Before we get carried away with ethnic reductionism about the intrinsically bad qualities of the Scotch-Irish, which isn't too different from racism, let's remember something about the Borderer role in American history. They are the people whose ancestors, for the most part, did the ugly, dirty, violent, selfish but necessary work of taking the continent away from the Indians turning the forest and prairie into settled agricultural land. All of those supposedly bad qualities of pugnacity, hypermasculinity, xenophobia, and distrust of distant authority were very useful to that end. Nowadays Manifest Destiny is out of fashion and the high culture is more than a little embarassed at the accomplishments of the pioneers -- though we don't intend to give any of them up -- and it is comforting to think that those traits are obsolete in our highly civilized modern world. Their historic role as the conquerors of America is why the carriers of the Borderer culture consider themselves the truest of Americans, and why they feel that their country is being stolen from them by people who disdain what their ancestors did.

These know-nothing nativists wanted “their country” back in 1845 too, used to burn our churches, fire us first, hire us last, it now be the struggle of the Latin immigrant. History doesn't repeat itself,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “but it rhymes.

It's pretty hard to find any ethnic group, tribe, or culture that doesn't have a great deal to confess and grieve. The important thing is what do we, their descendants, do with our time.