In peacetime, America is the most original nation in the world. We are the maddest, most inventive; truly a splendid disorder are we. When America goes to war, we become a nation like any other.
Nowadays, I turn on TV and hear Americans gamely stumbling through the national anthem. At an intersection yesterday, I saw a Lexus carrying a socialite alongside a pickup with a kid who was absorbing the thump-thump-thump of rap music — both cars wearing the Stars and Stripes.
Everywhere I walk in San Francisco, in shop windows, signs of uniform size, identical lettering, proclaim: United We Stand.
Odd. I had always assumed the reverse: That the strength of America derives from our variety and disparate opinions. Which is to say: Disunited We Stand.
In today’s nation of wartime unity, television comedians, newspaper columnists, Berkeley politicians and everyday loonies — indeed, anyone who might voice an eccentric opinion about Sept. 11 and our government’s response — have been called down by their fellow Americans as unpatriotic.
Immediately after Sept. 11, I found it dismaying that opinion was so uniform. And it was not until I began to hear dissenting voices — opinions I didn’t necessarily share — that I knew the America I recognized had survived.
Meanwhile, from his cave emerges Osama bin Laden, a medieval villain, fondling a microphone, to describe the United States as a “Jewish-Christian alliance.”
America, of course, is no such thing. America is the Enlightenment’s daughter, a nation that someone like bin Laden cannot comprehend. America was created as a secular country. Which is why, today, a Buddhist, pagan, Methodist and Hindu live side by side.
President Bush was not only shrewd but authentically patriotic in his insistence that Muslims should be regarded by their neighbors as true Americans. Treating Muslims as Americans at this moment in history is not magnanimous, but an act essential to our nation’s meaning.
My Mexican immigrant father, I remember, was never less than grateful for the economic freedom of America; never wasted a moment of nostalgia for the country he had left behind. But my father was confused by the variety of America.
“There is truly no unity here; this is not a real country,” my father used to remark. Coming from a Mexican village of continuity, my father found metropolitan America a puzzle.
But from the first, I was seduced by America, enchanted by the idea that a nation could be organized, disorganized around the first-person, singular pronoun.
The history of America I read was the history of a young country extending, too slowly and painfully at times, but certainly extending the definition of “the American,” decade after decade. It was a marvel to me and the source of my greatest love of this country — the way the country enlarged with every facet, every religion and race and tongue and recipe. America became the jewel of civilization.
Wartime is not the best time to see this America. In wartime, Americans are merely united; the country defines itself by what it must exclude and resist.
When I was a boy in the 1950s, I remember hearing adults talk nostalgically about the way the country had been united a decade earlier. Americans in World War II had been galvanized by a sense of a shared enemy, a common purpose. “You wouldn’t believe it,” a neighbor lady said to me.
But in the peacetime America of the 1950s, America was drawing new worlds to itself — drawing my Mexican family to itself, even while the country was finding its meaning in its disunion.
By the late 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll jack-hammered a channel we named the “generation gap.” And Americans of every age sped along newly constructed interstates, trying to get as far as possible from in-laws and the inner city. And my neighbor lady was getting a divorce.
I sing the American parade in peacetime: the Chinese teenager with earphones; the Russian woman in a sparkling sweater, the blue-suited Big Deal chattering into her cellphone; the tattoos and the shorts; the big bellies; the prim; the rabbinical; the anarchic.
It is true that the chaos of America can leave us melancholic and lonely. The pace and frenzied desires of our lives often leave us, more than any other people on Earth, addicted to sexual titillation, celebrity (the glamour of the oversize ego) and drugs, “recreational” and not.
There are days, I admit, when the fury of America — the determination of each driver to pull ahead — seems a madness and leaves me feeling that America is the thinnest culture in the world, barely a “nation.”
But from the American respect for individualism would also come our nation’s great originality and creativity. American culture is the mass culture of the world, because the world is hungry for an idea of itself larger than a single creed, nation or color.
This is, of course, why the religious fundamentalist, the nationalist and the tribalist must hate America.
It is nothing for me to hate in return. I loathe bin Laden — may his tribe decrease. I resent him most because he had taken away my America at peace, at frenzy, and has replaced it with a nation of uniform opinion and too little sense of its greatness.
