As a minor ironic side thought, a guy using the name Roman Helmet Guy arguing for exclusionary blood-and-soilish nationalism (if not directly and not in such words but dancing up to it) is bizarrely wrong-headed on symbolism given the success of the Roman empire as compared to other classical ones was its integrationism - one could unlike other classical states 'become a Roman' (and climb up post first gen) - right up to Emperor see the Libyan Severans... (and equally Rome's quite promiscuous openess to coopting bits and pieces of cultures within the Roman sphere, religious, kit, etc)
That's something of a touch back to Noah's closing - to return to our integrationist unifying ideology.
During the rise of the Roman Empire auxiliaries would risk their blood and their lives for Roman law and Roman citizenship and their children would be considered true Romans. One generation. Romans were ethno-centric snobs, but if you shared values, cultural capital and language, you could be blond or black-skinned and still be a Roman.
Yes- of course first of all I would center a take-away on Roman approach as compared to their contemporaries - e.g. the Greek Polis where integration was de jure impossible and de facto quasi impossible.
Really key to long-term Roman success was that integrationism.
The fit to modern era can't be perfect but it makes a bozo using Roman Helmet as his moniker just even dumber given the strength of Roman system over time -and it's also a somewhat vaguely relevant point for modern Democracy - meltiing potism but with a large dollop of blending (promiscuous borrowing of any cutlural aspects within empire and just making it Roman)
(of course also not understood intellectually by themselves but turning the Med basin into a huge free trade zone comparatively safe for commerce was a great win too).
What the Roman system required was proven loyalty typically in the form of a) long-term military service, or b) literal slavery followed by manumission.
And both of those paths typically required a certain level of cultural integration and reciprocity on the would-be citizen.
I'm assuming that is what Helmet guy is implicitly relying on when he says you should be loyal to all Americans.
In America today, there really isn't any equivalent. How do you distinguish between a would-be immigrant that wants to integrate and embraces a reciprocal loyalty, versus one that doesn't? What about those that just want the economic opportunity that comes with being American?
My sense is that modern America is too culturally diffuse and ill-defined to even give immigrants a good target for integration. And to extent that it is not, it is either too thin to be compelling, or we are sharply divided.
Civic nationalism requires something of substance to latch on to, and we don't have it anymore. The Right's version relies at least somewhat on a type of blood and soil nationalism that is inherently limiting, and the Left's version is so watered down that the only thing we have in common is some mealy-mouthed platitudes and the fact that we're all under the same institutions and jurisdiction.
Corporate profits are inherently bad... while we don't have good healthcare and a decent social safety net.
It's a statement of prioritization.
In Amsterdam, a McDonald's burger flipper gets 20 paid vacation days a year, health insurance, and mandatory paid parental leave.
This wasn't the Dutch saying, "WE WANT TO BURN DOWN MCDONALD'S, BREAK UP THE GOLDEN ARCHES and DISTRIBUTE THAT GOLD TO THE DUTCH PROLETARIAT!"
It was the Dutch saying, "The priority is that Dutch workers anywhere in the Netherlands get to have health insurance, paid vacations, and parental leave.... THEN the priority is corporate profits."
The entrenched defense by groups like the Atlas foundation and the Chamber of Commerce against the idea that there is any obligation by rich people to the wider society of country of their existence has pushed people against the idea of stakeholder obligated capitalism.
Even Milton Friedman, that avowed Marxist, suggested that there needed to be a negative income tax and basic social services.
Respectfully, it seems that you are just asserting that the ends justify the means of it means getting to your your preferred state of X.
Where X in this case is a very specific type and scope of welfare state.
As Fallingknife states, we have a solid healthcare and social safety net. And our tax and redistribution system is arguably more progressive than many European countries, though the topic is complex.
This is one of those posts that really states the obvious for anyone not in the constantly online activist shrieking wars. My wife is an immigrant, her whole family are immigrants, all of my friends are immigrants and even though they are all quite lefty coded progressives if I say something like “you know the great thing about America is that anyone can come here and bring their culture and their talents to the country and become a part of the whole community” they think it’s the most uncontroversial thing in the world. This is an ideology that I think is so deeply embedded in our culture that it seems odd to have to defend it. It’s certainly a perspective that I grew up with in a conservative Christian church going household. It’s always been the bedrock of my perspective on American culture and one of the things I am most proud about our civilization.
