I am actually glad they will do a standalone bill even if a defense authorization bill is the quickest way. The DTA was done as an amendment to a defense authorization bill, and nobody (even now, even Wikipedia, even on this blog) seems to acknowledge that it curbed habeas corpus, and that everybody who was anybody in the Senate voted for it.

A standalone allows us to count heads, take no prisoners, and accept no excuses. As I posted elsewhere this morning, habeas corpus is a right that they used to behead, revolt, and fight wars over, not some dumb line item we won't hear about in between sex scandals on the 6:00 news.

And as far as I'm concerned, if there is anyone in the public school system over the age of 10 who doesn't know what the two words habeas corpus mean by the time that bill comes up for a vote, their teachers should be fired, the school's funding revoked, and the School of Education from which they graduated decertified. Then they should be made to chant the Massachusetts general law of 1680 until they know why education is a right in a democracy.

Enough is enough.

I agree. The frustrating part, and the reason I chose the age of 10, was that we were taught about it at the age of 10, so I know it can be done. As for the 1680 part, well, I grew up in Massachusetts.

I have always favored the melting pot model to the multicultural diversity model. Maybe that's because I am, with respect to the country, not the descendant of immigrants: My forebears were immigrants to the continent, but all were here by the American Revolution. Which is not to say there weren't surprises and prejudices -- I found out at the age of 50 that I'm half Pennsylvania German, because my great-grandparents changed their names during World War I.

But I tend to think I favor the melting pot because it yields a single country at the end, and not an enclaved collection of divergent interests. I also have a bad taste in my mouth about the exact phrase "multicultural diversity" because of its somewhat different use, or perhaps different standard, in Singapore.

Either way, the civil and human rights standards of the country are more, not less, important subjects of study than personal ethnic background. They are things that everyone should know if they live in this country, and their importance isn't a matter of opinion, it's a matter of rights and responsibilities. In fifth grade I was taught that habeas corpus was the right that was in the main body of the Constitution instead of the Bill of Rights because it was more important than anything else. Maybe that's only a fifth grader's take on it, but I think not.

Hmm. You have written a lot to think about. However, ethnic enclaving is the norm in immigrant communities like coastal cities in the absence of forces against it. The melting pot philosophy was not a construct to encourage people to band together against other races, at least not when it was taught in my school, it was a goal. The goal was that we would all live together, as one. Did it work? Hard to say, it had a big effect on me, and on the others in my community, and did mix up populations that otherwise might have stayed with "their own".

By contrast, I now live in a community where multiculturalism is de rigeur. I'm not sure how it is supposed to work, but what is being taught is solidarity with ones own ethnic heritage up to and including at the expense of a unified whole. It is considered natural that America should consist of largely unmixing groups who know more about where their ancestors came from than about where they and their parents live.

What does it lead to? I recently worked in a workplace that was 73% Chinese with an average age of about 33. We had a recent round of layoffs, miraculously, although all layoff decisions had supposedly been made based on project requirements, everyone who was laid off was white, and most were over 40 (it had other attributes as well, like that only Chinese from (or with parents from) a particular country of origin somehow became managers).

At one point, quite prior to the lay off, I had complained about the ethnic makeup of the resumes I had received for an open hire. I was required to do that because the makeup did not correspond to the makeup of the local or national hiring pool. The recruiter gave me a long spiel about how it was really strange that everybody who went into the subfield in question was Chinese. When I remarked that at a previous company I had been told by an English recruiter that the same subfield was remarkably one that everybody who went into it was British, I got a long spiel about, you guessed it, multiculturalism.

The recruiter didn't think she was doing anything wrong, she thought that it was only natural (it turned out) that people "hire their own." She thought that that is how American society is supposed to work, and that it leads to rich cultural diversity as different groups become good at different things. She was born and raised here, and her multicultural education had essentially instilled a deep belief in segregation.

That being as it may, I still maintain my previous point, that there is no excuse for not teaching the fundamentals of American society and requiring them to be learned early in children's lives in this country. Least of all that it conflicts with multiculturalism.

...an article about bride burning that focusses on the dowries and murder and doesn't get it confused with suttee. That's better than the major news outlets can usually muster. Nice work, Carol!