I cannot imagine a more patriotic insult America could offer bin Laden than to become as divided in wartime as we are divided in peace.
Copyright: Pacific News Service
A dark little secret — the divide at the heart of America’s racial and ethnic politics — has been exposed by the contest for mayor of Los Angeles. In America’s largest Hispanic city, a majority of African-American voters are expected to side with the white candidate, against the Hispanic candidate.
All is not well along the spectrum of America’s rainbow, despite the tendency of some on the political left to describe “blacks and Latinos” in one breath. From Miami to Dallas to Compton, blacks and Latinos are engaged in a terrible competition for the meanest jobs; for the security of Civil Service positions; for political office; for white noise. It is no exaggeration to say that African-Americans have paid the price of Hispanic numerical ascendancy. In Los Angeles, for example, the famous “black neighborhoods” have suddenly become Hispanic — immigrant, Spanish-speaking.
The U.S. Census Bureau is candid, but makes matters worse. Out of malice or stupidity, federal demographers have taken to predicting that Hispanics are destined to “replace” African-Americans as “America’s largest minority.” This year, the bureau estimates Hispanic numbers to be nearly equal to those of blacks. But Hispanics are poised to take the lead. The bureau manages both to trivialize the significance of Hispanics in our national life, as well as to insult African-Americans by describing Hispanics as replacing blacks. But to date, the nation’s Hispanic political leadership has remained largely silent about the Census Bureau’s grammar.
If I were an African-American, I would not be so silent. What does it mean, I would ask, that Hispanics are becoming America’s largest minority? The notion of African-Americans as a minority is one born of a distinct and terrible history of exclusion — the sin of slavery, decades of segregation and every conceivable humiliation against a people, lasting through generations.
To say, today, that Hispanics are becoming America’s largest minority mocks this entire history. It dilutes the noun “minority” until it means little more than a population segment.
This is exactly what Hispanics have become — a population segment, an advertiser’s target audience or a market share. Not coincidentally, it was an advertising agency that got the point of Hispanic totals as early as the 1980s. It was then that the Coors beer company erected billboards throughout the Southwest celebrating “The Decade of the Hispanic.”
Nowadays, on television and in newspapers, you will notice Hispanic actors, a growing Hispanic population in the American South and Midwest, Ricky Martin’s views on God and the world and multimillion-dollar baseball stars with Spanish surnames and unreliable swings. Nowadays, white politicians of both parties happily mangle Spanish phrases in their speeches, and President Bush celebrates Cinco de Mayo on the White House lawn.
If I were African-American, I would tire of the cha-cha-cha, the salsa and all those happy adjectives that cluster around Hispanic, the noun. I would resent the blast of Latino numbers. I would resent the politicians — whatever their color — who insist on lumping blacks and Hispanics together.
I would remember how, not so many generations ago, Hispanics, particularly Mexicans and Cubans, routinely resisted the label “minority.” In a black-and-white America, Hispanics tended to side with white, or at least tended to keep their distance from black. But then came the success of the black civil rights movement in the South. And when that movement moved north, African-Americans gained bureaucratic notice and remedies from Washington.
Suddenly, all sorts of Americans who would never have thought to compare themselves to African-Americans wanted to compare themselves to blacks. White, middle-class feminists claimed the black analogy. And so did gays.
There were even sweet grandmothers who took to naming themselves “Gray Panthers” in imitation of Huey P. Newton. And, of course, Hispanics claimed the black analogy. The problem, all these years after, is that we Hispanics have had to lie about ourselves to claim the black analogy. We have had to pretend to be other than we are. We have had to impersonate a new black race in the world.
In truth, despite our pretense, Hispanics do not constitute a racial group. Members of every race in the world can claim to be Hispanics. As Hispanics — the blond Cuban, the black Dominican, the mestizo Mexican — we assert a cultural tie.
The notion of Hispanicity might thus be revolutionary in a nation that has always identified its citizens according to blood. But, to date, Hispanics have largely failed to tell the truth about ourselves, and thus have limited our significance to the nation. Hispanics end up today proposing embarrassing absurdities. The white Hispanic with blue eyes applies to college as a “minority.” Meanwhile, the Appalachian white with blue eyes cannot apply to college as a minority, because she is “only” white.
