The ghost town vividly illustrated the difference between my grandmother’s traditions, which insist on keeping things as they are, and American traditions, which continuously innovate. The American mind seeks new, better, and more efficient means of cooking, washing, and finding fuel, the most basic and most universal activities of human life. In my grandmother’s tradition people get stuck, almost imprisoned, by the cycle of finding food, preparing it, and eating it. I can’t think of anything useful a Somali man or woman ever invented to make that cycle easier.
Even this long-abandoned ghost town in the no-man’s-land between Nevada and California contained relatively more luxury than my mother’s house did. Moving from that town back to L.A., I saw how incredibly fast the early settlers in America had moved forward, how swift their progress had been.
A couple of months before my Vegas trip I was back on the East Coast, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Wim Pijbes, and the Corporation of Tulip Breeders had proposed to hold a small ceremony in my honor. I was to be given a hundred Black Tulip bulbs as a symbol of (so Pijbes explained) diversity in the Netherlands. I invited some of my closest American friends, and Pijbes invited a few Dutch visitors. I mentioned that Chris DeMuth had a weakness for the artist Vermeer. Coincidentally the Met had just mounted as complete an exhibition of Vermeers as they could find.
Chris was late, but I went down to see the paintings, led by Pijbes. We paused for some time in front of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. Pijbes went into an in-depth explanation about the genius contained in that small painting: the precision, lights, colors, shadows, and the choice of a milkmaid as a subject. But as I stared at it what struck me was the room; it was poor, dark, and small. Many rooms in the neighborhoods of my youth were just as small.
After the short tour of the exhibition I got into a conversation with another of the Dutch visitors. I was disappointed to hear her recite the usual prejudices about Americans being plat. This is a very difficult word to translate; it means something like “plebeian,” unrefined and with little or no history of art or proper culture. In this view everything in American culture is pop, if not pap, and produced for the masses. Certainly much nonsense passes for culture in the United States, including an obsession with celebrities of all kinds. But that is scarcely representative of the vast wealth of extraordinary art, literature, and music produced by Americans in the almost two and a half centuries of the country’s existence.
As a stranger to America I often find myself excluded from conversations because so many references are made to musicals and movies I have never heard of. Once in Boston while chatting with friends, I let slip that I did not understand some of the cultural references in the conversation we were having about prejudice. “Did you ever see South Pacific?” one friend asked. For some reason it sounded familiar, but I had not. (It is typical that a lot of American references sound familiar but really are not.) She and her husband promptly invited me to join them in New York to see it.
A love story in wartime told on stage with songs and acting that left you more cheerful than if you had been to a comedy, South Pacific enchanted me. It was a relief too, after European opera. Opera’s love stories almost always end unhappily, even though the lovers are accompanied to their doom by the most splendid music. By contrast, couples in American musicals can sing and dance their way around massive issues like war and racism, only to end the love story on a happy note. At the end of the show I found myself humming the tune “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
This show and the conversations that followed gave me a window into America’s seemingly endless struggle with the issue of race. More than any number of sermons from politicians or pundits, such songs designed for mass consumption served to weaken racial prejudice by ridiculing it.
Another couple took me to Leonard Bernstein’s ninetieth-birthday-gala concert in New York. I was a little embarrassed to admit that I did not know who Bernstein was. No problem, they said in unison. Tonight will be a good introduction. One of the performances that intrigued me was by a couple of poorly dressed teenagers who imitate an encounter with their neighborhood policeman and then sing about it:
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringin’ up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks,
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!
After the show I asked my friends about that song with the teenagers. They were astonished. “Haven’t you seen West Side Story?” Just a few days later I was watching it on DVD and savoring the swings that the lyricist took at the soft psychology that talked teenage delinquents into believing that they were “victims of society.” I also heard for the first time the unforgettable immigrants’ song, “America.” It is a conversation in song between men and women immigrants from Puerto Rico. Below are a few of the lines that I think are timeless; they also illustrate the different perspectives that people from the same place, indeed the same family, have on America. For the women it is a land of freedom and unlimited opportunity, for the homesick men a place of poverty and bigotry if you are not white.
I like to be in America …
Everything free in America….
Buying on credit is so nice.
One look at us and they charge twice.
I have my own washing machine.
What will you have, though, to keep clean? …
Industry boom in America.
Twelve in a room in America.
Lots of new housing with more space.
Lots of doors slamming in our face….
Life is all right in America.
If you’re all white in America.
Here you are free and you have pride.
Long as you stay on your own side.
Free to be anything you choose.