It's also the most successful ideology of the 18th and 19th centuries. On July 4th I'm carrying an American flag with 13 stars, not the flag where the stars are replaced by 250.
This is the clearest thing I've read on the question in a long while. You found the wall the whole house leans on — that nationalism cracks the moment it has to say who counts — and you pushed.
As someone who migrated with his family young, I read this from inside the question Balaji and RHG are fighting over, not above it.
We are the cautionary tale you name in passing. Worth a longer look.
The Levant held everyone once. Sunni and Shia. Alawite, Druze, the Christians who had been there since before the Arabs came, Jews in Aleppo whose families predated half of Europe. One cloth. The Ottomans kept it whole for four centuries — not from tolerance, nothing so modern as that, but because the story on offer was large enough to seat a stranger. Damascus did not ask your sect before it sold you bread.
Then it tore.
From the inside first, years before any foreign army bothered to cross a border. It started the day an ordinary man stood at the well and wondered whether the water was theirs or ours. That was all. That was enough.
You call it Middle-Easternization, and you borrow the word for America. Fair. But it was never a thing we caught from outside. It is just what a mixed country turns into when it stops telling itself a story wide enough to cover the people it hasn't learned to love yet.
The story is the whole of it. Roosevelt understood that. We mislaid ours somewhere, and the bill is still coming in — we are not done burying.
A nation is a sentence its people agree to go on saying. Stop saying it and see what fills the quiet.
The Ottoman system was complex and we'd strongly object to its particular forms of inequality and integrative failures today, but the general point stands.
How quickly are you replacing components of the ship, and are they integrating into the main structure? That is what determines if the ship is a well-functioning coherent whole, or just a jerry-rigged mess that is barely staying afloat.
Modern America seems to be drifting closer to the latter. And it is worth contrasting that with what FDR had to work with.
By the time WW2 rolled around, America had ~15 years of effectively no immigration. The 1924 Immigration Act closed the doors and gave the USA about a generation to integrate the descendants of the prior waves into a cohesive whole. FDR's civic nationalism success relied on this as a foundation and then built upon it.
Modern America probably warrants strong border control, limiting abuse of the asylum and refugee systems, and a reduction of legal immigration levels and/or a tuning for high net positive immigrants with some meaningful selection for integratability — at least for a generation or so. Combine that with a collective push towards civic nationalism.
There are two Americas, and I don’t mean North and South. There is the America that is my neighborhood, my local community, and, in general, the area associated with where we go out to dinner, see a movie, or go to the beach.
The daily machinations of national politics, anti-Trumpers, and pro-Trumpers don’t really exist in my daily activities. The only place I see this play out daily is in Noah’s column, CNN or MS Now, on the pages of the NY Times or WAPO, at The Dispatch. Not at my local ACME, or liquor store, I go to buy my Vodka for my dirty martinis and wine for my wife.
Let’s be clear where the struggle Noah is talking about goes on. It is not in much of anybody’s daily life, except if you are involved in the daily struggle between our political parties. If you are a purveyor of a particular ideology, it is how to make money, part of the grift of the political industrial complex, you live the stupid argument I was forced to read between two idiots.
One is a grifter looking for approval and money, the other is looking for meaning in life after accomplishing something that turns out to be vapid. Making a fortune is great; you never have to worry about paying bills or finding food and shelter. So he likely feels that, since he made a fortune, his thoughts are worth the world's consideration. He is looking for meaning that money cannot provide. The other is a bomb-throwing grifter, a NASCAR crash; it is the latest form of empty rhetoric that will never make the pages of any history book.
It is said that only about 10% of the public follow politics at all. That very few people like me, read two papers, watch some 24-hour news in the background, and follow three newsletters. Listen to a couple of political podcasts.
Americans do not think about the world they exist in daily as liberal nationalism, or liberal capitalist democracy, or post-liberal nationalism. This doesn’t mean that our politics doesn’t infect their minds. Of it does.
Here is the crux of the problem. We Americans know who we are, it is the political industrial complex that no interest in what Americans think except in formulating the latest populist inclination. Our politics runs on hatred, both teams run their fundraising on hatred and fear. The other side is coming for you and your family. Danger, warnings, fear, hatred, bigotry, antisemitism, racism, nationalism, socialism...You can go down the list, and it is all being used to generate funds for the parties' quest for power.
