Remote Learning and Social Distancing: The Political Economy and Politics of Corona Pedagogy

(Third in a series of articles on the implications of the coronavirus for our times, for human history, and for the fate of the earth.)

The advent of COVID-19, or a novel coronavirus, has, it appears, virtually overnight altered the nature of university instruction and student learning.  Throughout the months of January and February 2020, while the virus created havoc in China before turning Italy into the new epicenter, life proceeded on American university campuses without any real thought to what was transpiring in that ‘distant’ country. By January 25, a cordon sanitaire had been placed around the entire province of Hubei Province, which with a population of 60 million has as many people as Italy, but this did not leave any real impression on Americans nor on universities.  As late as February 20, Italy had reported

*Declare the NRA a Terrorist Organization

I recall a conversation that some friends and I were having more than twenty years ago, on the eve of America’s bombing of Iraq months after Saddam Hussein had moved into Kuwait.  We all agreed that war was engineered into the American psyche:  the country seemed then, as it is now, to be on a war footing.  The bombing seemed imminent and thousands were bound to die, reduced to the indignity of being viewed as mere “collateral damage”.  Someone then remarked that while the United States was busy bombing other countries into submission, relegating them (as one American official declared with much pride) to the stone age, enough people were being killed on American streets from gun-related violence.

Another Olympic Gold for the US

The newspapers carry the story of yet another massacre, this one at a community college in Oregon.  Lovely small-town America has had its share of mass killings and the end is nowhere in sight.  The killer, Chris Harper Mercer, is now reported to have taken nine lives before being killed in a gun battle with law enforcement officers.  Rather predictably, we are now being told that the gunman was a “loner” with quite likely a history of mental illness.  A Washington Post headline sums it up, “Oregon shooter left behind online portrait of a loner with a grudge against religion.”  The lack of “community”, the inability to forge relationships with others, the desire to go down in glory:  all these are the stable ingredients of a story that has been foretold.  Thus, we read, “Mercer was a quiet, withdrawn young man who struggled to connect with other people, instead seeking attention online or, ultimately, through violence.”  In nearly all such instances—the Charleston shooting, most recently, comes to mind—there is mention of the killer’s real or alleged membership in neo-Nazi groups, or other so-called “fringe” groups which bear a grudge against the de-whitening of America, and the Washington Post is unfailingly true to form in this respect.  The article states that “Mercer’s e-mail address referenced an iron cross, a symbol often associated with Nazis.”

The aftermath equally will hold no surprises.  All of America will come together in grief, there will be much hand-holding and some soul-searching, and a few noises will be made about gun control.  The country will be unanimous in declaring Mercer a “coward”:  there are, of course, much stronger words to be used for a mass killer, but cowardice is always deplorable and one can expect consent around such a characterization even amongst those who might otherwise disagree about the killer’s motives, the relative responsibility of an individual and society in such cases, the desirability for gun control, and so on.  In about a week’s time, or perhaps as soon as the funerals of the victims have been held, the news will have disappeared from the media.  The Pope will no doubt be saying a few prayers seeking God’s mercy for Mercer, particularly since the killer appears to have borne a grudge against “organized religion”.

We are being told that at least one thing is already different about the aftermath of this shooting, namely that President Obama is now coming out with all his guns blazing.  His acolytes, mindful of the ‘fact’ that he is no longer hobbled by the need to appease Republicans, argue that Obama is now showing true grit and determination, and according to some liberals he has already been redeemed by the political positions he has embraced over the course of the last year.  His comments on the Oregon shooting have been described by the media as displaying his “rage” and frustration, as he asked the American people to reflect on how they could get the government to change gun ownership laws and give young people at least an opportunity to grow up.  Obama, according to the New York Times, took a “swipe” against the NRA with these rather modest words:  “And I would particularly ask America’s gun owners who are using those guns properly, safely, to hunt for sport, for protecting their families, to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it is speaking for you.”  But Obama, evidently still smarting from his resounding defeat by legislators from both parties to introduce gun control in 2013, admitted that he was powerless to change anything at all.

Only in the United States would Obama’s remarks be viewed as “radical”.  They are in fact nothing more than another instantiation of the pussyfooting which for decades has characterized what rather comically and tragically passes for ‘debate’ on gun control.  There will be the usual arguments about background checks and the desirability of keeping guns out of the hands of criminal elements and those who are mentally unsound; others will discuss whether schools and colleges should implement safety precautions; and there will be mention of a lengthier waiting period.  Thus, in this fashion, the ‘debate’ will go on ad nauseam—not moved an iota by the news that thirteen firearms were found in the possession of the gunman Mercer, all acquired legally.

