Lebensraum

Full-bloodedness is an old coin that's gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values and made-in-America. Just as we once had and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

Who "gets" America? And who doesn't?

The answer has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin, which Mr. Obama donned for a campaign swing through West Virginia, or even military service, though that helps. It's also not about flagpoles in front yards or magnetic ribbons stuck on tailgates.

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others, and therein lies the truth of Mr. Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically - and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century - there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants - and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

Meanwhile, immigration trends have shifted drastically in the past 40 years, as growing percentages of Americans are foreign-born. In 1970, just 4.7 percent of the total population was foreign-born - 9.6 million people. By 2000, 11.1 percent, or 31.1 million individuals, were foreign-born, according to the Census.

Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal immigration fiasco. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.

-Kathleen Parker in Der Stürmer

Blood equity?

It's actually the "necessarily" in that last sentence that brings the grim smile to my lips. Quel caveat, eh? Obsession with the Joos the "foreign-born" out of concern for the cultural and racial heritage of the Aryan full-blooded American race is simultaneously faddish and passé. I'm the descendent of early-twentieth-century European immigrants, but the tendrils of generational intermarriage have added old Pennsylvania Scoth-Irish to the Italo-Germano-Ukraino genealogy as well. That hardly makes me a Daughter of the American Revolution, although I am related to one, but am I not--despite and quite against my will--an American? Are we gonna split hairs here? I once heard a fitting joke--Sherman Alexie, I think, told it at a reading. White guy sees an Indian walking past his house, and he thinks the Indian looks at him funny, so he says, "Hey, why don't you go back where you came from?" So the Indian came back that night and pitched a tent in the guy's backyard. All of human history, someone once said, is naught but the migration of tribes. I love the smell of inevitability in the morning.