It is about gaining power, but to no end. Both parties believe that at some point, they will win this war and will have all the power in the world and turn the country's economy into whatever “ism” they desire at the moment. All this while, America is asking the two parties to work together, to compromise, to fix what is broken.
That cannot happen in American politics today. Sadly, my neighbors and I could probably come up with a list of things we think are American ideals. Charity, helping your neighbor, and individual freedom to live your life as you pursue happiness. Americans understand freedom of speech, freedom of the press, they understand that racism is wrong, and they don’t like skin color to be anything other than melanin.
Largely speaking, conservatives have rejected the idea of victimology that has pervaded the politics of the left. Everybody in America largely understands that you have to work, that work is good. They understand that you have become educated. Whether it is how plumbing works or the physics required to run a nuclear reactor. We understand that there are people in the world who want to kill Americans. But the only person on the planet who thinks Canadians are a threat to America is the lunatic living in the White House.
FDR, is a problematic person to emulate. He was a good communicator, but all he did was to throw socialist ideas at the wall while trying to feed the country during the depression. Most of us would have tried many of the ideas with our economy broken but they all were about the Government becoming the great father to its citizens.
America has a large social safety net, much like Europe. It is what the citizens have asked for. The biggest difference is that we have the freedom to make money; we had a less structured class system that infected Europe. Fewer regulations initially. Today, the left is calling for a new economy. For FDRs vision of the government directing the economy. The problem for the left is the government is largely incapable of directing the economy.
It is pretty good at redistribution, and the Left is asking for more. The difference is, of course, taxes. Currently, the Left is serving up a lie: tax the rich, and you will be shown will money from the heavens. Our deficit and debt have reached a critical point. Everybody will have to pay more in taxes, and that will be only to pay the interest on our debt.
This was the biggest appeal to Obama 2008 for me, he talked in the tradition of liberal nationalism that people like me where (and still am) hungry to hear.
"The reason American policy is insane right now is because the country is being torn apart."
So the country is being torn apart but we are not in a civil war yet because I guess we don't have wholesale mass
murder. Seems like it is only a matter of time in the most violent country in the developed world that we get to the real war part of it. Given how much both sides hate each other. Liberal nationalism seems like. a made up term as well.
It’s a joke. A lot of centrist consultants for the DNC are trying to salvage Israel’s reputation and restore allegiance to Israel as a litmus test for getting elected.
.... non-sequitor. Motivation has fuck all to do with my observation. I question the facticity. And lest you misframe, I am not a D and never have been, don't really give many fucks about "DNC" however you made an assertion that doesn't seem well attached to visible facts.
Note that the Continent that became America was first populated by Immigrants. No humans lived on the Continent until Evolution brought them here. We are all here because of these first Immigrants.
A) Folks, what is missing is a decent “conservative” nationalism. Need to look at leadership rather than the positions of random online shriekers. Most, if not all, of the Democrat leadership’s positions are middle of the road classic American apple pie and Emma Lazarus nationalism. The leadership on the right though is advancing a force and cruelty agenda and one that undermines public confidence in expertise, the scientific method, and authoritative institutions. There just is almost no evidence that leadership of the Democrats is advancing any version of America that is corrosive to responsible self-government.
B) It is a problem that anyone like RHG has a platform at all. Cost-free, filter-free publication access is a bad idea in theory and a bad idea in practice. No reason to think that it would not be corrosive to society and responsible self government, and the empirical evidence is not good! In other words, there was no reason to think it would be a good idea not to insist on exactly the same standards of behavior online as offline — and the failure to do so has been predictably corrosive in practice.
According to a slim majority of most of the criteria and polled people on that interesting chart, Melania Trump would have trouble being recognized as a real American, for starters.
Excellent overall article
As a minor ironic side thought, a guy using the name Roman Helmet Guy arguing for exclusionary blood-and-soilish nationalism (if not directly and not in such words but dancing up to it) is bizarrely wrong-headed on symbolism given the success of the Roman empire as compared to other classical ones was its integrationism - one could unlike other classical states 'become a Roman' (and climb up post first gen) - right up to Emperor see the Libyan Severans... (and equally Rome's quite promiscuous openess to coopting bits and pieces of cultures within the Roman sphere, religious, kit, etc)
That's something of a touch back to Noah's closing - to return to our integrationist unifying ideology.