Debate and Discussion in a Free Society: Bullet-Proof Vests for Children in the Land of the Brave

The Big Gulp: More is Better

Meanwhile, the NRA will go on the offensive, though the sheer idiocy of its position may be gauged from the comment put forward by Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s long-time executive vice president, in the aftermath of the school shootings in Newton, Connecticut:  “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Wayne LaPierre, Messiah of the Gun Lobby

One hopes that we will be spared the usual indescribably stupid remarks that are bound to follow from one spokesperson or another of the NRA and its supporters in Congress, something akin to this:  ‘Guns don’t kill, people do.’  What has been indubitably clear for decades is that the NRA makes or breaks political fortunes, waging a jihad against its opponents that has taken far more lives than the acts of terrorism ordinarily termed jihad.

What is called for is simple:  The National Rifle Association should at once be declared a terrorist organization.   The preponderant portion of even those who favor strict gun control, whatever may be meant by that phrase, will at once ferociously object that many members of the NRA, whose membership in 2013 was announced at 4.5 million—joined by “tens of millions supporters”, according to the NRA’s own spokesperson—are not only law-abiding citizens but recreational sportsmen who use their guns for simple pastimes such as hunting.  The rights of the hunter are, in America, described as sacrosanct.

The Hunter’s Moment of Sublime Pleasure: The Peace and Quiet of the Gun

Indeed, it is a reasonable supposition that Bernie Sanders, who represents Vermont in the US Senate and is now being projected as the radical or at least socialist wing of the Congress—the idea that there is a “socialist wing” is laughable, too preposterous for words—has often voted against gun control legislation because Vermont has a disproportionately large number of hunters and heavy gun ownership.  The ethical arguments against the slaughter of animals for pleasure aside, the days of Davy Crockett are long gone. As for those who point to the Second Amendment, its anachronism must go the same way as those odious measures which for centuries kept women, African Africans, and native Americans in subjection. When religious-minded people are prepared to concede that passages from their scripture or holy works must be rejected if they are repellent to the conscience, absolutely nothing requires allegiance to a portion of the US Constitution that is obsolete.

When, moreover, an organization is deemed to be a terrorist outfit, consequences must follow.  The NRA’s members might be given 30-60 days to comply with the ban on their organization and surrender their arms, and failure to do should lead to a freeze on their bank accounts and the issuance of an alert by Interpol which would prevent their travel outside the US.  Perhaps a leaf should be taken out of the methods routinely deployed in Maoist China:  a long stint, extending over several months and perhaps much longer, in a re-education camp for offenders would be highly desirable.  LaPierre and his fellow gun enthusiasts might perhaps learn that in all of Japan, there were two firearm-related homicides in 2006; in 2008, the number had gone up to a staggering, comparatively speaking, eleven—about the number killed in Oregon.  Private ownership of guns in Japan is nearly impossible.  With a population that is more than 1/3^rd of the US, the number for 2008 might proportionately be raised to about 30—compared to 12,000 firearm-related homicides in the US the same year.  Lest the NRA dismiss the Japanese as “Orientals” who do not understand the spirit of American democracy, it is worthwhile noting that a background paper on gun ownership and gun fatalities released by the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2015 shows that the US has 88.8 guns for every 100 people, Australia 15, and the United Kingdom 6.2; the firearms-related homicide rate for every 100,000 people is 3.1, 0.14, and 0.07, respectively.

The NRA does not, of course, even remotely represent all firearm owners in the US:  as Obama himself noted in his remarks some hours ago, there is “a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America.  So how can you with a straight face make the argument that more guns will make us safer?”  Moreover, the problem of guns in the US runs exceedingly deep, and the same militarism that has turned the US into a lethal military machine has every relation to the pervasive culture of guns that has turned the US into a country of gun shows, ammunition shops, firing ranges, massive gun ownership, and of course the mass killings that mark the exceptionality of the US.  The NRA is the most visible face of this barbarism and must be a dealt a blow which would render it extinct.

