The Thoughtful Homemaker

Not like anyone missed my posts anyway! Well, I read a neat article about what would happen in America became like Europe. I think it was meant primarily as a joke as he writer complained about not having any ice in his drink or paying to go to the bathroom. It was the comments that were interesting though. A lot of the comments were written by people who lived in Europe for a time and their insights were far more interesting than the writers.

Most people agreed that the standard of living is higher in the United States. That is my own opinion of the USA vs. Asia. I went to London and visited a local’s flat but I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to really make a conclusion on Europe yet. I will say that the urban lifestyle seems to be similar in many countries. London, Seoul, New York, Chicago all have similarities: cramped living, expensive housing, bad smells, homeless people everywhere. Seoul is different in that everything besides housing is cheap and the city is very homogeneous. New York has huge sections of Muslim population like London and many other large cities. There was a neighborhood where I used to go shopping in Queens where I felt strange that I didn’t cover my hair. There are places in Washington D. C. where you have to pay to go to the bathroom. I remember in Honolulu walking 30 minutes trying to find a public bathroom. I had a similar problem in London, but a security guard let me use the toilet at the Economist building. I heard Londoners complaining about people not being able to speak English and would joke openly about the tourists unable to speak English. I made a similar comment in DC and got shocked looks by the lady in her Chanel sunglasses sipping her Starbucks coffee. Living in NYC was lonely for me as few spoke English and I really didn’t have the chance to study Urdu or Tibetan in school for those of you who make fun of monolingual Americans. The food was awesome though!

I can’t really judge a nation unless I see their suburban/rural life. American rural and suburban life is highly developed. There may not be museums or theaters but if you live in the suburbs or country you can actually afford to visit the “city” every so often to get your culture because you aren’t taxed to death. I cook international food at home and there are even Chinese restaurants deep in the heart of the country. There fast food restaurants and Super Walmarts where you can buy any kind of food you want. There are parks and gas stations every few miles. You can buy as much land as you are able to and build the house you want with few regulations (this is in the Southern US, I heard places like California are different) Your house will get electricity, gas, phone service and even satellite service. You can fly a Confederate flag on your property if you want and country schools even have prayers and sermons preached at their graduations. If you don’t want a rural life it is easy to change. You just have to work and study hard and you can be like Abraham Lincoln or Jimmy Carter if you want to. College is too expensive. There are many ways around the expense. If you study hard you can get a scholarship. You can join the military. You can study your first two years at a community college and transfer to a nice four year University. (though Liberals seem to look down on people who do that for some reason) Your lifestyle in the country is completely dependent on your choices. That is why very independent thinking develops out in the country. You get to hear interesting conversations on Libertarianism and detailed information on the Civil War and the Constitution whereas in the city you hear more blanket statements like “the North was good, the South bad”

That brings me to my next point. Why was the South bad? Was it simply because of slavery? Slavery was at the top of the list of bad from the South. Where did their racial theories come from? Europe? The South also tried hard to copy feudalism from where- Europe and the southern Aristocrats made sure to tell you of their -what? European aristocratic heritage. The boys of the wealthy were sent to where- Europe to study and the Southern Aristocrats tried to be as what? - European as possible. Study Southern vs. Northern American literature of the 19th century and you see Southerners being more influenced by European literature way more than the Northerners.

Here is what Mark Twain had to say on the influence of the European writer Sir Walter Scott-

“Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner– or Southron, according to Sir Walter`s starchier way of phrasing it– would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. ”

The rebel yell and cross burning actually come from old Scottish (European) customs romanticized by Sir Walter Scott. Books and books on the superiority of the southern Aristocrat exist with material from primarily European sources. What made the South so bad? It clung to Europe desiring to bring back a romantic ideal of feudalism.

What is the North and West of today doing but clinging to Europe and a Romantic ideal of Socialism?