During the rise of the Roman Empire auxiliaries would risk their blood and their lives for Roman law and Roman citizenship and their children would be considered true Romans. One generation. Romans were ethno-centric snobs, but if you shared values, cultural capital and language, you could be blond or black-skinned and still be a Roman.
Yes- of course first of all I would center a take-away on Roman approach as compared to their contemporaries - e.g. the Greek Polis where integration was de jure impossible and de facto quasi impossible.
Really key to long-term Roman success was that integrationism.
The fit to modern era can't be perfect but it makes a bozo using Roman Helmet as his moniker just even dumber given the strength of Roman system over time -and it's also a somewhat vaguely relevant point for modern Democracy - meltiing potism but with a large dollop of blending (promiscuous borrowing of any cutlural aspects within empire and just making it Roman)
(of course also not understood intellectually by themselves but turning the Med basin into a huge free trade zone comparatively safe for commerce was a great win too).
What the Roman system required was proven loyalty typically in the form of a) long-term military service, or b) literal slavery followed by manumission.
And both of those paths typically required a certain level of cultural integration and reciprocity on the would-be citizen.
I'm assuming that is what Helmet guy is implicitly relying on when he says you should be loyal to all Americans.
In America today, there really isn't any equivalent. How do you distinguish between a would-be immigrant that wants to integrate and embraces a reciprocal loyalty, versus one that doesn't? What about those that just want the economic opportunity that comes with being American?
My sense is that modern America is too culturally diffuse and ill-defined to even give immigrants a good target for integration. And to extent that it is not, it is either too thin to be compelling, or we are sharply divided.
Civic nationalism requires something of substance to latch on to, and we don't have it anymore. The Right's version relies at least somewhat on a type of blood and soil nationalism that is inherently limiting, and the Left's version is so watered down that the only thing we have in common is some mealy-mouthed platitudes and the fact that we're all under the same institutions and jurisdiction.
" corporate profits are inherently bad."
This is a reach.
Corporate profits are inherently bad... while we don't have good healthcare and a decent social safety net.
It's a statement of prioritization.
In Amsterdam, a McDonald's burger flipper gets 20 paid vacation days a year, health insurance, and mandatory paid parental leave.
This wasn't the Dutch saying, "WE WANT TO BURN DOWN MCDONALD'S, BREAK UP THE GOLDEN ARCHES and DISTRIBUTE THAT GOLD TO THE DUTCH PROLETARIAT!"
It was the Dutch saying, "The priority is that Dutch workers anywhere in the Netherlands get to have health insurance, paid vacations, and parental leave.... THEN the priority is corporate profits."
The entrenched defense by groups like the Atlas foundation and the Chamber of Commerce against the idea that there is any obligation by rich people to the wider society of country of their existence has pushed people against the idea of stakeholder obligated capitalism.
Even Milton Friedman, that avowed Marxist, suggested that there needed to be a negative income tax and basic social services.
We have excellent healthcare and social safety nets. Not perfect, but near the best in the world.
...As long as we don't count cost/access to health insurance, parental leave, and paid time off as part of "healthcare" or "the social safety net"
PTO and parental leave are not part of healthcare and social safety nets.
Respectfully, it seems that you are just asserting that the ends justify the means of it means getting to your your preferred state of X.
Where X in this case is a very specific type and scope of welfare state.
As Fallingknife states, we have a solid healthcare and social safety net. And our tax and redistribution system is arguably more progressive than many European countries, though the topic is complex.
This is one of those posts that really states the obvious for anyone not in the constantly online activist shrieking wars. My wife is an immigrant, her whole family are immigrants, all of my friends are immigrants and even though they are all quite lefty coded progressives if I say something like “you know the great thing about America is that anyone can come here and bring their culture and their talents to the country and become a part of the whole community” they think it’s the most uncontroversial thing in the world. This is an ideology that I think is so deeply embedded in our culture that it seems odd to have to defend it. It’s certainly a perspective that I grew up with in a conservative Christian church going household. It’s always been the bedrock of my perspective on American culture and one of the things I am most proud about our civilization.
It's also the most successful ideology of the 18th and 19th centuries. On July 4th I'm carrying an American flag with 13 stars, not the flag where the stars are replaced by 250.
