The Statue of Liberty does not say “Give me your angry blowhards”
Here
we go again. We were just
witness to Representative Louie Gohmert (r-TX) going on a rant of Old
Testament proportions to condemn the Obama administration for not being –
you guessed it – Old Testament enough. Gohmert, apparently completely
unfamiliar with not only Article VI of the Constitution but also with
the First Amendment, wants Obama to use the Old Testament to guide his policies.
This is hardly the first and it will not be the last attempt by a repugican to force a biblical worldview on the American government. It
is happening with tiresome regularity. I want to first of all go on the
record as saying that biblical stances on anything don’t belong in
Congress. Keep your religion in your pants. Or at home. In Congress we
ought to be debating the constitution’s stance on immigration, and
nothing else.
We didn’t elect these guys to hold a church council. We elected them to run our country.
And they’re not doing a very good job of it.
Maybe because they’re so confused.
The quote on the Statue of Liberty kinda mirrors what jesus was saying:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
But they don’t want the poor and they sure don’t want anything jesus was selling.
The repugicans are really unhappy with immigrants (and nobody hates immigrants more than Louie
“Terror Babies”
Gohmert) and yet they want our foreign and domestic policies to be
informed by a foreign book! Foreign not only the United States but to
the Anglo-Saxons.
I’m getting confused too: Only
Anglo-Saxons are real Americans but then only if they are carrying around a
Semitic book with a later
Greek revision added to it?
And as long as we’re on the subject of immigration – and being a
Heathen I always wonder if there is any particular way a Heathen like me
should think about the topic – shouldn’t we be cognizant of the
underlying historical fact that America is largely a country of
immigrants?
And we can do better than that. The people who came here not only
came from someplace, but their ancestors often came from someplace else.
Not only the United States, but the world, has been a real melting pot.
No more than the jewish or christian bible is the Heathen Hávamál a
manual on immigration policy and procedure. I mean let’s face it, there
wasn’t much in the way of immigration controls in the ancient world.
People really got around. If the Israelite port authority had something
on paper it didn’t survive Sargon II’s visit.
The Scandinavians (my own ancestors) were pretty easy-going on the
subject of moving populations. They moved themselves around and they
moved others around as well. A recent genetic study has shown that while
only a quarter of the men in ninth century Iceland were Gaelic in
origin, half or more of the women were.
Irish brides, anyone?
The Vikings more often than was once thought brought their families
with them. In the early 11th century Adémar of Chabannes mentions them
invading Ireland “with their wives and children.” But the Vikings
demonstrated that if they came lacking brides, they were more than
capable of finding some. After all, Adémar also mentions their
“christian captives whom they had made their slaves.”
Cultural assimilation was the rule of the day. Peoples mixed.
Sometimes willingly, sometimes not. The periphery of the Viking Age
world was a melting pot, and not merely as a consequence of the
activities of the feared Northmen.
So the picture that emerges is that this was not the sort of world in
which set ideas of immigration could exist, let alone be enforced. You
went where a boat – or your feet – could take you, freely or as a slave,
and mixed with the dominant culture.
People talk about immigrants in the Roman empire being Romanized (and
they were) but the Romans were also Germanized, Syrianized and
other-ized up the proverbial wazoo. In the same way christianity itself
was Germanized when it came north force the not-such-good-news gospel on
the Heathen, most of whom were perfectly content with the gospel they
had been born with. And of course, the same process is taking place in
America – and the world – today.
By the same token, sometimes the Vikings assimilated others. More
often than not, as I mentioned above, they were assimilated themselves.
Recent studies
have shown the extent of Norse blood in the populations of the
northwest of England: “The collaborative study, by The University of
Nottingham, the University of Leicester and University College London,
reveals that the population in parts of northwest England carries up to
50 per cent male Norse origins, about the same as modern Orkney.”
We see something similar in Iceland, where
genetic studies
reveal that while most settlers were from Scandinavia, the rest –
particularly women (to the tune of 60 percent) – were from the British
isles. Certainly some came as slaves, but many Norse immigrants to
Iceland came from Scotland, where they had intermarried and brought
their mixed blood brood with them. Others were those Irish brides. Of
course, all this becomes politicized in nationalist but also racialist
terms. But the search for “real Vikings” as it is for “real Americans”
is doomed to failure by history itself.
