Media Criticism

This couple, they are the epitome of “patchwork” wouldn’t you say?  I’ve heard mumbles of the word mosaic being used but patchwork was better because Mosaic seemed to Muslim.  Whatever.  I’ve heard mumbles that “patchwork” sounds better than “melting pot” because …well they say just because it does.  I say, what difference does it make? 

There is a quote out there, somewhere, and I will find it, but for now, to summarize, it goes something like this, “the end of the hyphenated American”.  Doesn’t that sound awesome.  No more African Americans, or Latino-Americans or green-Americans, just us, Americans…no hyphens. 

Most of you probably don’t know the method to my madness when it comes to posting on my blogs, but one way, is I think of something simple and I start writing.  I jump back and forth between the post and surfing or researching and continue to come up with words.  Today, I’m searching for that “hyphenated American” phrase.

That’s why, sometimes I say, I’m still looking for ____ then in a couple of paragraphs later I say, I found _____.  And, ah ha, I found it….it was Theodore Roosevelt who, in 1915 said,

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.
This is just as true of the man who puts �native� before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.
But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English- Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian- Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.
The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
Addressing the Knights of Columbus in New York City
12 October 1915 “

And now, as we move forward, we have a President and a First Lady, a First Family if you will who……looks like this…

“The president’s elderly stepgrandmother brought him an oxtail fly whisk, a mark of power at home in Kenya. Cousins journeyed from the South Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from the synagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’s Birthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, of course: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought her Chinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a white wife.”

So, yea, I think it is time to toss out the “blog of ink” as it is referred to by some that has in the past made a hyphen between ______ and Americans.  We are no longer _______-Americans.  We are ALL Americans.