So. The first post of this latest in the venerable tradition of ex-pat blogs was going to be on the theme of cabinetry. We will have to wait for that. Some friends encouraged this blog into existence, and I thought, "OK, I'll do a third millennium woman-feminist American abroad with the mechanisms of empire Mark Twain in Europe kind of thing." And, Dear America, you are making it way too easy.
One of the essays I used to teach in Comp 101 at several universities was by Twain who, after reading his recently delivered newspapers in Paris, implored the good people of the state of Missouri not to engage in the popular sport of lynching humans. This was somewhere around 1905. The good people of the state of Missouri did not listen to the famous son, and I don't expect you to listen either, America, for all the same reasons Twain was pretty sure humans were irredeemable as a species. Because, you know, you (we) keep doing unbelievably stupid and cruel things, it seems, for the fun of it.
Let's talk about Islamophobia, mosques, the flood in Pakistan, and the winning of hearts and minds. If you think the peoples of Middle East and Central Asia are not paying attention to your shenanigans, you are frighteningly naive. If you think that burning piles of the Qu'ran and a mosque here and there are turning moderate Muslims into the kind of friends abroad who trust the American people and consequently believe that American foreign policy might do the right thing -- you are patently out of your minds. I know you want to feel better, and that in America feeling better often means making someone or some group you don't know much about feel really awful and afraid of you, but it is time to grow the hell up.
Twain asked the good people of Missouri to be more morally righteous than the good people of Georgia and Mississippi and California. He appealed to their much vaunted Christianity. I am going to ask you to be adults. Just adults. Not morally righteous, or good examples of Christ's love for the needy and the stranger. I ask merely for grown ups who handle fear and confusion by learning a thing or two and who can handle the responsibility of living in a religiously plural society by honoring the very pluralism that allows each of you to practice your faith, build your houses of worship, and generally not fear a mob or sneaky coward of some other faith are going to drive you into the proverbial desert. It's called courtesy, and it is a basic American value we haven't talked about in a long, long time.
I realize that this opening salvo will not make me many friends among the camps and hordes who enjoy their fear and anger. I don't really want your friendship. I don't like you. I just want your ear, for just a sec. I'll thank you for your patience, as I am not the subtle subversive that Twain was.
These gestures of economic frustration (they're more common in recessions than when we're feeling flush), these acts of violent suspicion, this blanket assumption that a Muslim is a terrorist in the offing -- is a self-fulfilling prophesy and a play right into the closed fist of our real enemies who practice bad faith. The real bad guys are not good Muslims, as most good Muslims will gladly tell you. They're angry, power hungry, murderous, destroyers of the very possibility of a thriving, happy, contented Muslim world. The bad guys are sowers of chaos fed with rage.
And they are highly organized. Remember that.
In the absence of charity for the 20 million odd people of Pakistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are stepping right in with food, medicine, relocation, and protection for the people they can reach. They have learned a lesson or two from Hammas,* which does a great job of providing for the people of Lebanon, thereby securing their loyalty. And, not being the sorts of civilized folk who need a lot of the much missed infrastructure to get around, the bad guys in Pakistan are helping quite a few. Also, they can afford the $8 USD it costs to buy a water purifier that would let Pakistanis drink right out of the Indus river and not die a slow death from dysentery. And so, my fellow citizens, can you. But you're not, not in a way that will get the attention of the good Muslims suffering and watching the suffering.
This is bad news for us geopolitically. It's bad strategy to let this happen.
Now, tell me: to whom, after the devastation of your tiny farm that barely supported your family as it was, do you transfer your loyalty? The person or group who saves your kid from cholera and malaria. The person or group who brings you water, or a mule, or some bedding. That's who. That group should be us--along with the British and French people who are doling out money they can't spare in the recession either at a really holy and grown up rate. But the US, our good citizens seem to be punishing the people of Pakistan for the hypothetical mis-actions of their government. Nice. Real grown ups we.
We should have the facts on the mosque/community center in NY, on its creators, on their vision of its purpose. It's to be an interfaith center, is being established by exactly the kind of moderate Muslim we've been wishing would be more active in the US and abroad, and is in fact not even visible from the former site the World Trade Center. We should be grown up enough to know that, and to know that whenever you hear only what strokes your ego or confirms your fear from your leaders ... you are being distracted from the truth if not lied to outright. That's what grown ups are supposed to know.
We are also supposed to be grown up enough to remember that the Constitution does not apply to some of us, but all of us, and that if it were to apply only to some of us then some of you would be on the wrong side of it, too. And that thought, if no care for your fellow citizens, should be enough to scare you away from burning other people's holy books or their houses of worship or letting them starve after nature stomped all over their lives. It would seem that to many of us, that thought is not occurring.
More's the pity. Here's our collective chance to do some citizens in the US a good turn, to be bigger than our pain and fear, like grown ups. Here's a chance to give an unforgettable gift of charity to millions of Muslims and thereby prove to a billion people that we just want to get the bad guys, not all of the of Muslim world, and thereby get more of them on our side. Which is winning hearts and minds, which is good strategy in this situation, which is what grown ups do. Because doing so gets you lots and lots of good press all over the world, and lessens the chance that the bad guys can lie about us to frustrated, angry, scared people all over their corner of the planet.
But, if you prefer to throw your tantrum, don't be surprised when it blows up in your face in two, or ten, for twenty years.
One of my sharpest memories after 9-11 was of being in a bar in Dallas with some friends after dinner. Two strapping young men near us were getting a little sauced and smack talking slogans like, "Get those terrorists!," "Let's kick their ass!" I turned and looked at them and asked one question, "Are you going to join up and go fight?" They informed me that they had no intention of signing up to express their patriotism. My response, "Then shut the fuck up. Other American's will be over there dying for you."
And that's the other reason I really want America to grow up. These little fits of childish anxiety will not make the sacrifice of our citizens one bit less necessary or unlikely. For the love of country, people, grow up.
Update: This from the New York Times notes the mourning and alienation of the very kinds of people we need and should want to be neighbors to, to work with, to welcome.
*Note: Two days later, my mind reminds me that I was not thinking Hammas in the West Bank, but of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rather a crucial difference. My apologies.