By telling you these things, I do not mean to betray “my people,” though I tend to think of the nation entire — all Americans — as my people. Yes, I call myself Hispanic, but I also see myself within the history of African-Americans and Irish Catholics and American Jews and the Chinese in California.
And more.
I believe there are useful purposes in having citizens who feel excluded from the mainstream organize themselves — to lobby, to petition, to attract the interests of government and employers. But when Americans organize into subgroups, it should be with an eye at merging into the whole, not remaining separate. What was the point of the black civil rights movement of the early 20th century if not integration?
The trouble with today’s ethnic and racial and sexual identifications is that they threaten to become evasions of more general citizenship. Soon groups beget subgroups: Last week there was a meeting in Atlanta of Colombian Americans, their first convention. Almost in parody of Hispanics nationally, Colombian Americans announced themselves to be “America’s fastest growing minority.”
On the other hand, if you are looking for reasons to feel optimistic about our shared American future, you might talk with those kids one meets in Oakland, Calif., today who have outgrown the Census Bureau’s labels. I mean the kids who call themselves “Blaxicans.”
These children exist in some future tense, well ahead of the politicians and the rest of us who live in a nation that divides and divides again, by sex or color or accent or grievance.
The Blaxican will describe our national life, long after the politics of the moment have faded to gray.
) COPYRIGHT 2001 Pacific News Service
In the Bible, it’s the prodigal son who realizes his error and is welcomed home by his loving father. In Mexico, it’s the father who needs to ask forgiveness from his child.
This week, in his first public ceremony at the presidential residence, Mexico’s new president, Vicente Fox, apologized to his country’s children who, for decades, have been scorned for going to the United States in desperate search of work and for survival. “The times are gone when Mexico viewed the emigrant and the emigrant’s children with resentment,” Fox said.
As a biblical confession, Fox’s statement wasn’t all that much. But in the history of Mexico, here was an important admission. For generations, Mexico has tended to cast itself as a victim in history and, thus, an innocent in the great world.
Mexico has most famously imagined itself in the figure of the Indian maiden, ravished by the 16th century conquistador. After independence from Spain, three centuries later, Mexico suffered various European invaders. Worse than any European was the United States — the Gringo — who absconded with half of Mexico’s territory.
Poor, poor Mexico, the nation sighed. And with good reason. But its self-pity also allowed Mexico to ignore the role it played in its own history — the corruption of its prodigal ruling class and the violence of Mexican against Mexican.
In the early 20th century, Mexico preferred to call its civil war a glorious “revolution” against foreigners. But it was this civil war that caused millions of Mexicans (my own parents among them) to escape to the U.S. Through the decades following, as Mexico turned itself into an oligarchy, other millions of Mexicans went to El Norte, looking for work.
Mexico wrapped itself in patriotic robes, refusing to acknowledge the reasons why so many of its own children had fled. Mexico played the sorrowing mother and pretended not to know why her children were consorting with her rival, the Gringo.
Mexican-Americans today number around 28 million, 70 percent of the entire population of Hispanics in the U.S. We are statistically better-educated and wealthier than our relatives in Mexico.
For decades, Mexico hated it when Mexican-Americans would return “home” with dollars, and with children who no longer spoke Spanish. Everything Mexicans hated about themselves — their victimization by a foreign culture, the loss of self-possession — Mexico saw in us. The Mexican-American who returned, speaking English, was like the 16th-century Mexican-Indian who ended up speaking the conquistador’s Spanish.
But Mexico reserved her special loathing for the migrant workers — the peasants who traveled back and forth between the United States and Mexico. For decades, the migrant worker was the most cosmopolitan figure in Mexico. The peasant was bilingual, fluent in dollars and pesos, multicultural. But he was scorned for his new Gringo ways by his village and he became a target among strangers.
The border between the U.S. and Mexico for most migrant workers remains a hurdle — in either direction. But while there are dangers in coming to the U.S. illegally, the journey back into Mexico has often been even more dangerous. Mexican workers have been routinely shaken down and humiliated by Mexican police; not a few have arrived “home” with their pockets empty.
