Is a baseball mitt a toy? How about a trampoline? Is a goose a farm animal or a wild animal? Is chess-playing an art or a science? Do I shelve a novel about China with my fiction books or my China books?
These are problems of categorization. Each of us approaches the matter differently. “Hard” categorizers insist that everything should go into one bucket or another, while “soft” categorizers are more tolerant of ambiguity, more willing to leave objects in some fuzzy middle ground.
A clever political scientist has shown that persons of a politically conservative inclination are more likely to be “hard” categorizers. That’s me, and that’s why thinking about Puerto Rico drives me crazy.
I mean, what is the place? Is it a country, a state, a colony, or what? “A commonwealth,” is the official answer. What’s that? . . .
"Another approach would be to get Puerto Ricans thinking that independence might be a good idea. Perhaps we could try oppressing the place"
That alone was worth the read.
Brigadier General Guy Henry, a leathery old Puritan who, according to one historian, thought the Puerto Ricans “had acquired very liberally the Spanish habit of lying and cannot be trusted.”
Could there be a better named Brigadier General? Seriously, he may have had something there. But in more recent times, I get a kick out of what lengths some Whites--not including Derb for just passing along the colorful quote, but also shown by some commenters below--will go to get away from the stigma of 'racism.' And in the case of liberal guilt, how such comments seem to be an inverse form of racism. Once a guy who would probably today be called a liberal Republican said to me, "We taught Latin Americans how to be corrupt by way of the United Fruit Company." You see, we are such special all-powerful creatures that we have even taught an innocent world how to be corrupt. And yet somehow I suspect the rest of the world would have figured out how to be corrupt all by its lonesome.
That alone was worth the read.
Brigadier General Guy Henry, a leathery old Puritan who, according to one historian, thought the Puerto Ricans “had acquired very liberally the Spanish habit of lying and cannot be trusted.”
Could there be a better named Brigadier General? Seriously, he may have had something there. But in more recent times, I get a kick out of what lengths some Whites--not including Derb for just passing along the colorful quote, but also shown by some commenters below--will go to get away from the stigma of 'racism.' And in the case of liberal guilt, how such comments seem to be an inverse form of racism. Once a guy who would probably today be called a liberal Republican said to me, "We taught Latin Americans how to be corrupt by way of the United Fruit Company." You see, we are such special all-powerful creatures that we have even taught an innocent world how to be corrupt. And yet somehow I suspect the rest of the world would have figured out how to be corrupt all by its lonesome.
In another way, however, I think the idea has some truth to it. The modern West has sort of elevated an individualistic meritocracy--with exceptions, our being only too human--above almost all else. Whereas in traditional societies such things as bribery and nepotism are probably often seen as simply the way the world works. I'm not saying that various other societies had no concept of corruption, but I don't think it was so stringent. So by defining corruption as we have and trying to hold the world up to that standard, the West has in a sense invented 'corruption.'
And who is to say which worldview is correct? I prefer the Western way, but then I am a (increasingly outnumbered) Westerner.
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