I went to a fairly obscure college in rural North Dakota.  But you can’t always judge a book by its cover.

My obscure little college had hellacious recruiting chops in foreign places, like Europe, the Middle East and Chicago.  At one point, the little school of (then) 600-odd students had fifty Iranians (the hostage crisis turned into an enrollment crisis, as they all pretty much left when the crisis started).  My freshman year, we had Germans, a Kuwaiti, thirty-odd scholarship athletes from Chicago – you get the picture.

The small campus had three dorms (four if you count the one that was just for married students).  In one, four Jordanians shared a suite. 

In another dorm, a couple of Palestinian kids shared a room.

And over in the dorm I lived in my last three years of school, there were seven or eight Lebanese – Christians, in this case.  (Rumor had it that a number of Israeli kids were on the brink of attending, but there was no way to make the cafeteria kitchen kosher).

So you had in microcosm the entire Middle East problem; Arab Christians (who were allied with and supported by the Jewish Israelis), Jordanians (who had fought the Israelis and expelled the Palestinians ten short years earlier), and Palestinians.

Somehow they managed to get along with each other, even sitting in classes together without killing each other (or the poor Kuwaiti kid, a nice guy who got a stipend from the Kuwaiti government that put him in the top 5% of incomes in the city of Jamestown).  I’m willing to chalk that up to equal parts “oh, crap, if we get in trouble here we’re 4,000  miles from home” and, I’d like to think, “this is not why we’re here”.

The story is apropos not much – except that I thought about it when I read Ella Taylor’s passable City Pages review of what is apparently a passable movie (You Don’t Mess With Zohan).  The story (do I need to say it?), of a Mossad agent who retires from the business and comes to New York to work as a hair stylist, and manages to solve a microcosmic Arab/Israeli conflict in a Gotham neighborhood is…well, an Adam Sandler movie.  I’m not a movieblogger, as a rule. 

But this bit here jumped out at me:

With the Middle East returned to Hollywood’s table (albeit mostly in thrillers), Zohan is back…Score one for freedom of expression, I suppose, and pushed far enough into outrage the movie might have had something pungent to say about the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. As it is, the American way rides to the rescue: Even sworn enemies get along nicely living side by side in New York, no?

Does Ella Taylor a problem with this?

I mean, since it’s been pretty much a reality for most of the past 200 years?

Poles, Germans and Russians have not killed each other off for almost two centuries in America.  Russians have refrained from anti-Jewish pogroms; Irish and Brits have mostly stayed away from each others’ throats (except in Nick Coleman’s fervid delusions); Norwegians have largely refrained from kicking Swedish and German ass; Germans haven’t stomped on French; Hindi and Pakistanis work together; Turks go to Greek restaurants, and Japanese and Chinese generally co-exist in America; even Moslems and Jews rub elbows in most major cities.  They’ve all mostly had the good common sense to leave their squalid anscestral squabbles in the old country.

Of course we have our own to fill in the blanks; some blacks hate whitey for slavery; some whites return the favor; natives have a beef with us; Italians mix it up with blacks in Brooklyn; some Latino gangs practice ethnic cleansing against blacks in LA, where blacks and Koreans in turn mix it up. 

Maybe that’s the moral of the story; most ethnic groups come to America to forget their old anscestral squabbles, and adopt our new ones. 

God Bless America!

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under A 'n E, PC / "Woke" Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.