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Messages, mixed & otherwise

Note: The following is another in a series of columns on subjects of a philosophical or ethical nature by a Schuyler County resident who prefers to go by the nom de plume of A. Moralis -- a reference to what the writer sees as the lack of a moral compass in this country during this rapidly changing Age of the Internet.

By A. Moralis

There is an age-old pastime called the telephone game. It is played by having the first player in a circle whisper a sentence or two into the ear of the next person. Each player then successively whispers what he or she believes was said to the next person. The last player announces aloud what the last message was -- or what he or she thought it was.

And invariably, the message has been stretched and twisted into something almost unrecognizable from the original -- often triggering great hilarity.

It's a tried and true party game, and a classroom tool used by teachers to show how tenuous our understanding is of what our fellow humans are saying or meaning ... and how, by extension, our policies and history are often driven by this failure to communicate.

But child's game or practical teaching tool, the telephone game can also serve as metaphor -- for all that can go awry in a world, or a nation, where the melting pot often trumps tradition ... where a complex intertwining of differing philosophies and religions and cultures can create a situation where miscommunication becomes the norm, and change becomes the inevitable result.

Witness, if you will, the traditional -- as embodied in the words of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 ... words that symbolized an America with a narrowly defined viewpoint of Americanism. It is, in retrospect, one with great appeal.

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American....There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag....We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language....and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

One hundred and three years later, Mr. Roosevelt's message has become outdated, its words unchanged but the perception of those words altered, a bit like in the telephone game. The politics and philosophy of his time have been twisted from a conservative, isolationist, reassuring Americanism into something quite different; his words seem rather quaint in the face of a century of life. His message has been more than twisted, really -- it's been pummeled by wars and assassinations and the rights movements and ever-changing modes of communication: from the telegraph and telephone to the radio, television and movies -- and, ultimately, to the computer with its game-changing Internet.

Among all of that change has come a tolerance -- we've touched on the disagreeableness of that word in these columns before -- that has allowed Americanism to be diluted, its culture embracing the tenets of other cultures, its name adjectified, as in Hispanic American or Jewish American or German American or just about Anything American..

While there is much to be commended about these varying cultures, the point here is not about them, but about a sense of loyalty to the tenets upon which this nation was founded, a sense of tradition, a sense of unity -- of being United States. We seem increasingly scattered as a people, as a nation.

I am tempted on occasion to cry out in frustration, to ask when we became an ethnic-group-emphasized America, rather than the American America of Teddy Roosevelt.

But I know the answer.

Blame it on evolution -- on the message ever changing, ever swayed by outside forces often driven by miscommunication, by life as a telephone game.

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Previous A. Moralis columns:

The first one is here.
The second one is here.
The third one is here.
The fourth one is here.
The fifth one is here.
The sixth one is here.
The seventh one is here.