Posted by
Jon Brandon on Tuesday, May 05, 2009 2:15:27 PM
I've been following with interest radio talk show host Dennis Prager's
"Prager University" project--his effort to build a simple, easily accessible online educational resource that will provide an antidote to the pernicious multicultural drivel propounded in our schools and vigorously promoted by the current administration. In his first mini-lecture, Prager discusses the "American Trinity": the three phrases, "Liberty," "In God We Trust," and e pluribus unum, that appear on our coinage and encapsulate our unique value system. I'd like to make a little observation of my own regarding the last of these. As eminent classical scholar Gilbert Highet observed in his book The Classical Tradition, "E pluribus unum apparently comes from the pastoral idyll attributed to Vergil and called the Moretum, line 104. As the salad which the poor farmer has mixed is mashed in the bowl, the herbs lose their distinctive hues, and color est e pluribus unus." Which is to say, the colors blend into one. Pretty much along the lines of the famous "melting pot" metaphor which dominated American attitudes toward assimilation of immigrants for generations, at least until the ascendance of multiculturalist dogma in the 1980s. There's a good deal of irony here. As an alternative to the traditional "melting pot", which implied surrender of one's distinct ethnic culture to a broader American identity, multiculturalists proposed a "tossed salad" approach, whereby such ethnic distinctions would be maintained intact, like tangy croutons and tomato slices. All in the interest of fostering what they call "diversity". Ignorant of history, as committed multiculturalists must be, they thought they'd really hit on a whiz-bang new idea with the salad thing--not realizing that the founders had anticipated them by a good two centuries. The difference, of course, is that the founders, with their hatred of faction, understood that a nation riven by identity politics could not endure. That's why they advocated the mashed- as opposed to the tossed-salad approach. And that's why the multiculturalists, who don't really want the nation to endure, who want to see it transformed into something unrecognizable, must be mashed. Just like the rest of us.