Dr. Werz: Right, let me just state two things briefly. You made a very important point, you can become an American. And you’re not becoming an American by adapting to cultural standards because nobody really has the copyright in culture standards.
Octavio: Mm-hmm
Dr. Werz: I mean if you regard standing in a line at a bus instead of fighting to get in first as a cultural standard then there are cultural standards but there are no cultural standards tied to national traditions, color of skin, specific religions…
Octavio: Or even language.
Dr. Werz: Or even language, which is interesting. So the question is what does it mean to become American and what is at the core of Americanism. And the only way you can define the United States is in abstract terms. I mean actually if you ask what is the United States. You can say the flag. The flag is an interesting case because it’s actually the only flag in the entire world that over 150 years constantly changes. Always more stars, more and less stripe, even the flag is a symbol in it’s evolution of a changing country with the Western frontier growing. So it’s the flag, its rule of law, and it’s basically the possibility to be participating in the public sphere which means all these definitions are abstract. So the American people only come together as people when they are really under the flag or at the people versus something in a law suite.
But this is the only definition of the American people as one homogenous group. Every other definition would have to be more differentiated and would be a definition along the lines of the [IB] Unum, the one out of the many, because it is not a definition that you can define or argue along cultural lines. So becoming American is an individual act. It is an act of subjective identification with abstract ciphers of what America stands for. And that’s very different even today in many nationalization procedures in Europe, where you have to show cultural skills that are tied to a very specific forms in which people or bureaucrats define national traditions. With regard to the Supreme Court that’s a fascinating development because it is of course these were two of the most discriminated minorities in the United States. We often forget that Catholics were in a harder position in many places in the 19th Century than for example African-Americans. There is a famous letter that W.E.B. Dubois writes from Harvard to his mother and says, you won’t believe it but the Irish are more discriminated here in Boston than I am. Of course he was in a privileged position. But it’s clear that even when President Kennedy went to University they were having a big discussion whether he could share dorms with [IB]. So that was still…