Honestly, This Sort of Thing Makes Me Sick

I idly wondered if CNN would actually summon some patriotism for America's 250th birthday. But their top story, at the time I accessed their website, had this headline: The World Cup's unexpected gift to America: A game the rest of the world knows as football is teaching America something about itself on its 250th birthday. (If you click on the article itself, the headline changes to: "America held a big birthday party — and a soccer extravaganza broke out.")

Here's a passage from the story: "The game the rest of the world knows as football is teaching America something about itself on its 250th birthday and reminding international visitors that the nation is far more welcoming and complex than its bitter political caricature. The World Cup’s gift of joy is a unifying distraction after tough years marked by ideological divides and a pandemic’s economic fallout. And its blend of European and South American superstars and rising African and Asian teams is also holding up a mirror to the country’s own diversity and its enduring political experiment, enriched by immigration."

Seriously, can they get off the hobby-horse for even one day?

But it's more than that. This sort of rhetoric seems so self-defeating to me.

Liberalism wants to celebrate America for its diversity. It also wants to celebrate Ireland, America, Spain, etc. etc. for their diversity. Everything is diversity, all the time. But if everything is diversity, doesn't diversity itself become...monotony?

And what is diversity composed of? What are the ingredients of diversity? Well, they are national and ethnic and religious traditions, that's what. Diversity is like artificial intelligence-- it can't create anything. (Although immigrant ethnic communities do create their own traditions, like the Italian-American Feast of the Twelve Fishes. But that's still national and ethnic and religious cultures, even if they happen to be displaced.)

As for "tough years marked by ideological divides"-- why is ideological diversity a bad thing, while cultural and ethnic diversity is seen as a good thing?

It's all so tiresome.