*Hiroshima and American Exceptionalism

Seventy years after the United States waged what to this day remains the only instance of nuclear warfare in history, Americans persist in subscribing to the view that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, whatever the moral perils of such an undertaking, were justified by exceptional circumstances.  It is taken as an unimpeachable fact that the nuclear attacks on the two Japanese cities saved lives:  on this argument, the invasion of Japan would have energized its fanatic residents to a renewed defense of their country, and the war might have stretched out for several more months and even longer.  The proponents of this view have advanced an apparently noble kind of moral calculus, whereby the atomic bombings not only saved American lives but the lives of their very antagonists, since a long protracted war would have decimated what remained of young Japanese men.  If this argument be stretched a bit further, the United States was animated not merely by the desire to preserve the lives of its own youth but by the reverence for all human lives.  Furthermore, Japan’s unconditional surrender, which the United States had insisted upon as the condition for bringing hostilities to an end, is described by those who justify the bombing as having been wholly precipitated by the picture of utter devastation unleashed upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  An obdurate country, slavishly holding itself in subjection to the writ of the Emperor, had left no other recourse.

Hiroshima before the Bombing

It is also characteristic of the United States that, on every anniversary of the bombing, a supposed “debate” is thought to take place among Americans vigorously arguing in support of, or in opposition to, the atomic bombings.  Certainly, some arguments resonate more strongly now than they did in 1945 or in the years immediately thereafter.  The end of the war had brought forth a new adversary in the Soviet Union, one reason among others why German war criminals tried at Nuremberg were, barring the first set of some twenty odd Nazis who had occupied the highest positions in the Third Reich, handed down insignificant prison terms when they were not simply acquitted.  If a demonstration had to be furnished to Stalin of the immense and unmatched military prowess of the United States, nothing was calculated to achieve that effect as much as a new super-bomb which was immeasurably greater than anything witnessed thus far.

Hiroshima after the Bombing: photograph taken from the Red Cross Hospital, about 1 mile from the site of the bomb blast

If the war-time rape of enemy women is merely the way in which rapists convey messages to enemy men, the nuked cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by this reckoning, were intended to show to an emergent world power under the dictatorship of Stalin the probable consequences of embracing the enmity of the United States.  Furthermore, now that “multiculturalism” and “diversity” have become enshrined as the very armor of a liberal democracy, there is greater willingness to acknowledge that the atomic bombings were, in good measure, prompted by a vicious racism that made it all too easy to dismiss the Japanese people as vermin who merited nothing but complete annihilation.  The chairman of the US War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, spoke for many people when he publicly declared that he “favored the extermination of the Japanese in toto.”  Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, admitted to Vice President Henry Wallace that he supported the continuation of the war against Japan “until we have destroyed about half of the civilian population.”   These views were by no means atypical.

The Morning of the Holocaust: Two Victims with Severe Body Burns

What is astonishing, however, is the indisputable fact that even the enlarged parameters of the liberal critique of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still do not permit the probing of more fundamental questions and a robust critique of the entire course of American history.  Two considerations, but there are many more, might be brought to the fore.  Why, for instance, did American planners target Hiroshima, a city of comparatively moderate military significance?  American scientists, military strategists, and politicians were keen to assess the impact that a nuclear bomb might have on its target.  In the months preceding the nuclear attacks, dozens of Japanese cities and towns had been firebombed.  Large portions of major Japanese cities, including Tokyo, had already been reduced to ashes.  A nuclear bomb thrown on Tokyo would have been “wasted” and it would have been difficult to measure its impact.  Hiroshima had yet to be ravished; it was virgin territory:  never mind that most of the casualties were bound to be civilians.  Or consider Roosevelt’s speech describing December 7, 1941, when the Japanese initiated war with a lightning attack on Pearl Harbor, as “a date which will live in infamy.”  Most people have naturally supposed that Roosevelt was lamenting the treachery of Japan and its declaration of hostilities against a peace-loving nation. But tacitly what Roosevelt, and millions of Americans, had in mind was another kind of infamy, the supposition that the United States uniquely reserves the privilege to unilaterally bomb other countries, and that any nation which dares breach Fortress America must contemplate its own doom and destruction.

This was truly “Little Boy”: years later, with the advent of the hydrogen boy, “Little Boy” would have been the dinosaur of the new atomic age.

