[quote=@Vilageidiotx] I am aware that he isn't simply his public persona, but the reality is that he was primarily known as his public persona. The "Guy from the Apprentice" narrative wasn't sewn from whole cloth in the last fifteen months by the media to smear a guy who had previously been seen as an Alan Greenspan type figure. You go back six years ago when we didn't consider him a mostly political figure and you'd find people looking at him as that guy who builds flashy casinos with his name on it and yells at Gary Busey on television. Imma assume that most people haven't exactly read his book, for instance. Well, first and foremost I think your reading of the situation between races isn't quite true. There are still racial divides in this country this is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. I live in a pretty mixed working class area and, everyone here being part of the same regional class culture, we get along pretty damned naturally despite race. If I drive downtown into the ghetto, or conversely if a black neighbor or co-worker went to a small town in the hills, then yeh, there is problems. But speaking of the part of the city I live in, I have more in common with a black neighbor than I do with a white man from Beverly Hills. And I agree, cultures should be allowed to change naturally. That's kind of what I am saying actually. What I have just described is my natural cultural condition, but your theory seems to assume it is invalid and that I and my neighbors need to be artificially segregated so that I experience my culture more in line with your idea with what it should be than what it actually is. Which is to say simply that I find your concept too bizarre and rigid to ever allow me or those around me to experience culture naturally. There would have to be a culture Gestapo around telling me what Didgeridont requires my culture to be. Historically some regimes have tried it, and historically it doesn't work. The Soviets tried to enforce a culture and the people rejected it a few generations later. Franco attempted the same thing in Spain and the people rejected it only a couple of generations later. Culture is a moving thing, and if you put it behind a dam it only cracks the dam and floods outward on it's own. And the Roman Empire doesn't work as an example. In the Mediterranean, particularly the eastern half, they absorbed cultures that were decidedly unroman and allowed them to practice their culture, and even their religion, so long as they followed civic law and refrained from converting people to cults. These places Romanticized slowly through a natural process of cultural drift. They had divisive citizenship laws this is true, but as time went on citizenship laws, for your average person, mostly just affected where you sat on the tax base. It's in the decadence of the post-Severan collapse that they begin to hold Germanic tribes introduced into their borders at arms length instead of integrating them, dividing the Empire into increasingly competitive power bases in the last century until those power bases basically tear the thing apart. They couldn't have kept those barbarians out because... well, they tried, they simply couldn't afford to. But by holding them at arms length instead of integrating them, they created the conditions for the empire to fracture as those Germanic power bases became independent. [/quote] Perhaps you may indeed share some traits in your lifestyle with the people who live near you. I would rather chalk this up to the culturally chimeric nature of the West rather than any meaningful connection of true culture. You share little history with these people. You don't share a background in the food you like or the beliefs you hold. You wouldn't raise children in the same way as them and you weren't taught the same values as them. There may be some overlap in your social characteristics, but on the whole, you are unable to connect with these people in the same way you would connect with someone who looks and acts almost exactly like you. The common ground you find with them is not as ideal as the common ground you might find with a person of the same ethnic and cultural background as you. That is the root of human conflict - difference. Races are different, cultures are different, genders are different, individuals are different. As long as there is difference between us, there will be conflict, in some form, no matter how minute. A successful nation is built upon people who can find the most common ground between each other. Culture is spawned from that, and is meant to preserve the unity be encoding the ideological similarities of the people into a state where it becomes easy to absorb by people of that culture. You may share values with someone who looks and acts completely different to yourself, but the cultural connection between you is weak and will continue to be weak, mainly because you are too [b]different[/b]. Maybe the Roman Empire was too weak of an example. Perhaps a more modern example of the strife and discord that come from a drastic change in culture would be the rise of the Ayatollah in Iran. Granted, there was a political reason for the Iranian Revolution, with the overthrow of the Shah and all, but the strongest part of the movement was its focus on religious fundamentalism. Iran was becoming more and more Westernized as a result of the Shah and the influence of the U.S./Britain, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was a driving force in trying to destroy this Western influence. The culture within Iran was becoming too detached with the identity of many Iranian people. Naturally, they rebelled, and tried to reform their culture and society based on what they believed was more congruent with their national identity. We could argue about the degree of success this had, especially when you consider Iran today, however the one point you cannot argue is that the connection between a people and their defined culture is integral to social harmony.