This week, as Mexican workers in the U.S. began their journey south for Christmas, Fox promised a change: “We’re going to make sure that [workers] are not blackmailed, cheated and that they’re received with the honor that each of them deserves.”
It is to his credit that Fox would express such candor. But it is appropriate, too, that he would recognize the Mexican emigrant’s dilemma. Fox represents the coming of age of a new generation in Mexico — a generation that has grown up largely influenced by U.S. pop culture, by the lure of American dollars and by the ascending visibility of Hispanics north of the border.
Fox was famously an executive for Coca-Cola in Mexico. Less well known is it that Mexicans now drink more Coca-Cola than Americans, even though Mexico has a quarter of the U.S. population. Put bluntly: Mexicans have a thirst for America.
At the presidential residence in Mexico City, Fox greeted a contingent of Mexican-Americans, including actor Edward James Olmos. He accepted a San Diego Padres jersey.
He played the prodigal father with a wide grin. Informal in an open shirt, friendly to his audience, Fox praised the contribution of migrant workers to the nation’s economy. He also praised the economic success of Mexican-Americans and promised a future in which Mexican and Mexican-American would work “side by side.”
Times have indeed changed. In generations past, the Mexican-American (who had “lost” his culture) was a scorned figure in Mexico, a reminder of all that Mexico hated about its own past. Today, the Mexican-American may well foreshadow all that the Mexican feels himself becoming. The Mexican-American may well be Mexico’s future.
© COPYRIGHT 2000 Pacific News Service
According to the New York Times — this nation’s “newspaper of record,” as we are accustomed to call it — a discussion of U.S. race relations, even at this date, can only mean a discussion of the tensions between descendants of Europe and descendants of Africa.
Most Americans do not read the New York Times. But the Times is the newspaper that reflects and shapes elite liberal thinking, especially on the East Coast. So it is worth noting that, for the last six weeks, the Times has been running a series called “How Race is Lived in America,” concerned exclusively with how “whites” and “blacks” perceive one another.
How should we expect the omniscient New York Times to settle all scores? Time and space forbid! But here we are in the new century and it is clear to just about everyone that our country has become Latino and Asian; and miscegenation among races is increasing. With citizens from every corner, America is creating a global society, the first in the world.
The brown future is also our past. Americans, particularly African-Americans — from Colin Powell to Tiger Woods — are speaking candidly about their mixed blood and a colonial America the history books never bothered to describe. I mean the marriage of the Indian and the African. And the black-and-white goings-on at Monticello.
Curiously, even while the Times was publishing front-page pieces on black-and-white separations in America, in its Arts and Leisure section one morning, the Times noticed that London is racially mixing: The city is alive with subcontinental Cockneys.
But then New York is crazy about London this season. Gotham is crawling with Brit Twits who know eversomuch about eversomuch. The New York Times will condescend to consider the color brown, as long as it poses in a British accent.
Then, on the Fourth of July, the New York Times proclaimed that California will soon become the first “big state in the nation in which non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority.” To tell its readers what that might mean, the Times solicited the opinion of three white guys and one nervous gray. Governor Gray Davis was steadfast and refused to panic. After all, “leadership requires one to look on the bright side …”
These two brown sightings from London and California quickly dissipated. And the Times turned once again to serious concerns.
In article after article, whites were portrayed as being at the very center of contemporary American life. Nice people. Persons of liberal disposition and politics. Rather like the readers of the Times.
So with every article, white readers were reassured that they remain at the center of our national life — which is exactly where they expect to be.
So nothing was said in the Times about Korean/Mexican relations in L.A. or how (East Asian) Indians are faring in high-tech North Dallas or Haitian-American/African-American relations in Tampa, Fla. Any drama where whites are absent can be of no interest to the New York Times.
Hillary Clinton, who surely reads the New York Times, spoke of a vast right-wing conspiracy in America. The vast liberal conspiracy in America, by contrast, is a benign and relatively harmless business: Each spring, liberals love to give each other brotherhood awards and statuettes.
Surely the Times is in line for something for such breathtaking fatuousness: At the conclusion of its series, the Times found a majority of black and white Americans regard race relations to be “generally good.”