The narrative of American exceptionalism, as is well known, has enjoyed remarkable longevity, and every American president has subscribed to it, not excepting the quasi-African American Barack Obama who is frequently on record as having pronounced America as the world’s one indispensable nation and the greatest force for good in the world.  Let us suppose that we affirm this narrative, so long as it perfectly well understood that the United States singularly retains the sinister distinction of having carried out an attack of nuclear terrorism—not once, which would be shameful enough, though it is doubtful that the word “shame” is any more part of the lexicon of American society, but twice. There is scarcely a nation-state whose conduct might be described as irreproachable, and there are a great many countries where scandalously the better part of too many people’s lives is squandered in securing a mere two meals for the day.  We can easily recognize that America has been a land of opportunity for many; nevertheless, in the intellectual laziness and moral stupor which characterize the conduct of most Americans, evidenced in their steadfast refusal to question the role of their country in precipitating one of the greatest moral and spiritual crisis to have afflicted humanity with the atomic bombings of Japan, America remains qui.te exceptional.

[Published as “Superpower’s Superbomb”, Indian Express, 8 August 2015.]

*Love for the Country: Obama, Giuliani, and Narratives of Patriotism

 

 New York’s former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, dubbed by the adoring American media as “America’s mayor” after the events of September 11 cast him in the spotlight and even turned him into a hero in the eyes of many, has long had a habit of attempting to insert himself into the public sphere after his “retirement” and failed attempt to gain America’s presidency.  Giuliani was always known for his machismo rather than his intelligence, and it is not surprising that one of the many sinecures that came his way after he supposedly brought New York back on its feet—first by tackling crime on the city’s mean streets, acting tough with criminals, and then by showing terrorists that New Yorkers could not be cowed into submission by turning their twin towers into burning infernos—was as a consultant to various law enforcement agencies, in and outside the United States, on cultivating “zero tolerance” with respect to crime.  For Giuliani, as for many others who are habituated to the idea that certain human beings should be treated as a lower species, “zero tolerance” is produced not by tackling the social roots of crime—and “crime” is, needless to say, never the actions of Wall Street bankers who plunder the wealth of common people, or the backroom dealings that enable many of the country’s wealthiest people and corporations to evade taxes—but merely by packing the jails.

 

That Giuliani has always had “zero tolerance” for those who do not meet his exacting standards of patriotism has become amply clear with his latest pronouncement, relayed not surprisingly on Fox News, that President Barack Obama has never expressed love for the United States.   (If a man is known by the company he keeps, it is worth recalling that Fox News, Giuliani’s favorite news channel, in the aftermath of l’affaire Charlie Hebdo described the city of Birmingham as a “Muslim-only” city where non-Muslims could not go at all.  Even David Cameron, scarcely the champion of liberal views or the model of perspicacious reasoning, could not restrain himself from describing Fox News’ anchors as “idiots”.)  “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say,” Giuliani told a dinner meeting of business executives, “but I do not believe that the president loves America.  He doesn’t love you.  And he doesn’t love me.  He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”  Giuliani has now elaborated his views in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, but one need not bother oneself excessively with his words of explanation.  Giuliani avers that he did not mean to question Obama’s “motives or the content of his heart”, and that he only sought to convey his feeling that Obama’s words and actions have often had the effect of lowering the morale of Americans.  It is surprising, indeed, that Giuliani concedes that Obama has a heart; some, myself included, have wondered whether the same could be said of Giuliani.  “America’s mayor” claims that he only seeks to open a national conversation on this question, though it sounds very much like a national conversation, which quite animated some Americans, on whether Barack Hussain Obama could really claim to have been born in the United States.

 

Giuliani challenged the media to furnish examples of Obama’s unqualified love for his country—a challenge that the gallant New York Times found irresistible.  This weighty newspaper, in a piece entitled “Criticism Aside, Obama Has Stated Love for U.S.” (February 23), defends Obama with chapter and verse from his numerous speeches.  When Obama was but a presidential candidate in 2008, he confided to his audience:  “I also know how much I love America.”  At the Democratic National Convention that same year, Obama told the wildly cheering crowd, “I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.”  Moreover, as the New York Times reminds its readers, Obama’s love for his fellow countrymen and women appears not to have diminished a jot even after the first difficult years of his presidency, since in 2011 at a town-hall meeting in Illinois he sought to explain to his audience “why I love this country so much.”  Obama could well be forgiven if, in this love-drenched environment, he might have not quite mustered the will or ability to love Rudolph the red-necked moose.

