"One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish." -- Doctor Fagan, in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall.
It's a canard that 'there are no atheists in foxholes,' but an attendant one might be that there are no dissidents abroad. This is an observation so hoary it hardly bears repeating: once abroad, the faults of the native land vanish, the beauties bloom, and the old culture, which was so venal, repressive, and corrupt that you left it like a rocket, begins to be the sweetest honey in the hive. In fact, when abroad, one makes common cause with strangers, enemies, and weirdos, all because they come from the same place.
Y'all may find this hard to believe. Certainly I was shocked. But I was a "high school ambassador" in People to People way back in the 1970's. That's right: I represented you, and I would like to say I'm sorry. I apologize for any ill-will I created between our European allies and ourself (introducing the kid in Oxfordshire to Danish snuff was bad).
I was sixteen, angry, and more hormonal than a beauty parlor in August, and off I went to represent and stay in the homes of regular citizens of regular nations of Northern Europe. I went to the Netherlands, Denmark, France, the UK, and the Soviet Union, when Brezhnev was running the place. My favorite stop was Denmark, because I met my first great crush there, Dorte (if you're her, tell me).
While milling and mulling in sweaty crowds and doing my best to avoid my fellow ambassadors whose very breath embarrassed me, I would unfortunately speak English everywhere I went. I had only learned Latin in high school, but the ones of us who had learned French or Spanish were at least as useless and monoglot. The wide vowels and loud ash would inevitably attract attention. Other English speakers could hear "can" and "don't" and immediately know the country of origin, and the natives needn't distinguish so finely. Other Americans, like dogs with noses in the air, would be summoned from the corners of a crowd by "caaaaandy" or something similar, and approach.
"Where are you from?"
Atlanta.
"Really? We're from Iowa!"
That is a place to be.
"You should come visit."
I would walk away feeling, yes, yes I should go visit. They're just over in Iowa, after all. (Mercator's Projection becomes more and more fictional the farther and farther one gets from the need to travel.)
Meanwhile, although, at sixteen, I had put down, definitively, my tearful flag-loving stage (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's line that she loves "with my childhood's faith") and awakened to flaws and faults, I found myself having to speak for the United States. Had I been at home, I would have been a "No-Nukes" guy, but I was in Europe as the first major wave of anti-nuclear sentiment broke out after the introduction of the neutron bomb. (There's something about a bomb that explicitly announces that your country is going to be a battlefield that makes folks unhappy. At least the art will remain, and the winner gets the pretty buildings, Da!) Nixon, whom I hated, was now my problem, too. I even had to answer for Earl Butz!
When we went to the Soviet Union, it was even stranger. We had the usual "tour guides." Our guides were seventeen and twenty-one years old and members of the Party. They went with us everywhere, had wonderful English, and were extremely nice guys. The odds that they were KGB were high, I figured, but I didn't care. When we went to the gigantic store (back then, there was one), I wanted to get Marx and Lenin books, and the guide was very, very, very unhappy with me. I wasn't supposed to do that. I wasn't supposed to have a favorable opinion of socialism. At the Young Pioneers jamboree, we were supposed to ask these "hard questions" that we had been given, but I didn't give a fig about that. I was far, far, far more interested in the coping strategies of the people. At the Bolshoi, I watched the manners of the people, and that was fascinating. The average Russian seemed like the average American: a rural population suddenly made important, without any cultural maturation in between. (I was wrong.) The USSR was toward the end of our tour, and I had grown (grown independent, grown meaner, grown surly) by then, you see.
What I am writing about, if you can tolerate it for just a wee bit longer, is contemporary and political. I simply needed an illustration first, and I hope it wasn't too tiresome. (Yes, I could go thesis first, and then explanation, but let's call this French method and extend charity, please.)
When the Dutch and Danish (and French) protesters wanted to blame me for the bomb, I defended it. I was midway on the waves, and I defended a thing I neither understood nor supported. Note that I was the "weirdo" among our group, too. I was the "difficult" one. When the herd of us quite literally ran, at full speed through the Louvre to see the blinkin' Mona stinkin' Lisa and then ran, at even greater speed back out (complaining that there was "this big thing" in the stairway, which was the ), I told the chaperons that, from now on, the buddy system could eat itself, because I was going to look at the art.
I am not exaggerating, by the way. They ran through the Louvre. All I recall of the Louvre is a room stuffed with Cub Scouts.
I have been lucky enough to know many, many expatriots. I have known French, Belgian, English, Scottish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese.... you get the idea. Each suffers from the same phenomenon I described above. Dissent is very difficult abroad. One friend found himself apologizing for Mao, once, when he had been one of the Beijing University guys in Tienanmen Square!
You see, "we" -- the concept of "us" -- is fluid. Most people will respond to being called a "them" by sympathizing with, if not joining "them." Even in petty ways, it happens. I am an Episcopalian, and I am surrounded by Baptists. When one saw me with ashes on my forehead, she began screeching at me about the Catholics and how the Catholics worship Mary. Well, the bishop of Rome is no particular friend of mine, but what could I do? I stood firm to point out that no such thing takes place. Well, that fixed it forever: I'm a Catholic now, as far as she's concerned. Probably her whole church has it on good authority that I'm a Jesuit. (I can't wear black! I have an American Eskimo Dog.)