This is the clearest thing I've read on the question in a long while. You found the wall the whole house leans on — that nationalism cracks the moment it has to say who counts — and you pushed.
As someone who migrated with his family young, I read this from inside the question Balaji and RHG are fighting over, not above it.
We are the cautionary tale you name in passing. Worth a longer look.
The Levant held everyone once. Sunni and Shia. Alawite, Druze, the Christians who had been there since before the Arabs came, Jews in Aleppo whose families predated half of Europe. One cloth. The Ottomans kept it whole for four centuries — not from tolerance, nothing so modern as that, but because the story on offer was large enough to seat a stranger. Damascus did not ask your sect before it sold you bread.
Then it tore.
From the inside first, years before any foreign army bothered to cross a border. It started the day an ordinary man stood at the well and wondered whether the water was theirs or ours. That was all. That was enough.
You call it Middle-Easternization, and you borrow the word for America. Fair. But it was never a thing we caught from outside. It is just what a mixed country turns into when it stops telling itself a story wide enough to cover the people it hasn't learned to love yet.
The story is the whole of it. Roosevelt understood that. We mislaid ours somewhere, and the bill is still coming in — we are not done burying.
A nation is a sentence its people agree to go on saying. Stop saying it and see what fills the quiet.
Keep saying yours.
Well said, almost to the point of being poetry.
The Ottoman system was complex and we'd strongly object to its particular forms of inequality and integrative failures today, but the general point stands.
This is fundamentally a Ship of Theseus problem.
How quickly are you replacing components of the ship, and are they integrating into the main structure? That is what determines if the ship is a well-functioning coherent whole, or just a jerry-rigged mess that is barely staying afloat.
Modern America seems to be drifting closer to the latter. And it is worth contrasting that with what FDR had to work with.
By the time WW2 rolled around, America had ~15 years of effectively no immigration. The 1924 Immigration Act closed the doors and gave the USA about a generation to integrate the descendants of the prior waves into a cohesive whole. FDR's civic nationalism success relied on this as a foundation and then built upon it.
Modern America probably warrants strong border control, limiting abuse of the asylum and refugee systems, and a reduction of legal immigration levels and/or a tuning for high net positive immigrants with some meaningful selection for integratability — at least for a generation or so. Combine that with a collective push towards civic nationalism.
There are two Americas, and I don’t mean North and South. There is the America that is my neighborhood, my local community, and, in general, the area associated with where we go out to dinner, see a movie, or go to the beach.
The daily machinations of national politics, anti-Trumpers, and pro-Trumpers don’t really exist in my daily activities. The only place I see this play out daily is in Noah’s column, CNN or MS Now, on the pages of the NY Times or WAPO, at The Dispatch. Not at my local ACME, or liquor store, I go to buy my Vodka for my dirty martinis and wine for my wife.
Let’s be clear where the struggle Noah is talking about goes on. It is not in much of anybody’s daily life, except if you are involved in the daily struggle between our political parties. If you are a purveyor of a particular ideology, it is how to make money, part of the grift of the political industrial complex, you live the stupid argument I was forced to read between two idiots.
One is a grifter looking for approval and money, the other is looking for meaning in life after accomplishing something that turns out to be vapid. Making a fortune is great; you never have to worry about paying bills or finding food and shelter. So he likely feels that, since he made a fortune, his thoughts are worth the world's consideration. He is looking for meaning that money cannot provide. The other is a bomb-throwing grifter, a NASCAR crash; it is the latest form of empty rhetoric that will never make the pages of any history book.
It is said that only about 10% of the public follow politics at all. That very few people like me, read two papers, watch some 24-hour news in the background, and follow three newsletters. Listen to a couple of political podcasts.
Americans do not think about the world they exist in daily as liberal nationalism, or liberal capitalist democracy, or post-liberal nationalism. This doesn’t mean that our politics doesn’t infect their minds. Of it does.
Here is the crux of the problem. We Americans know who we are, it is the political industrial complex that no interest in what Americans think except in formulating the latest populist inclination. Our politics runs on hatred, both teams run their fundraising on hatred and fear. The other side is coming for you and your family. Danger, warnings, fear, hatred, bigotry, antisemitism, racism, nationalism, socialism...You can go down the list, and it is all being used to generate funds for the parties' quest for power.
