The Hamlet and Cheese Omelet

by Paul A. L. Hall.

The key to the great British navy of yesteryear was the Danes.  They were all British from the Stone of Scone, upon which the Kings were crowned. The stone brought from ancient Israel, to escape the Babylonians.

British is a word actually sometimes construed as meaning: "they live together in peace and peacefully". And said Brith is a key to prosperity from the coming together of the disparate cultures. The Danes having become Viking or seafaring, brought the contribution of the Ship Wright to the Brith of the Britons. But only after they stopped belligerence and settled down usually in Thorpes.

It's as the famous Dane in Shakespeare's play said. "To be or not to be". Well, I suppose two bes are better than one. But as you can tell from history, apparently the Danes and the Vikings of all Scandinavia were anything but indecisive. And while they could be thought of as huggers of the coastlines like the early Mediterranean sailors were, history also proves they were anything but, setting out not only into the deep open sees, but also into Arctic waters and in open longboats and what they were able to do eventually with Brits of England they were not able to do with the Native Americans of North America, and perhaps that was unfortunate.

It's interesting to note that my ancestors were among the English colonists that first populated North America's shores so many hundreds of years ago. And they were most probably descendents from the stock of England's early Scandinavian invaders that had eventually settled in. All the European colonists had great problems settling in North America, but standing out from them all in ultimate success were the hearty English, who seemed to have been just the right stuff for the job.

An interesting point to make. It's like the contrast between a work horse and a thoroughbred. When it comes down to the real nitty-gritty, the thoroughbred is almost useless for anything but a beautiful horse race.

And here we see the robustness of the combination the scrambling of the ingredients of our Hamlet and cheese omelet. It reminds me of the joke about the country that needed a stronger Air Force: The Presidentee just had the air controller scramble the jets.

Here comes to play a word known as "disparity", meaning the "difference between", such as the disparity in binocular vision: When you look at something with both your eyes, each eye sees a slightly different picture. Your mind combines the two pictures and what you really see is actual perspective, known as "depth perception". It's a matter of life and depth. So what you are really seeing is what is known in visual physiology as "binocular disparity", or the difference between two pictures. Two pictures or not two pictures, that is the question.

The key to success is not always, in fact hardly ever, and maybe even never, the flawed human idea of "purity". With a good look at the hindsight of history, noting the parts where all the successes took place, we can plainly see that it is the mixture, different peoples working together in a blend of peace and prosperity, that really make a functional and prosperous society. Yet it is not always as simple as it seems.

In many societies, disparate cultures where different sorts of peoples are living together in the same nation still do not blend. I've seen examples of this in almost every place I have visited. I mean, people can do as they want. Far be it from me to criticize. What I'm doing here, though, is observing a phenomenon and pointing it out in this article.

When I lived in New York City, I resided in the West Village back in the sixties. The neighborhood I was in on Bedford Street was also a part of a section of New York City known as "Little Italy". It was a neat little place with lots of great cultural value, fantastic food, really interesting. But it was an enclave and in most places, you will also find such sorts of enclaves where newly arrived citizens from other parts of the world settle into tight-knit and exclusive micro communities that serve to, it seems, retard, as it were, the blending of disparate societies into the prosperous combination they could be.

Whatever the motive, security, purity, maybe even in some cases common sense, the outcome is usually the same: the area assumes a sense of rigidity, in which the denizens acquire an air of polarity and fragility, where the situation becomes territorial and stilted, all the while camouflaged by the color and liveliness of the culture brought in from the old country and clung to tenaciously.

If that's you I'm describing, what can I say. Real life has its insecurities were a person has to step out, front up, take a few chances, learn the new language. True strength comes from the blending of different factions, not from the misconceptions of purity where fallible human nature tries desperately to filter out anything it imagines to be impure.

In fact , we find out with some of these races, and peoples or even families that are given to inbreeding and shutting out the external world, what they imagine to be pure is really nothing more than stagnation. It's curious to note that a malfunction of the human mind is to cause, or to tend to cause it's local society around it to develop no further, but rather, in false visions of purity, cause it to implode upon itself.

What we have actually in the world today, almost 6000 years after we emerged from a stone age, is a mere shell, a fragment, of what humanity could be and should've been. We see a weakened and debilitated species that is intent on its own extinction; it's extreme intelligence being its own undoing. In other words becoming the opposite of what it had intended itself to be. But then, I suppose, two bes are better than one.