jeadscarf, because n ot to wear it is to risk sexual assault in broad daylight and a constabulary whose basic attitude is that it’s your fault if you got raped, you should know better than to walk around asking for it.

In the midst of the non-stop deniggration of Israelthat is the theme music of much of the European media, there’s another Jewish problem nobody is mentioning–a large-scale emigration of Jews out of Europe to Israel and the United States.  Sixty years after the Holocaust, and the determination that it would never happen again, Jews once again have to fear for their lives walking in certain neighborhoods in Berlin,  Paris, Amsterdam, and  Brussels–and have to fear for their lives because they are Jews.

There’s a lot more to this than I have either the time or the inclination to go into here, including a rising level of sheer brute phsical violence that is making a hash out of Europe’s vaunted social progressivism.

It just occured to me that giving Obama the Peace Prize might have something to do with recognizing the fact that the United Sttes has, somehow, manged to confront the challenges of immigration and race and, make it all work more often than not.

In Europe, they’re not making it work, and it’s no longer possible for them to pretend that it doesn’t matter.