Some Applications of Aristotelian Politics to Modern America

One blogger today posts a bunch of stuff Aristotle says, tries to tie it on America with the title “Some Applications of Aristotelian Politics to Modern America,” and won't allow anyone to comment there.

Feel free, then, to comment here. I'll start, by quoting Ishmael Reed:

“And the last material [Richard Wright] wrote was in Haiku. So I was thinking, ‘How can I extend this?’ And I started studying Japanese. And Frank Chin’s analysis of African American folklore comparing that with Chinese warrior stories and Japanese fairy tales coming up with the same material for characters and strategies in common everyday life, in stories about Brer Rabbit and I got a war novel out of it, that’s one element. I try to mix up stuff in Japanese by Spring—that’s my style. So I do have Japanese in there, and like a jazz musician, it ends in another key, so at the end, Yoruba. . .

But it’s happening in the country. You've got Garrett Hongo in Japanese and English. A number of Latino writers writing in Spanish and English, and the most well known writers in the Latino community still write in Spanish. You have a Quebec situation in North America, both in Canada and the United States.

We were the first ones to use the term ‘multicultural,’ and I wish we never used it because now it doesn’t mean anything. Academia got a hold of it and now it’s just a big hustle. Anybody is multicultural. . . So, though people depict us as a Third World organization, our idea of multiculturalism was to include all the ethnics, and I don’t mean this Balkanized theory, but rather people who are bi-cultural, multicultural. Popular culture unites America, not Aristotle.”