It is about gaining power, but to no end. Both parties believe that at some point, they will win this war and will have all the power in the world and turn the country's economy into whatever “ism” they desire at the moment. All this while, America is asking the two parties to work together, to compromise, to fix what is broken.
That cannot happen in American politics today. Sadly, my neighbors and I could probably come up with a list of things we think are American ideals. Charity, helping your neighbor, and individual freedom to live your life as you pursue happiness. Americans understand freedom of speech, freedom of the press, they understand that racism is wrong, and they don’t like skin color to be anything other than melanin.
Largely speaking, conservatives have rejected the idea of victimology that has pervaded the politics of the left. Everybody in America largely understands that you have to work, that work is good. They understand that you have become educated. Whether it is how plumbing works or the physics required to run a nuclear reactor. We understand that there are people in the world who want to kill Americans. But the only person on the planet who thinks Canadians are a threat to America is the lunatic living in the White House.
FDR, is a problematic person to emulate. He was a good communicator, but all he did was to throw socialist ideas at the wall while trying to feed the country during the depression. Most of us would have tried many of the ideas with our economy broken but they all were about the Government becoming the great father to its citizens.
America has a large social safety net, much like Europe. It is what the citizens have asked for. The biggest difference is that we have the freedom to make money; we had a less structured class system that infected Europe. Fewer regulations initially. Today, the left is calling for a new economy. For FDRs vision of the government directing the economy. The problem for the left is the government is largely incapable of directing the economy.
It is pretty good at redistribution, and the Left is asking for more. The difference is, of course, taxes. Currently, the Left is serving up a lie: tax the rich, and you will be shown will money from the heavens. Our deficit and debt have reached a critical point. Everybody will have to pay more in taxes, and that will be only to pay the interest on our debt.
This was the biggest appeal to Obama 2008 for me, he talked in the tradition of liberal nationalism that people like me where (and still am) hungry to hear.
Best thing you’ve written in a while in contrast to your recent ideological anti trump screeds.
"The reason American policy is insane right now is because the country is being torn apart."
So the country is being torn apart but we are not in a civil war yet because I guess we don't have wholesale mass
murder. Seems like it is only a matter of time in the most violent country in the developed world that we get to the real war part of it. Given how much both sides hate each other. Liberal nationalism seems like. a made up term as well.
And the first item on the agenda is unconditionally supporting Israel.
I don't unconditionally support any country, including the United States.
It’s a joke. A lot of centrist consultants for the DNC are trying to salvage Israel’s reputation and restore allegiance to Israel as a litmus test for getting elected.
Are they?
I don't see this visible at all.
It seems to me Israel Obsessives of both Pro and Anti factions extremely overweight Israel
Personally rather tired of both.
There’s a lot of contributors who might be inclined to cut off support if the Democrats abandon support for Israel. That’s the motivation.
.... non-sequitor. Motivation has fuck all to do with my observation. I question the facticity. And lest you misframe, I am not a D and never have been, don't really give many fucks about "DNC" however you made an assertion that doesn't seem well attached to visible facts.
Note that the Continent that became America was first populated by Immigrants. No humans lived on the Continent until Evolution brought them here. We are all here because of these first Immigrants.
A) Folks, what is missing is a decent “conservative” nationalism. Need to look at leadership rather than the positions of random online shriekers. Most, if not all, of the Democrat leadership’s positions are middle of the road classic American apple pie and Emma Lazarus nationalism. The leadership on the right though is advancing a force and cruelty agenda and one that undermines public confidence in expertise, the scientific method, and authoritative institutions. There just is almost no evidence that leadership of the Democrats is advancing any version of America that is corrosive to responsible self-government.
B) It is a problem that anyone like RHG has a platform at all. Cost-free, filter-free publication access is a bad idea in theory and a bad idea in practice. No reason to think that it would not be corrosive to society and responsible self government, and the empirical evidence is not good! In other words, there was no reason to think it would be a good idea not to insist on exactly the same standards of behavior online as offline — and the failure to do so has been predictably corrosive in practice.
Good luck in Albanian Noah!
Excellent piece, Noah. Thank you.
According to a slim majority of most of the criteria and polled people on that interesting chart, Melania Trump would have trouble being recognized as a real American, for starters.
Yes!!! 100% you nailed it, for me! I absolutely love your writing!! Well done.