Ugh. If this article was written about indigenous people in some developing country, good lefties would have (rightly) complained that it was insulting and othering, but when it’s the Amish, we have The New Republic writing about Amish kids playing baseball in a way that’s just insulting and it’s all good. Dude even makes fun of their accents and is too stupid to realize that it’s not just the Amish who talk all dutchified. And he sounds proud of himself for ignoring the tour guide (and seriously, tour buses to gawk at the Amish?) and snapping photos of Amish children even though it’s completely disrespectful of Amish beliefs and he’d just been told that (not to mention that it’s frikkin rude to take photos of people without their permission–they’re not animals at the zoo).
The only good that people like this guy serve is that it’s because of seeing people like that go to Pennsylvania Dutch country to gawk, and seeing how much my grandmother hated it, provided a great bad example for what not to do when I’m in a culture different than my own.