Yes, I too — like the bereaving Muslim father of a fallen American patriot, who, from the podium of the National Democratic Convention recently, rebuked Donald Trump for his brazen Islamophobic bigotry — would like to ask the Republican presidential nominee if I could lend him my copy of the Constitution of the United States. But, then, that may be the wrong question.
The bluntly-put question should instead be this: Are Americans — or at least the millions and millions of them who support the man — as mentally dull, dim-witted, naive and child-like as they appear to be? For who else would fall for such a circus act and for the actor’s racially-tinged absurdities and politically pretentious trivia?
Generalisations are a reckless undertaking, since they amount to racial profiling, especially when used to define a whole people. But at times, even the most circumspect analyst resorts to them. H.L. Menckin, the acerbic journalist, editor and social critic, did so. In one of his columns that appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1929, he wrote: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Then he added, in the same column: “Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even in many cases to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.” The term “plain people” may sound quaint today, but were Menkin writing today, we would know whom he’s talking about.
As a Palestinian, an Arab and a Muslim — these are three equivalent centres of my identity — who has lived in the US for most of his adult life, I have convinced myself that for every nit-wit, racist and red-neck who, respectively, wants to have rapture in the brain and awaits Armageddon, no matter how long it takes; who wants to block Muslims from America and kick Mexicans out of it; and who wants to sit back in his trailer and slosh down a 12-pack, there are decent, well-read and cultivated Americans out there to balance the equation.
Okay, now that we’ve eschewed one generalisation, the sad fact remains that no one has found a way to stop the latter from voting the former into office.
I do not blame American society for lacking a semblance of high-brow culture, the kind of culture whose values would act as the bulwark against the dissolution of civilised norms, but we should blame it for its ever-increasing tawdriness, its predisposition to meet racism with varying degrees of welcome. Yet, the former have for generations been imposing their sensibility on the rest of us.
In the world of what the American literary critic and poet, R.P. Blackmur, called “the New Illiteracy”, the debasement of public discourse — whether in the media, government or academia — is manifest proof of America’s retreat from intellectual elan. A case in point? The English spoken by a Republican leader and former president like George W. Bush during his eight years in the White House neither communicated national truths nor added to the vitality of body politic. And to tell it like it is, current Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s strident English, her contrived diplo-speak, which is high on sonority and low on substance, is not any loftier, for it communicates but creates no communion.
Yes, lets hear it for a candidate who wants to “make America literate again”, harking back to the time of a leader like former president John F. Kennedy, the energy and glitter of whose words dazzled America. The man, however, was cut down before he could leave a legacy of literate discourse on the people of his country. Americans, in short, have known no greater gourmand of words in their modern history — but, then, who can top an Irishman when it comes to stringing words together and making them at once sing and elucidate?
And here’s the rub: A vulgarian like the current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, even as his rhetoric grows more cancerous, has nevertheless convinced countless Americans that his vision, if vision it is, is commensurate with the manifold truths of their experienced world — much in the manner in which Germans at one point in time were sold on the vision of another demagogue emerging from their midst in the first half of the 20th century.
The danger that Trump poses in America today is, hyperbole aside, similar to the one that Adolf Hitler posed before Germany in the 1930s: He is pandering to followers who, predisposed to blame “the other” for their sense of economic disorientation and to indulge their nostalgia for the absolutes of a long-lost Anglo-Saxon land, will readily embrace a venomous ideology that they believe will get them to the clearing. What they don’t seem to realise, though, is that if today it is fashionable to degrade Muslim Americans and Mexican immigrants, tomorrow it will be equally fashionable to degrade other Americans.
Moreover, by not taking a stand, by not speaking up, by not repudiating the man, a section of Americans are not only giving their approval to the prevailing order, but are also allowing the venom to secrete itself into the blood of American culture, making bigotry an equal opportunity victimiser.
We all know that plaintive lament by German pastor Martin Neimoler, who wrote about his complicity in the escalating brutality of life in Nazi Germany. “First they came for the Communists”, he said, “but I was not Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew. So I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no [one] left to stand up for me.”
Should Americans wait for the time when they hear the midnight knock on the door, before they realise where Trump is taking them? And trust me on this, that is where that vulgarian from New York will take his people, just as that blustering buffoon from Austria had taken his.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
