For various reasons, identity in all its rich meaning has been on my mind lately. Beyond the obvious professional and national identities, it must be one of our more serious preoccupations.

In the past few days, the newscasts have shown townhall meetings interrupted by screaming and name-calling. Every time I hear a quote from talkshows the words evil, facist, socialist, communist and Nazi come up. There is no deep analysis, no classic debate, no actual quotations from current bills in Congress, merely a simplistic label, meant to terrify and vilify. Everyone on the left is anti-American.

It's a completely disturbing trend, not all that new, but in an age of instant information and messages limited to 30 seconds or 250 characters, it sets us up for more screaming and no understanding.

So, back to identity, I think Americans enjoy harkening back to their heritage. I myself am a complete mutt and have added French to my son's lineage. I wonder if any of it will matter to him later. After all, how do you divide 1/168th Cherokee by two? I can't name that great grandmother, but I have seen her photo. In a pluralistic society, it should cease to matter, but it still does.

We Americans wear t-shirts and have bumper stickers letting the world know our backgrounds: "Kiss me I'm Irish"; "Italians are better lovers", etc. The architectural styles of homes in my neighborhood are named for some fanciful notion of Europe, such as Italianate, English tudor, French provincial, Dutch colonial and Greek revival. Actual people from those actual countries must shrug and snigger.

Mr. Horton over at the Union Herald reminded me of linguistic identity in a post about teaching ESL. I am currently reading Pierre Bourdieu's Langage et pouvoir symbolique and need more time to digest it before I can comment intelligently on language groups and dialects. Maybe I'll set up a Twitter account and lambast that damned socialist sociologist.