we're all connected: was anti usa sentiment

[pieter pannevis]

With kind permission I forward this:
IMHO I do think as long as the national anthem is about the bold and the
free I find it bizarre to hide out as Canadians or Irish

Pieter from Holland


William Kittredge, in his book THE NATURE OF GENEROSITY, makes the point
that from the beginning of the European contact with America, the continent
has been perceived with a dreamlike, utopian overlay.  Octavio Paz states
that "we ought to rather speak of the *invention* of America than of its
discovery.  America never was, and *it is only if it is utopia,* history on
its way to a golden age.  . . America is the dream of Europe, now free of
European history, free of the burden of tradition."  Kittredge goes on to
quote Caroline Merchant, a noted feminist environmental historian, as
writing about America as an opportunity for regeneration and restoration:
"The recovery plot is the long, slow process of returning humans to the
Garden of Eden through labour in the earth ...The long term goal has been to
turn the earth itself into a vast cultivated garden . . .. the
transformation of undeveloped nature into a state of civility and order. .
.. In America the recovery narrative propelled settlement and 'improvement'
of the American continent by Europeans."

Kittredge writes:

      "Yearning for an example of innocence, we want to think of America,
before
settlement, as untrammeled by man.  This is ridiculous.  Huge expanses of
America were managed like a native garden by indigenous peoples.  But
Europeans needed to call it wilderness, unclaimed, so as to claim
it.  America was their safety valve too, where the poor and disenfranchised
could escape, in which they might suffer isolation but could triumph
through perseverance.  Always, the reimagining.  For Europeans, unmarked
Americas were a mirror in which they hoped to observe the working out of
ideas, a final untouched place where possibility might live unfettered, as
well as a hideout for runaway impulses, where people might recover, where
dreams could be repossessed."

*  *  *
It might be both wise and useful to keep this perspective in mind when we
read about the American wilderness and the lifestyles of native
Americans.  For this is largely *our* perspective - the lens through which
we have examined modern life.  It suggests that it is our *need* for
possibility and recovery, and the influence of the old European point of
view, that makes us view American forested lands as wilderness, and to
imagine that natives were simple, innocent people who were "closer to
nature" than we are.


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