"A full-blooded American."
That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president."
Whether Fry was referring to McCain's military service or Obama's Kenyan father isn't clear, but he may have hit upon something essential in this presidential race.
Gosh, it “isn't clear?” So what does “full blooded mean?”
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Full-bloodedness is an old coin that's gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.
Old coin indeed. I think “full blooded” as a slur on a man who is half white/half black has to take the cake in counterfeit political thinking. I practically got lead poisoning chewing on it. The word that KP wishes he'd used is “red blooded” but alas for her, he said what he actually meant. And actually, KP's pretty happy with that because her explanation for what he meant goes like this:
It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.
Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Josh Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically -- and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century -- there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity. We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants -- and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.
Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal-immigration fiasco. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.
No, KP, its not necessarily racist or nativist, but it probably is. For example, it is racist to assert that other races weren't present here before the revolution, and after, from the beginning—that the hispanics in the Southwest who've been here for 400 years are newcomers, or that white southerners who fought against the union share the values that the founders made great.
You might think that this whole culture wars thing was just a ploy and, of course she admits it with a breezy “The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals." But its not just a political tool!—the authenticity and honesty of our rubes makes an appeal to their fears and rages just plain common sense. Because g-d damn our rubes is smart:
But so-called "ordinary Americans" aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.
What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.
So who speaks for these people? Why, the Republicans of course, who “get it.” And what is at stake? Everything:
Some Americans do feel antipathy toward "people who aren't like them," but that antipathy isn't about racial or ethnic differences. It is not necessary to repair antipathy appropriately directed toward people who disregard the laws of the land and who dismiss the struggles that resulted in their creation.
Full-blooded Americans get this.
As I read along about “blood equity” and “full blooded” Americans I had some niggling thoughts in the back of my head. Luckily, google helped me spot the original:
Another group consists of scholars and scientists, a group steadily becoming smaller — even abroad — as is clear from the most varied decisions of foreign and international scientific societies that agree with our racial hygiene measures and our genetic policies. We can only say to these learned critics that our genetic and racial thinking stems in the end not from our scientific, but rather from our National Socialist convictions, and that it was not learned scientists, but rather our Führer Adolf Hitler, and he alone, who made genetic and racial thinking the center of our National Socialist worldview and the foundation of the rebuilding of our people's state. The doctrines of blood and race are not first of all an important and interesting piece of biological science to us, but rather above all else a political-ideological attitude that fundamentally determines our attitudes to things and to the questions of life.
More important than these two groups, however, are those who reject or oppose us because they hold to another worldview.
Those who base their materialist image of the world on the doctrines of a liberal or Marxist era cannot understand how we can have dethroned their idols of "the economy and Mammon," replacing them at the center of our National Socialist process of construction and renewal with the German man, with the German people.
The other groups with a worldview warn their sheep in Christian piety, and in the name of both confessions, of the errors of National Socialist genetic and racial doctrines, and of the errors of the measures taken by the Third Reich. I have this request to those who, in contrast to the communist and Marxist foreign apostles, overtly and covertly go about their business at home: When you don the worthy priestly robes of either confession and claim that "your kingdom is not of this world," please concern yourselves with your kingdom and leave to us the responsibility for the kingdom of this world. Allow us to form our German state according to our laws and needs.
My fellow party members, you know the reasons for our National Socialist population and racial policies. We want to rescue a dying people from the edge of the abyss and lead it back to the paths that will lead, according to human reason, to a future in the coming millennium. We must oppose the three great dangers of racial and biological decline that have repeatedly destroyed states, peoples, and cultures in the past if they did not succeed in resisting them in good time. We must therefore contend with these three issues: the decline in the birth rate, the increase in sick and unfit genes in our people, and the mixing of the blood of our people with that of foreign and unrelated peoples, in particular with Jewish blood.
The source: Gerhard Wagner, "Rasse und Bevölkerungspolitik," Der Parteitag der Ehre vom 8. bis 14. September 1936. Offizieller Bericht über den Verlauf des Reichsparteitages mit sämtlichen Kongreßreden (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1936), pp. 150-160.
But then, you saw that coming.