The only question that the New York Times did not ask African-Americans is how much longer they will be seduced by liberal white flatteries. A dangerous seduction indeed, especially now, at a time of increasing tension and competition between African-Americans and Hispanics for jobs and position.
I remember, several years ago, during one of the trials of O.J. Simpson, listening to the loud black-and-white conversations on television. I remember looking out the window and seeing the vast, silent brown city going about its business, oblivious.
)2000 Pacific News Service
Your dentist is climbing Mount Everest. The mother of four is mountain-biking through the desert. The boy next door skateboards on asphalt at 60 mph.
Beyond this summer’s baseball scores or news of PGA tournaments or tennis matches, something is going on in the world that newspapers and television sportscasters barely know how to report as “sports.” But this week the wise guys with orange hair and blue sports jackets at ESPN and ABC Sports are heading out to San Francisco, to televise what they call “The X Games” — a tournament of rock-climbing, bungee-jumping, sky-surfing, street luge and other death-defying exploits. It’s an odd idea, since extreme sports have arisen in opposition to regular athletics.
In many extreme sporting events, it’s true, there are celebrities, even organized competitions. But while other American kids might want to get into the NBA and make a million bucks, most persons who are addicted to extreme sports belong on a very different page of the morning paper — not the sports page, but maybe the religion page, instead.
Today, when technology increasingly separates humans from nature, there is a growing hunger to fear nature, to remember what ancient people knew: nature’s power. In an earlier time, Herman Melville wrote a novel about a whale lurking in the sea. In the century since “Moby Dick” was written, we have learned that whales are vulnerable to human will. So we love whales now. And yet, some part of us wishes we could fear the sea again.
Consider it the dark side of the environmental movement. Suddenly there are bestsellers about winter’s wrath. Sebastian Junger writes in “The Perfect Storm” about fishermen off the Nova Scotia coast who encounter waves more than 100 feet tall. Or there is Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air,” about a deadly storm that enveloped climbers near the summit of Mount Everest.
It takes money to reach the top of Mount Everest. Today there are accountants and doctors and advertising executives willing to pay. The base camp of Mount Everest is crowded with Japanese and Germans, as well as Americans. Often these adventurers bring along cell phones and fax machines.
The line separating the adventurer from the athlete has conventionally been financial. Think of the very rich who fly their hot-air balloons across the sky, only to be rescued at taxpayer expense when their adventure deflates.
More importantly, what separates the adventurer from the athlete is an element of risk — real danger. Athletics can be dangerous — think of football or boxing or hockey. But the point of such sports is winning or losing, and the game must always be played within rules.
The adventurer, by contrast, plays an opponent more terrible — call it life or death.
Today, in “extreme sports,” the point is less winning or losing than risking and feeling. Gravity, cold, the sky become the opponent.
Consider the street luge, riding essentially a skateboard at 40, 50, 60 mph, steering only with the body’s weight. Participants speak of the exhilaration of gravity.
In his best book, “Into the Wild,” Jon Krakauer tells the story of a teenager from a comfortable Maryland suburb who ventured between hot and cold. For a time he bicycled in the desert. Then this young man wound up in Alaska, where he ended up dead.
Why exactly, we never learn. All we know for certain is that here was a young man from a comfortable American suburb who needed to find himself, or to find God, in the far extremities of hot and cold.
I know a kid, an “adrenaline junkie,” he calls himself. Every weekend, he comes to the forest all alone. He leaps through the trees, from limb to limb.
How to explain the human need to jump through a tree or to climb a terrible ice mountain? How to explain why the bungee-jumper howls with pleasure to feel herself falling, falling?
At a moment of history when human beings govern nature, many need to experience hot and cold, to feel the rush of air, to prove to ourselves — at the risk of death — that we are alive.
) Pacific News Service
In the Americas, few countries are as expert in the business of magic as Mexico. Romance, illusion, cocaine — fantasy is Mexico’s growing export, more important than burritos or the eager hands of its migrant workers.
Last week’s midday murder of Paco Stanley, Mexico’s beloved comic and TV talk-show host, forced millions of Mexicans to recognize reality: Mexico has become a violent, criminal society. Over and over, Stanley’s bullet-ridden minivan was shown on TV.
