Without exception, every ethnic group, in way of self-definition, is partially constituted by dislike for the ethnic groups with which they have recently been at war. This is very clear when you travel through the Balkans. And it's one of the nostrums of American municipal political science -- Irish politicians did so well in the elections, because unlike the immigrant communities from central Europe and elsewhere, they had very few inherent enemies. This is still a living dynamic, and I would have done well to have learned it and to have thought of it a bit more carefully before moving here.
Big fight night at the White House, and the city swarming with wealthy tourists whom I now know to be utterly unrepresentative of the cultures from which they have come. It is the hour of those for whom the world is enough. Ora et labora. A bit like the opening moments of a Bond film, perhaps.
For some reason, my university summerstock days have been coming back to my mind recently. Especially the season at a tent theatre at one of the Seven Sisters, with the tent pitched adjacent to one of the old dorms above a lake. It was one of the very few summers I didn't spend in the trial-of-the-soul boot camp that was outdoor historical drama, and it was perhaps as close as I came to the civilized and cultured places of the northeast in my university days. Pace Hegel, no nation is inherently one thing--it is a concatenation of enclaves, and some of them are quite amiable. But, with Hegel, this assemblage does have a basic nature. Ora et labora.