Man - has he ever jumped the shark.

H. L. Mencken, "On Being an American":

"The land was peopled, not by the hardy adventurers of legend, but simply by incompetents who could not get on at home, and the lavishness of nature that they found here, the vast ease with which they could get livings, confirmed and augmented their native incompetence.  No American colonist, even in the worst days of the Indian wars, ever had to face such hardships as ground down the peasants of Central Europe during the Hundred Years' War, nor even such hardships as oppressed the English lower clases during the century before the Reform Bill of 1832. ... the one thing that made life difficult for him was his congentinal dunderheadedness. ... The immigrants who have come in since those early days have been, if anything, of even lower grade than their forerunners ... the average newcomer is, and always has been simply a poor fish."

And so on.  You don't have to agree with Mencken, but there is, at the very least, a counter argument to this super DNA shit.  Talk about "dunderheadedness".

Thanks for the nice post on that charlatan Michael Medved, Mr. Orr. I recall back in the '90's. Leon Wiesleltier leveled him and Elliott Abrams and others in his spendid Diarist meditation "Epistle to the Hebrews". "The inherited power of American DNA" - wow. That is a pseudoscientific concept if I have ever seen one. Just to let you know, you are infinitely superior to Medved as a cinematic critic.

Ironically, Medved was the lone right wing talk radio yahoo who championed McCain during the GOP primary.  

Well, thank God the 19th-century Democrats prevented the liberal Free-Soil Republicans from creating massive federal subsidies to settle the West instead of letting individual risk-taking initiative do the job. The socialist "homestead" plan would have run against America's very DNA.

Oh, wait. We actually did settle the West with massive federal subsidies to individuals and businesses, not stand-alone individual gumption. Never mind then.

On a serious note, many if not most of the "self-selected" American settlers were also the victims of various obvious scams on the way across the Atlantic and West to the frontier, often involving transparently ridiculous land speculation. So does that mean that "American DNA" also predisposes us to stupidity, gullibility, and losing money?

How does Medved explain what he doubtless regards as socialism in Canada?

Rhubs: Was it Barnum who said, no one ever lost a buck ...? ;-)

This DNA business is such horse-shit, I wonder why Medved would even get published any more.  Could someone tar-and-feather him and run him out of the country on a raft?

My ancestors escaped the great potato famine, the risks to stay; almost certain death for many, far outweighed a boat ride. Honestly, for such a nakedly dumbass statement Medved deserves to literally, and I mean literally, shunned.

Speaking as an American expat, a person who left more than 10 years, does this mean I lack the risk taking gene since I am not living in America or does it mean I have it in abundance, that I am in fact a superAmerican? Not to be immodest but surely it is the latter and I missed my true calling as Captain America.

Anyway, to take Medveds insanity to its logical conclusion, everyone who left the Olduvai (sp?) gorge in Africa where mankind first walked upright has that risk taking gene, so Europeans, Asians, Pacific islanders, etc all have it. Or, come to think of it, wasn't walking upright a risk in itself?

"Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking"

Maybe if they hadn't been taking a risky walk through the forest, those European bastards wouldn't have jumped out & grabbed them.

For that matter, surviving the "middle passage" was a Darwinian gold star in itself.

Wotta maroon, as Bugs Bunny used to say.

Blackton: Hats off to you for a poignant and funny post, both at once, which is hard to pull off.

on the bright side, it is nice that Medved has come forward in favor of continued "risk taking" Mexicans streaming across our southern border. They are truly la creme de la creme, in that they, like all Mexicans, have that risk taking gene (walking from Africa to America, damn.) and the ones who come north are like Supermen and women.

icarusr, that was Mencken, not Barnum, and the saying was officially rewritten a few years back to read,

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public, except the XFL."

Ooo-ooo-oooo-AHHH-AHHH-AHHH!!

Ooo-ooo-AHHHH-AHHHH-AHHHHHH!!!

[williamyard inserts hangnail from left pinky into left nostril and scoops counterclockwise, trolling for boogers]

Ooo, look at this!

[williamyard pulls up the Flintstones cartoon theme song on YouTube, and sings along]

Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they're the modern stone-age fam-i-leeeeeeeee!

[williamyard spies half-eaten donut from Tuesday under some papers on his desk]

Hmmm. A little dry, maybe...

[bites into donut; donut crumbles onto carpet]

[williamyard bends, picks up a couple of the larger fallen pieces, pops them in mouth]

Not bad.

--The above is a glimpse into a typical morning in the life of williamyard, a biotechnology industry editor who earns much of his living parsing the convoluted and largely unknown and misunderstood universe of human and animal deoxyribonucleic acid, who is proud to be descended from folks who landed in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, and who finds Medved's commentary, um, charming.

blackton, I was going to post something similar to yours.  For my mother's ancestors, the options were either to keep hanging around the Ukraine, trying to avoid eye contact with the czar's marauders, or book a trip to the US.  The latter option probably seemed safer, indicating that they were risk averse, not the other way around.

Of course, my father is from England, which shows that his superlative risk-taking WASP genetic material can cancel out any distressing ethnic tendencies.

The American century also had something to do with the ruinous two world wars which mostly wrecked the economies of any possible competitors for many years; not assigning blame, but there are other reasons besides natural American genius.

Yes, there is nothing to suggest that the Africans that came to the New World were the hardiest of people: captured in war, starved in the dungeons of West Africa, hauled in the stinking slavers to Sullivans Island, dropped in an uncleared jungle on the frontier of new world where they built the rice fields, cotton fields, public buildings, homes and cities of a new empire. In this unfamiliar place, surrounded by Africans and Europeans that they couldn't communicate with, they raised families and forged a new culture and identity to survive their servitude - a culture that his been now absorbed into the larger American experience.

From there, the survivors of the colonial and antebellum periods, were "freed" into a world where they were expected to survive without a nickle to their names, no homes, no legal rights, not even a surname. And then to Jim Crow.

That DNA challenged race has transformed and forever enriched this nation in ways that are hardly even even touch in our history classes. The story of the African in America is one of the most impressive in world history.

Too bad they didn't have the proper genes to make in the New World.

LR, thanks, but maybe it just means I am schizoid.

Why didn't Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein think of this?

"Why didn't Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein think of this?"

Because not even they are that dumb.

President Bush's press conference today:

"The new Department of National Risk will have as its mission the removal of safety and security for all aspects of life, from food safety to aircraft maintenance, and from child polio screening to supervision of the mortgage and loan markets.

Katrina was effective but, as you know, half of the city was left standing.  This unfortunately led to only 50% of the DNA-improving effects that we might have gained.  Between them the Corps of Engineers and FEMA did a heck of a job, but we can do better!  The new Department of Risk will work hard at improving our national DNA with a properly planned and executed program of clueless incompetence and grotesque ball-dropping."

I'm sure Hitler would have railed against those with 'impure DNA', as opposed to 'impure blood', if the term had been around in the 1930's.