A comment about comments on Part One of "American Exceptionalism"..

Yes, I have great respect for and much agreement with the views of Hedges and Chomsky. My point was that there is a distrust of intellectuals in the American ethos today and truth-tellers like them are on the margins of political discourse, quite ignored by mass media. That wasn’t always the case, and there must be a more concerted effort among us to discuss the real state of the State.

Also, my apologies to all if my mentioning of rebellious intellectuals seemed like name-dropping. Perhaps other tales and names from the American experience will feel different. So, onward.

A young friend called last week—very agitated. He is an engineer working for a US multinational, high on the Fortune 500 list, and he’s “stationed” in a Southern state. He had gone to the optometrist near his house for an eye exam and perhaps new glasses. As he walked in for the appointment, the front office women accosted him with many giggles. One said, “Okay, we have this bet. She thinks you are Black, but not from around here. An’ I said, no you are not Black. You look Indian… many of you here these days. An’ your name doesn’t sound Black.”

While my friend was unnerved and angered by this friendly debate, he did confirm his Indian-ness. The irritated engineer happens to be a tall, sturdy, dark-skinned man from the Indian south. He went on to the eye exam. After all he was there, so why not?

After the exam was complete, said my friend, almost shouting into the phone, “You know what this eye-doctor said to me? He asked me if I would join him in saying a prayer together? How dare he? I said no way, settled my bill and got the hell outta there.”

“Is there anything you can do about this?” I asked. “I can't imagine any other country in the world—except maybe Iran or Israel, where a health-caregiver of any kind would make such an overture. You know the eye-guy was trying to save you the heathen from elsewhere. He wouldn’t have to if you were Black!”

“We’re trying to find where I can lodge a complaint.” My friend didn’t seem amused, or hopeful.

In any event, after this conversation I began to think of my own American experience and sifted through some events and times and people in order to seek out any exceptionality in that experience—starting at the beginning I suppose.

I arrived in Coastal California ten days before the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four young Black girls. I’ll never forget their names—Denise, Cynthia, Carole and Addie Mae. That evening, as I was muttering “What the hell am I doing here?”, I realized that I had missed by a week Dr. King’s Jobs and Freedom march on Washington and his speech at the nation’s capital. There was a fundamental contradiction in America playing out right in front of me from day one, and I was interested in seeing how deep was the conflict. In less than two months JFK was assassinated, and again I thought of getting out of Dodge. But after LBJ let loose the hounds of the Vietnam War, I decided to see what else would unfold in the months and years to come. And here I am.

To be sure, things have changed since 1963. Yet, from the West Coast to the East, from Maine to South Carolina, I have been asked some variation of this challenge to my identity: “No, no, where are you really from?” About 3 times a year, I’d say. The last two times the week before and the week after the November election—in restaurants near where I live.

A less frequent but more weighty question I have faced is one answer to that first query. That is, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” Neither of the two questions would surround a conversation between a Bostonian and a Texan. Why? We need to think. Thus, abstractions and truisms about “a nation of immigrants” annihilates the well-differentiated, dissimilar quality of the immigrant experience. In my years here, that experience is quite divergent and contradictory.

One way to probe this contradiction for me is to note that other than deranged demagogues and frightened fundamentalists, I have rarely encountered people in America who think they live exceptional lives, even as they fantasize about their destiny. I mean, among the 99% invoked by this caucus, I have mostly found hazardous trends and courageous struggles marked by uncertainty and passion. Bitter visions that have been sources of real learning. And that has been a privilege.

From the fight against drafting young men into the military, to bloodied marchers in American parks and streets, from chatting with grandmothers in Watts, L.A., to watching the tension between Puerto Rican neighbors and “invading” Hippies in Lower East Side, N.Y.C.,I have encountered people who, in a sense, had “nothing left to lose”. And I have made many friends among them. But the character of political activism has changed in the 21st century and the two-party handcuffs have got tighter. So I want to direct myself to classrooms where I learned a lot about the youth of today belonging to the lower echelons of the 99%. That is, in the atmosphere of community colleges, not in the climate of prestigious universities.