Americans – some Americans – “real” Americans – set themselves apart
like a chosen people, and in fact, some of them do consider America the
successor to Israel as their god’s chosen agent and Americans as their
god’s new chosen people. As a consequence of this mode of thinking, they
tend to be picky about who gets to share in the bounty of this new
covenant.
These Americans seem positively xenophobic when it comes to letting
their “Anglo-Saxon” blood become diluted (in the new Confederacy they
call it “Anglo-Celtic”) providing the irony of something “pure” being by
its very name something mixed. For a long time in America, the Irish
were not even considered white, yet now we’re told the South is a white
homeland for people of Irish descent?
Really! Go back a century and a half and see how well that idea sells.
So where would this debate take us, given the store of Norse wisdom that has come down to us, and the example of Viking history?
There isn’t much reason to suppose that anything like Norse
Exceptionalism existed before the 19th century when the Viking Age was
invented by an excess of nationalism among Scandinavian scholars.
(Imagine how different the world of our imaginations if there had been
some equally enterprising Hungarian scholars to foist on the world the
Magyar Age – and let’s face it, Medieval Europeans were as afraid of the
Magyars as they were of the Vikings.)
Despite what some Heathen groups pretend today, there seems to be no
lack of willingness among Viking Age folks to allow others into the
fold, or to join another’s fold.
Thralls were the lowest of the low but even thralls could be freed.
They could become part of the community, sharing in the religion and
culture of the Norse. They could cease to be part of the constructed
other in a way no black person in American can aspire to.
And Norse folks easily assimilated into foreign cultures, as in
Ireland and England and Normandy. It didn’t take them long, either. A
mere century after settling in Normandy Rollo’s Normans were speaking
French and acting not like seagoing buccaneers but knights, destroying
the fabled Anglo-Saxon culture in England, which itself had subsumed a
previous Celtic culture which had a millennium before replaced the
indigenous culture.
The world is a crazy place. More than a match for any crazy Republican racist.
But back to my ancestors. There is no suggestion that anyone was
saying that the blood had to be preserved or kept pure, or that Norway
or Sweden or Iceland was only for the Norse. Obviously it wasn’t, given
the preponderance of non-Scandinavian women who found their way there.
That’s more Irish than 19th century Americans were willing to have
around.
Norse wisdom has a strong pragmatic flavor, a practicality and
acceptance of the world that is missing from American conservative
discourse – and from biblical discourse, which is not inclusive but
exclusive, lists of don’ts rather than do’s.
Yes, the Vikings killed their share of foreigners. Every Medieval
culture did. Every modern culture has continued to do so. But the idea
that America is for Americans, specifically for those who happen to be
white, Anglo-Saxon, and protestant, is somewhat new and absurd.
After all, if we go back to olden times, nobody was checking
passports at the port or along the border. Those who wished to come,
came. The same is true of the Viking Era. There were no legal or illegal
immigrants in the modern sense and the bible no more than the Hávamál
is going to guide modern minds through the dangerous shoals of
immigration policy.
Nor are ideas of justice limited to religion, or to any particular religion.
To answer my own question, I rather suspect that the Heathen
“community” is so varied that we might get any number of answers and of
course, you can (and they do) make the bible give any number of answers
to the question of how to deal with the immigration issue.
Then again, the bible presupposes we own slaves and stone unfaithful
wives and disobedient children and that there is nothing wrong with
this.
You have to wonder sometimes just how relevant what comes to us by
way of millennia-old documents is relevant to us. Maybe we should just
be who we are, the sum total of all our parts, not just our spiritual
notions, and check our religion at the door and look at the Constitution
when it comes to deciding how to run our country.
I think it’s safe to say that’s what the Founding Fathers had in
mind. After all, they wrote the Constitution, and they no more
referenced the bible than they did the Hávamál, the qur’an or any other
holy book you care to name.
Today is - International Men's Day