Free to wait tables and shine shoes.
Everywhere grime in America,
Organized crime in. America,
Terrible time in America….
I think I’ll go back to San Juan.
I know a boat you can get on.
Everyone there will give big cheer!
Everyone there will have moved here!
That dialogue still rings true today. For most immigrants, coming to America means exchanging a home plagued by joblessness, violence, and apathy for a new land where the alluring opportunities come packaged with residential grime, gangs, and organized crime.
By contrast, I have been exceedingly fortunate in having many of my American dreams realized almost on arrival. I have not only been to Las Vegas in the past year; I have been on a cruise to Alaska, where I saw high mountains, glaciers, bears both black and brown, and whales that sneezed meters of water straight into the air and then dove to show off their tail fins. At Thanksgiving another friend suggested, as if offering me a cup of tea, a ride on a four-wheeler on a Texas ranch. I ended up getting a riding lesson on a cowboy’s horse too. I have attended conferences at which the assortment of postprandial activities ranged from playing golf to tennis clinics to whitewater rafting.
I am lucky to have come here in the way I did. I am lucky to have the friends I have.
But that does not mean that I underestimate what it means to come to America as an illegal immigrant, sneaking across the Mexican border, or to be born in the inner cities of Chicago, L.A., or New York. On my visits to the Bronx I have seen that there are indeed pockets of America where people barely have enough food to eat, where girls get pregnant at thirteen, where teenage boys acquire guns all too easily and shoot one another, where school entrances need to be bulletproof and students need to pass through metal detectors. In some ghettos the life expectancy of a black boy is estimated to be only eighteen.
These are serious social and political problems, no doubt. In some cases they are clearly more serious than equivalent problems in European inner cities. But they are not problems that affect mainstream America the way such problems in Africa affect that continent.
What is it that makes America different from Europe and Africa? Clearly it is not just the homicide rate in poor black neighborhoods. To answer that question I need to take you with me to a wedding. In the Stanford Memorial Church in Palo Alto, California, a week before my fortieth birthday, I watched my friends Margaret and John get married.
At thirty-one, Margaret looked exquisite. John had the look of a man about to embark on a serious mission. I had never been to an all-American wedding before. In movies, it seemed to me, brides were always blonde and grooms always had dark hair. Margaret is blonde, John has dark hair, but beyond this nothing about their wedding was like the movies I watched. Weddings in movies are usually comedies: the priest messes up the vows (Four Weddings and a Funeral); the bride runs away (Runaway Bride); the parents get themselves in a fix (Meet the Parents). This, by contrast, was no comedy. The ceremony was impeccable. The food was plentiful and good, the wine excellent, the church breathtaking, the bride in her grandmother’s wedding dress had tears in her eyes, and the groom was visibly moved. Solemnly they took their vows. I quietly wondered if any human could keep such promises: “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
I was so stunned by the intensity of the service that I asked the female guest next to me, “This is pretty serious, isn’t it, for so young a couple?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Marriage has little to do with age and everything to do with family, and here in America family is serious.”
That day I learned that the core unit of American society is indeed the family. In theory, of course, the core unit in any truly free society is the individual, who is the starting point in a democratic constitution and in law. Individual responsibility is required and urged at all times. But pretty soon you realize that, to be happy and fulfilled, the individual must be embedded in a family. Americans are constantly asking after one another’s families. The American family is not as extended as in the clan culture I grew up in and not as tightly nuclear as the Dutch model. Nor is there any of the experimentation I encountered in the Netherlands.* In America I have met married couples, single people seeking to marry, engaged pairs on the point of marriage, and divorced ones who constantly talk about how to start the whole process afresh. Cohabitation, except in some circles, is not seen as a long-term option, and often couples who live together tend to be engaged. Only in New York does it seem acceptable to remain single on a long-term basis.
The other thing I learned at Stanford is that families are the building blocks of American society, for it is out of families that the communities grow that form the American nation. Margaret and John’s wedding exemplified for me so many of the characteristics of the United States I had come to appreciate.
America is a country with its own foundation myth, that of a new and virtuous republic, built in a virgin land by brave and hardy pioneers. This founding myth is told and retold in countless ways and through all available media, but for me the American wedding is the most powerful version. It is all there: the optimistic faith in the success of a new partnership; the lofty, Christian ideals and vows; and the patriotism that finds its way into every American family ritual. Most striking of all is the way so many American weddings epitomize the ideal of the unity of diverse peoples.