The "them" gets made, and the "we" gets made, too. Let's start with the really obvious example of how this plays out politically. It should not be news to anyone that there is no such thing as a Latino.
A person from Brazil and a person from Argentina represent different colonial experiences, different cultural development, different political perspectives, and a different recent history, but both become "Latino" if they move to the United States, and they will join the person from Northern Mexico, Southern Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, as well as the person from Puerto Rico and from Spain. After this room full of people is assembled, all under the banner of "Hispanic" or "Latino," demographers or pollsters will ask for the "Latino voters perspective" or "issues."
That's only moderately insane, isn't it?
What, then, about "white voters?" Are white voters one group? Do Irish immigrants, Swedish immigrants, Russian immigrants, and mixed up genealogy pale skinned women from Iowa want the same things? Those "angry white men" who decided the 2000 election: who were they? What did "white" mean? "Black" is even crazier, and it is rightly the subject of many books, as it contains not only a 'them' but a 'we' who possess counter-cultural power, a second round of power, a second round a resistance, etc.
I promised in my title to talk about the "we." Well, if you find yourself in the "gay vote" or the "female vote" or the "Black vote" or the "Hispanic vote," you may actually begin to lean toward the commonality offered to you. The outside force creates an inside force, if people allow it to.
The Republican Party was abetted in creating the "Hispanic voter" by the Democratic Party. The latter had a clumsy, Baby Huey-like stupidity toward the voters, while the former created the "invading illegal." In the last five years, though, the Republican Party has decided that a huge threat to the existence of Amurka is "creeping Sharia law." (Tim Murphy at Mother Jones has been keeping an eye on this, and it's alternatingly hilarious and horrific.) The fact that you haven't seen any Sharia law is proof of how well it's creeping. We all know it's what They want. Who are they? They are the Muslims. The Republican fringe has decided that "Islam" is their enemy.
Islam?
In this, the Republican Party agrees with and endorses al Qaeda by agreeing with Osama bin Laden that the whole world can be simplified (! medieval and renaissance scholars just hit their monitors with their foreheads) to all being about the reconquista. Aside from this, if we needed more sides, there are many other insults to sense.
Who practices Islam? Persians and Arabs practice Islam, and they do not get along well. Islam is growing among the African American population, which has no connection to Arabia or Persia. Northern African nations practice Islam, and they have been somewhat tepid or hostile to the "Caliphate" nations (seeing any of this as another colonialism). Sub-Saharan nations practice Islam, and their connection to the Middle East is vaporous. Western China has Islam, and it doesn't get along at all with its western neighbors. Afghanistan practices Islam, and it has historically gotten along poorly with everyone.
So, a wealthy family that fled with Shah Pahlevi and would love tax cuts is "Islam" and creeping sharia and religion of death, etc. A poor family that fled civil war in Africa and is trying to survive here is "Islam." A human rights refugee from one of the repressive Arab states is "Islam." All of these people, according to the Republican Party, are similarly enemies of the United States of America, similarly evil, and similarly fifth columnists. You and I see how insulting this is, how astonishing it is, but, as the man says, wait: there's more.
There are two things this does, at least. One is that it forces assimilating people, or their children (as we have, alas, seen) to defend policies that they would find reprehensible and identify with the old world when they had sometimes very decidedly left it. Another is that it creates the very voting block, the very cultural force that the GOP had been having wet nightmares about. Finally, it gives some sway to the Democratic Party for a brief and precious time.
If we on the left see this as simply a reflexive move, then we have learned nothing. If all we do is say, "Howdy, Imam, we don't hate you: vote Democratic!" then we're fools who do not deserve trust or votes. Islamic voters, having been created as an identity, will flee from the Republicans, but we must offer them an identity that is not oppositional. We need to learn the five pillars of Islam and point out the obvious -- that the left stands for sacrifice, duty, and charity. Of course, then we have to stand for it.
The actual danger to "them" is in accepting the Republican pressure. Had I had to answer for the crimes of the neutron bomb every day for long enough, I would probably have gotten jingoistic and invested in Hawaiian print shirts and cowboy hats. Just like the teabaggots today, the European population was angry and could not address its anger meaningfully. Unlike them, their anger was at least in the ballpark. But, like angry folks in general, any passing American could catch hell.
Ideally, we recognize that there is no such thing as an Islamic voter or "Islam in America." There are just people who are adding to our nation who practice that faith. Let us offer these people an American identity as individual and welcoming as they deserve, one that allows them to say, "Why are you talking about the Middle East, man? I'm from Michigan?" If we, as progressives, cannot interrupt every fatuous canned-ham-headed pollster and pundit who says "Islamic voters" or "Muslims in America" with "shhh!," then we must offer a positive identity, an identity of what the Islamic voter is (e.g. devoted to charity and justice) that will prevent yet another shattering of our society in the name of fear and racism.