Although (former English major with an interest in the Renaissance) I'm a little snobbish about reading "contemporary" fiction (except for trashy scifi/fantasy stuff--yes I am a geek), Jane Smiley is one of my favorite living authors. I was rereading Moo on the train and I came across a passage that actually made me sit up and think.
If you're not familiar with it, Moo is set in a fictionalized midwestern college campus during the early 90s. At one point the characters, in a sort of diffuse way, deal with the fall of the iron curtain and the Berlin wall.
In one section of this an African American chemist and his wife from Ghana have this exchange:
"What's wrong with this? We won. We're closer to peace than ever before in my lifetime."
"Is that so?"
"Well, yeah."
She smiled.
"Why not?"
She shrugged.
"You've been muttering about this for weeks."
"Well now, you see, John, all the tribes will get themselves stirred up now."
"What tribes? You mean in West Africa?"
She shook her head, gestured toward the screen. "Those Czechs," she said. "Those Slovaks. Now they can fight. Now thy can turn to their neighbors they've been living beside for years and say, "I want what you have. I want you out of here."
"Why should they do that?
She threw her head back and laughed out loud. She said, "Because they are people. People are all the same. You give them a little of what they want, and then all they do is want, and all they see, they want. And some of them, who don't have much to do, they want to fight, just to fight, so they bring everything else into fighting."
"Well maybe."
She laughed again. She said, "You white people"--Cates shifted in his chair; he knew she meant, You Americans, but he didn't correct her--"are the only people in the world who are suprised when people are people."
It seems like a simple point--and a common sensical point--but given the events of the past (and no doubt the future) one I like to keep in my mind when I'm in too much danger of being an "American"