Reimagining America
One reads the following words and somehow imagines them coming from the love child of Ayn Rand and Elon Musk (pardon the visual):
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans . . . . comes down to culture . . . and if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for far too long . . that doesn’t start in college, it starts with the YOUNG . . .
. . . A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers . . .
. . . More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.” . . .
. . . . Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve . . .
. . . Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest . .
. . . “Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China . . .
. . . This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awakened from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness . .
. . . That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.”
The words actually came from Vivek Ramaswamy in a now-infamous December 26 tweet, reportedly a factor that led to his ouster from Team Trump’s DOGE campaign and, indeed, from the national stage (click: The Grind Old Party). The Left understandably had eczema over the “grindset” mentality: longer work hours, raising the retirement age, rolling back child labor laws.
Yet, even the more sober members on the Right bridled at the notion of such a Dickensian world in which, “They want us to work eighty-plus hours a week and have zero time for our families.” Adding to the consternation was the supreme racial irony of an Indian American man presuming to lecture White America in the same tone they had once applied to Black America i.e. Whitey’s turn to be “it.” Talk about karma. In any event, Vivek is out.
Underlying the tariff drama is a kind of anticipatory nostalgia for an America, you know, the real America, where it is Main Street’s turn to hire workers, drive investment, and forge the dream – not like the one hijacked by the globalists over the past few decades. We can do it right here, damnit.
One imagines Trump peering into a snow-globe fantasy of an America to see those Reagan-era mythic playlets featuring romantic idealizations of men in groups who blast through mountains or pour plumes of molten steel in factories, the work all grit and grin. Who is kidding whom? It will be a long time before molten steel pours again.
From my college-town perch (Lehigh University) I bore witness to the decline of Bethlehem Steel, well underway from that graduation year 1971 until the mills finally closed in 2003. See (Google) for yourself, those once-massive factories are little more than gigantic rusty hulks now. They need more than a fresh coat of paint. Ah yes, 1971, the very year the country was taken off the gold standard. Correlation or causation?
In any event, Vivek raises an even more fundamental question i.e. the challenges of recovering an underlying work ethic. Do you (does he) buy his asserted confidence that “we can do it?” One encouraging sign would be to see the first lawn again cut by a local high school school kid.
The current tariff battle is but the opening act. Be careful what we wish for.
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