In America’s two year institutions I found myself among the working poor, first generation college-goers, mothers returning to school after raising children, soldiers scarred by their battles in Afghanistan and Iraq, new immigrants from Africa and Central America, all bundled in the same classroom. There I taught drama and theater, world cultures, war and peace, consumerism and affluence, beginning algebra, intro to poli sci and even SAT prep classes housed by those colleges. Somewhere along the line, my introductory “icebreaker” question became: “So, now that we are all here, how many of you think you have a shot at becoming president of the United States? Please raise your hand.”

In ten odd years, no one ever did. Even when I asked about state and local elected officials, the answer didn’t change. No raised hands. Once, one of the mothers said she might run for the local school board, or her borough council. Then maybe she could do something about her kids’ education and healthcare for her parents. All in all, these students knew very well that procedural democracy wasn’t real democracy and political power and big money went hand in hand. So they didn’t care to vote either.

No one in my classes opposed free education, guaranteed healthcare— and everyone would welcome libraries and clinics in their neighborhood. The mothers wished they had got paid maternity leave, so that they didn’t have to quit their jobs and struggle now to re-enter the work force.

At the same time, among white students, expressed obliquely for the most part, there was resentment of Blacks and Latinos and Asians. They didn’t know exactly how they would be living out their own history in the twenty-first century, but probably in some kind of conflict with those others, especially from countries whose names they only recently learned—like Iraq. Their language betrayed their fear and they would refer to “those people” quite a bit. Why should there be equal opportunity for them? But they didn't know that among them there were students like this architect from Haiti, training to be a nurse because no architectural firm in the US would hire her. Her written English was better than everyone else in the class, even though her first language was French.

The consumerist obsession that my students had internalized, drove them to desire many commodities—stuff—they couldn’t afford, but one common thread surprised me. Most of them either owned or would like to own guns. I remember one young man saying, “I’d rather drive a Ferrari and have my own assault rifle than run for office.” The dude loved sports cars and guns, disliked Mexicans and despised politicians. His friends nodded their approval. One of them added he didn’t give a rat’s ass about climate change or future of the Amazon rainforest.

“What’s all that bullshit got to do with my life?”

“All right. Suppose it can be shown that your unchecked consumption will put your great grandchildren in jeopardy, then what would you say?” I was supposed to be the one with intelligent questions, right?

“I’d say I’ll drive what I want, eat and drink what I want, keep my lights on day and night… you know, ‘cause I’m American and that’s what we do. In the greatest country ever.”

“Wait now. I’m not talking about poor kids somewhere in the wilderness. I’m saying your descendants… your own family may have children born with deformities… let’s say in another eighty or hundred years.”

“So what? I won’t be around then. Or you. Then why all the fuss? No one really believes in this global warming crap. It’s all a gimmick to make us drive stupid, puny cars.” His Ferrari friend cheered him on. Only mothers with small children were not sure what to believe. They knew that too many people in their lives had deceived them without any remorse.

The arrogance of being the only superpower today has no doubt fueled the culture of indulgence and instant gratification—as those students insisted. Yet, appropriating an “exceptionalist” identity in the middle of globalization with its unstoppable mobility of capital and labor— of money and people, can happen only with deep-seated anxiety, internalized at an early age. So let me turn to another, much younger group.

In the last few years, I’ve worked with some middle-school students in different areas. In acting workshops, for example, we used to do this voice exercise—love and hate emotions put into words, often with examples of food.

“Talk about your favorite foods, and also what you dislike most. Be convincing without screaming,” I’d ask.

The students giggled a lot, and the food items, tasty or disgusting, were surprising and even exotic on occasion. One time many in the room indulged in talking about Chinese dishes they loved. Their excitement was perfect for the exercise. Then suddenly a voice rose above other voices—out of the blue.

