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Wednesday, March 5th, 2003
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2:49a - Aramaic Movie Marathon in the Works?
While I was looking for information in IMDB about The Passion, the upcoming Mel Gibson film on the last 12 hours of Jesus which will feature dialogue entirely in Aramaic and Latin, I discovered that there are three other films in the database which have at least some Aramaic: Stigmata, Fallen with Denzel Washington, and a porno called Rocky Mountains.
current mood: amused
current music: Sky Giant, Transglobal Underground, rejoice, rejoice (comment on this)
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5:07a - End Illegal Immigration! Legalize it!
Instead of writing a proposal for my paper on the history of transnationalism just now, I am writing a blog on a related philosophical issue which interests me. Perhaps it will be the nucleus of a persuasive element within my academic paper; perhaps it will just keep me writing.
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Modern nativist movements in the United States tend to acknowledge that the fears of their nineteenth century ideological predecessors were ultimately little more than paranoia. The institutions of liberty, far from being destroyed at the hands of successive waves of immigrants – German, Irish Catholic, Polish, Jewish, Italian, were extended and strengthened. America endured and grew into a nation more free than the Founding Fathers could have dreamed or, more importantly, would have desired.
The admission of these Southern and Eastern Europeans into the nativists' conception of American identity is necessary for the movements' survival – there are few Americans left who can claim an ancestry that consists exclusively of Anglo-Saxons and Protestant Celts. It also ensures their defeat. Nativists argue that their ancestors, whether they came from Sussex or Sicily, were harder-working than the modern variety, more likely to have arrived “legally,” and more capable of being assimilated into both the local culture and the local population. All three of these arguments are historically unsound, critically flawed, and highly degrading both to modern immigrants and to those of the past.
[more coming soon on all three arguments, especially on the legal/illegal issue and the flaws in the concept of assimilation]
current mood: productive
current music: Ne me quitte pas, Natacha Atlas, Ayeshteni (5 comments |comment on this)
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