Margaret grew up in Colorado and is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the president of the United States from 1929 to 1933; her husband’s forebears came from Greece. The guests were even more diverse: the bridesmaids alone were of six different shades of color. In terms of class and religion, the guests ranged from local farmers to Stanford professors. There was not the faintest trace of snobbery. In the various speeches, this cocktail of races, religions, and classes was mentioned repeatedly with unconcealed pride. Look, they seemed to be saying to me, this is who we are: a family that welcomes all peoples who share our family values. That for me is America: a large family where anyone can belong, so long as you accept those values.
The big question, of course, is: What exactly are those values, and what if you do not accept them, or even take them seriously?
I admit I came to America full of African as well as European prejudices. One of those prejudices was that Americans were hypocrites when they lauded family values, particularly monogamy. In my first three years in America scarcely a month passed without some major public figure being exposed for cheating on his wife. The divorce rate seemed to bear out my suspicion that high-flown talk of family values in America was just that: talk.
But the United States is not utopia, and Americans do not aspire to be perfect. They aspire, above all, to be happy. And that means that if things don’t work out with a new venture, whether it is a marriage or a silver-mining town, Americans are much quicker than people from traditional societies to call it a day and move on, with as few hard feelings as possible.
What Americans are generally reluctant to do—and this is perhaps the most important difference between Americans and Europeans—is to call on the state (or “the government,” as Americans prefer to say) to help them out when things go wrong. They do it, of course, and never more readily than in a financial crisis like the one that struck when I was writing this book. But unlike Europeans, Americans feel instinctively that large-scale government intervention is wrong, is at best an emergency measure. In an ideal world Americans would form their families and firms, build their homes and workplaces, buy and sell their goods and services, go to a pizza place on Saturday and church on Sunday, and generally get on with their lives with the minimum amount of state interference.
That makes America a very different target indeed for the biggest challenge since Soviet Communism to confront the Western world: the threat of radical Islam.
*In Holland after the 1960s all sorts of new family models became fashionable: the Bewust Ongehuwde Moeder (the deliberately unmarried mother); the Bewust Ongehuwde Vader (the deliberately unmarried father); the Living-Apart-Together; the gay families, consisting of two lesbians and children of which one partner is the mother or gay men with adopted children; and the experimental communal families that vary in size and longevity but oppose the traditional family model of father-mother-children.
CHAPTER 10
Islam in America
The more I traveled around the United States, talking to people about my life, the more I was struck by other differences between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The American audiences clearly felt a sense of outrage at the injustices committed against girls, apostates, and infidels in the name of Islam, just as Europeans did, but Americans seemed much more interested in finding solutions, volunteering, mobilizing—and taking action.
On the other hand, although American audiences were hungry with curiosity—everywhere I went, people had to be turned away because the rooms were too small—they also seemed far less aware than Europeans of the problems that I was talking about.
To take one example: in Europe more or less everyone has heard about Muslim families who punish and murder women who trespass their boundaries of custom and faith. Such stories are featured regularly in the newspapers. P
eople in almost every European audience to which I have spoken had heard of at least one brutal murder of a young girl. Thus most European audiences already understand that Muslim immigrants create specific social problems in their countries and that they often involve the oppression of women on European soil. But in America I was constantly surprised that most people in my audiences perceive Islam as largely about foreign policy—an important question for America’s national security, maybe, but essentially about people living overseas.
Whenever I spoke, American listeners gasped in indignant surprise at the very concepts of child marriage, honor killing, and female excision. Rarely, if ever, did it occur to these audiences that many women and girls suffer precisely these kinds of oppression in houses and apartment buildings all over the United States.
Roughly 130 million women around the world have had their genitals cut. The operation is inflicted on an estimated six thousand little girls every day. If 98 percent of Somali women are cut, 95 percent of women from Mali, and 90 percent of Sudanese, how many women does that make in every subway car in New York, on every freeway in Colorado and Kansas? If 97 percent of Egyptian girls are genitally mutilated, what percentage of Egyptian girls born in the United States are cut? None? I don’t think so.* But my audiences couldn’t believe that.
I had encountered this kind of incredulity before, of course. Ten years earlier, when I began speaking out in Holland against genital mutilation, Dutch people were just as horrified as Americans to learn about it. I was constantly told that immigrants to Europe knew that this practice was against the law in Europe, so it just didn’t happen to children once they got to Holland. I did not believe that was true. In fact once I became a member of Parliament and helped to pass a law requiring the authorities to actually look into the situation, we confirmed that little girls’ genitals were being cut, without anesthetic, on kitchen tables in Rotterdam and Utrecht.