Within a day, Mexico City’s attorney general announced that Stanley (in whose face were embedded 26 rounds) was in possession of cocaine at the time of his death. Suddenly Mexicans were forced to wonder if Paco Stanley’s real life was more complicated than his TV persona.
The disjunction between reality and illusion is not only a Mexican problem. While the U.S. Border Patrol has tried to stop Mexican peasants from slipping into San Diego, American teenagers have developed a taste for a style of professional wrestling known in Mexico as lucha libre. Luchadors specialize in sequins and bluster and high-risk acrobatics. And while some American nativists may still worry about Spanish becoming our second language, the more important language coming from Mexico is a surreal grammar of love. Or haven’t you noticed? “Days of Our Lives” is suddenly starting to look like a Mexican telenovela with nuns and magic and the demonic — all part of the drama of love.
On the other hand, watching soaps on Televisa, Mexico’s largest television network, is like watching Swedish TV. Some years ago, a senior executive at Televisa justified the absence of brown faces on the screen by wondering, Who wants to see unattractive people on television?
Especially before cocaine was found on the corpse, Paco Stanley’s murder sparked a very public argument about who was to blame. Some attacked the ineptitude of Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, the nation’s foremost leftist, expected to run for president next year. Others attacked the ruling party, the PRI, notorious for its ties to organized crime.
The discovery of the cocaine changed everything. Suddenly the popular Mexican habit of blaming someone else for the problems of Mexico was undercut by the possibility that the victim was also responsible.
But who could say? Perhaps, one Mexican friend said to me, the drugs were planted on the body? By week’s end, many Mexicans were safely back in the realm of uncertainty, where rumors drift like ghosts.
From Monterrey, economic powerhouse of Mexico, where capitalism’s value for Mexico is daily evident, a professor phoned. Few intellectuals in Monterrey are much concerned with the television dramas of Mexico City, the professor said. Most Monterrey intellectuals, in the Mexican capital of capitalism, are either Marxists or right-wing Catholics.
What else is new in Monterrey? I asked.
The rich kids and the poor kids are dancing together in the clubs, the professor said. Democratic decadence. And they are all taking cocaine because they think it is modern and it will make them more American.
It’s an old habit on both sides of the border. Mexicans blame Americans for moral contamination. Americans imagine that Mexican drug lords have infected their innocent teens. The latter view, I think, has led recently to a gringo romanticism for Latin toy boys, apparent in the sudden popularity of Ricky Martin.
There he was, staring at us last week from the cover of “TV Guide”: Martin, dusty blond and cute, is the sort of neighbor many Americans wish we truly had in Latin America, the ideal boy next door, nothing at all like the pockmarked Latin drug lords we otherwise fear.
Sixty years ago, grandpa dipped into “Tia’wanna” to find cheap sexual fantasy. Thirty years later, American hippies went into the desert of northern Mexico, looking for a brujo who might dispense the secrets of the enchanted mushroom.
More recently, American intellectuals, as well as middle-class readers, have grown fond of “magical realism.” The bestselling Mexican novel in the United States was a novel called “Like Water for Chocolate.” Lovers kiss and butterflies come out of their mouths. Old Indian women float.
Twenty years ago, after a Mexico City appearance of Gabriel Garcma Marquez, I remember seeing long lines of Germans and Americans, waiting for the autograph of the master illusionist. I wondered, then, why magical realism had become the easiest way for Europeans and Americans to read Latin America.
The fact is that more and more North Americans are becoming like Latin Americans — seduced by magic away from reality. To that extent the border between fiction and nonfiction, North and South, is blurring.
Las Vegas, our capital of mirage, is the fastest-growing city in America. Televisa, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the world, specializes in blond.
Last Tuesday, Paco Stanley’s fans came to his funeral. It was a scene out of Nathanael West. Gravestones were overturned by the grieving mob. Family and relatives were pushed by the crowd. At one point, the crowd nearly overturned the coffin.
Outside the crypt, the crowd chanted, demanding “justicia.” Inside, a television camera had been installed so that the nation could bid its beloved comic a last goodbye.
