The Art of the Essay: "A Quilt of a Country" by Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen looks back at America's past as a country of immigrants in order to understand our present experience as a cultural patchwork of ethnicities and religions. Written after the tragic events of 9/11, this essay seeks to rally the United States under one banner of multiculturalism and tolerance.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. mongrel
    an inferior dog or one of mixed breed
    A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone.
  2. disparate
    fundamentally different or distinct in quality or kind
    A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone.
  3. discordant
    not in agreement or harmony
    That's because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades.
  4. tolerance
    willingness to respect the beliefs or practices of others
    Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry.
  5. ostracism
    the act of excluding someone from society by general consent
    Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other.
  6. conundrum
    a difficult problem
    This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as "community added to individualism."
  7. apartheid
    a social policy of racial segregation
    Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity.
  8. hostility
    a state of deep-seated ill-will
    Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.
  9. overwhelm
    cover completely or make imperceptible
    With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen--African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American--would overwhelm the right.
  10. devastation
    the state of being decayed or destroyed
    Terrorism has led to devastation--and unity.
  11. vex
    be a mystery or bewildering to
    One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, then on either side of the country's Chester Avenues.
  12. abet
    assist or encourage, usually in some wrongdoing
    Faced with this diversity there is little point in trying to isolate anything remotely resembling a national character, but there are two strains of behavior that, however tenuously, abet the concept of unity.
  13. coalesce
    mix together different elements
    There is that Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche that loves the difficult, the demanding, that sees mastering the impossible, whether it be prairie or subway, as a test of character, and so glories in the struggle of this fractured coalescing.
  14. grudging
    petty or reluctant in giving or spending
    And there is a grudging fairness among the citizens of the United States that eventually leads most to admit that, no matter what the English-only advocates try to suggest, the new immigrants are not so different from our own parents or grandparents.
  15. breadth
    the extent of something from side to side
    But patriotism is partly taking pride in this unlikely ability to throw all of us together in a country that across its length and breadth is as different as a dozen countries, and still be able to call it by one name.
  16. improbable
    not likely to be true or to occur or to have occurred
    Like many improbable ideas, when it actually works, it's a wonder.
Created on Tue Jul 22 22:18:41 EDT 2014 (updated Tue Dec 03 11:42:34 EST 2019)

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