“I hate the Chinese!”

This was a seventh grader shouting. Others paused and I intervened, steering the discussion into what kind of people they may like or dislike and why. Most of those students didn’t want to go there. Perhaps they were not sure they wanted to open up to my kind of an immigrant. The Chinese hater said he knew the Chinese were “out to get us” because they wanted to be number one. Then America would lose. This time around, I bet his parents have empowered Donald to make America great again.

Another time in the same school, I had asked the group in a writing workshop to share their answer orally to the question: “If you are given the chance to visit just one place in the world, where would you go and why? The place can be a city or a country, or some other location.” Then they were to write down their thoughts with more details and embellishments.

This time Paris was chosen by a few, London and Vienna and Poland and Italy by others, partly because of ancestral roots and partly because of what they had imbibed in the course of growing up. Then when her turn came to state her choice, one of the girls—another seventh grader, spoke.

“I want to go to Thailand.” The first place named outside Europe. That was pretty cool, I thought.

Other students were curious about the choice and someone asked, “Why Thailand of all places?”

“Because they are all Buddhists there”, she replied.

That answer made me feel good. It was a good thing to be interested in Buddhism at her age I surmised and encouraged her to continue.

“People from my church are missionaries, and some of them have been to Thailand. They love that country, and they’ve got some of those Buddhists to become Christians. So I want to go and do that too.”

Not what I expected, to be sure. Then I realized that this student came from a group of Russian families belonging to a fundamentalist Christian sect—relatively recent immigrants to the area. Their children are not allowed to celebrate Halloween or Christmas as America does with pumpkins and trees, goblins and Santa. But I didn’t know that they sent off missionaries to Thailand to make Christians of those poor, misguided Buddhists!

For me, the sum total of such experience simply brings to light what Cornel West and others have theorized about the business of “American Exceptionalism”. And I’ll take that up next time. A religiosity flanked by xenophobia and racism is hard to escape in American life. I have already mentioned American poets, novelists, historians and social critics who decided to demystify those trends. We may want to add to that list “visitors” who have tried to communicate their sense of a conceived “exceptionalism”-- from the outside.

[This may not be the highest priory for everyone, but it is worth looking back at de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. And also 20th century works like Kafka’s Amerika, Garcia Lorca’s A Poet in New York and Sartre’s Literary and Philosophical Essays. We hit a blind spot occasionally when it comes to how others may view our self-absorbed lives, so…]

One more testament. I once met a Jamaican-Canadian engineer working in Toronto. We were at a gathering, small-chatting about American and Canadian currencies, cost of living in
Toronto and Boston, and weather patterns in Kingston and Halifax. Then he said something I have not forgotten.

“You know, I’ve been offered a job or two… by American companies... With better salaries too. But me and the missus, every time we imagine moving to the U.S.—we kinda shudder.”

“How so?” I was obviously curious.

“One comfort—you may say a source of inner peace—for us is that we don’t have to prove to anyone we are number one in anything… Not anything that matters… like the world’s biggest houses and cars… or the largest army with many nukes. And, we have no anxiety about our kids’ education or our healthcare. Too many problems and too much uncertainty in America.”

“You are right about that… especially the cost of going to college. But in your kind of a job you’d probably have an excellent healthcare package.”

“Maybe… but we can’t get rid of that gnawing uncertainty inside us, you know.” He paused and added one more thought.

“There’s racism in both countries of course, but it felt different to us over there. Descendants of slaves seem to be reminded every day where they come from. I haven’t had that feeling here in Canada… even though we’ve faced scary moments. I mean really bad…!”

I never saw the guy again and I have forgotten his name, but I’ll always remember him as an admirer of all the great West Indian cricketers and a good man content in Canada.

Detection and dissection in the next part. I end with a haiku by Richard Wright—number 710. Perhaps uplifting. Perhaps not.

Cheers!