 

The question, one that can barely be contemplated in America, is not whether Obama loves his country enough, but whether he loves it too much.  There is a strand of thought associated with the sentiment voiced by Samuel Johnson, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”  Assuming, however, that most people do love their country, and that Americans are no more exceptional in this respect than any other people, and assuming as well that most people will be inclined to see some measure of patriotism as both desirable and reasonable, let us grant that patriotism may in itself not be an unhealthy sentiment.  Even the most hardened critics of their country are likely to succumb to patriotism, and the recent events surrounding the killings of French cartoonists have amply demonstrated how quickly people are ready to circle the wagons and fall back upon patriotism.  However, the patriotism of Giuliani demands something else, something much more stringent than mere affection for one’s country.  “I don’t hear from him”, complained Giuliani about Obama, “what I heard from Harry Truman, what I heard from Bill Clinton, what I heard from Jimmy Carter, which is these wonderful words about what a great country we are, what an exceptional country we are.”  Lest Giuliani, now a staunch Republican, should be accused of pillorying a Democratic President, he makes it a point to invoke the patriotism of three Democratic presidents.

 

So, as has happened so often in American history, the affirmation of America’s greatness and its exceptionality itself becomes a necessary condition for being considered a true-blooded American.  That Obama has, sadly, passed Giuliani’s stringent test all too often is not something that would interest much less confound Giuliani, since falsehood and deception are intrinsically part of his being.  Obama has repeatedly and with evident conviction described the United States as “the greatest democratic, economic, and military force for freedom and human dignity the world has ever known”; this piece of pompous and offensive banality is only exceeded by his pronouncement, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”  Not unlikely, such of Obama’s defenders who might still cringe at this shameless exhibition of American exceptionalism will almost certainly point out that the latter remarks were uttered at the commencement ceremony of the United States Military Academy and must only be viewed as a tactical attempt by the president to engage the country’s brightest young soldiers.  It is Obama’s predecessors, Bill Clinton and George Bush, who called America the world’s “one dispensable nation”, but it is Obama who has made this phrase his signature line.  “America remains”, so stated Obama in his State of the Union address in 2012, “the one indispensable nation in world affairs”, a sentiment reaffirmed in precisely the same language—“So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.  That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come”—and with almost defiant conviction at the aforementioned US Military Academy commencement ceremony.

Rosie the Riveter, WW II

 

Let us not merely console ourselves with the thought that hubris has brought down many countries and empires and that the United States will not be spared by history either.  The calamitous consequences of American exceptionalism will have to be borne by others.  We may also bemoan the fact that the illusory difference between Democrats and Republicans has been the bedrock of what passes for politics in the United States.  Both these trajectories of thought must be pursued at greater length by those keen on seeding the grounds for a much richer conception of politics and ecumenical futures.  In the meantime, however, it is worth asking whether there may be yet other modes besides pity, contempt, and condescension with which to question the scandalous patriotism of public figures or contemplate the vexed question of love for one’s country.  In closing, I am reminded of these hauntingly moving lines by the twelfth-century Saxon writer on mystical theology, Hugo of St. Victor:  “It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether.  The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.  The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

 

 

 

*The Mosque at ‘Hallowed’ Ground: Part I, The Controversy and the Meaning of ‘America’

Nearly all the fundamental questions that might animate anyone interested in what I would call ‘the question of America’ seem implicated in the swirling controversy that has arisen over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in lower Manhattan.   As much as any other place in the world, the history of the United States is inextricably interwoven with the narratives of immigrant groups.  Muslims are, for the most part, among the more recent of the immigrants who have made their way to the United States, furnishing the latest challenge to those who insist that America remains the ultimate haven of religious freedom.   Are the Muslims as welcome in the US as the adherents of any other religion?  If so, what arouses the passions of those Americans who, to put it mildly, feel resentful about the proposed installation of an Islamic center and mosque at what is called ‘Ground Zero’?  If not, does that tell us something about the limitations of religious freedom in the US and expose the grand lie that the freedom of religious belief and practice is the most venerable of all the freedoms, real or imagined, to which America is said to give unrivalled expression?

There are other prior questions:  are immigrants from Indonesia, the Gulf states, North Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and many other parts of the world which are predominantly Islamic to be viewed first as Muslims and then as being immigrants from those countries?  If, as is apparently the case, the answer is in the affirmative, is that because (say) Indonesian or Pakistani Muslims themselves insist that their principal identity is as Muslims, or is it because in the United States, as in most of the West, it is fondly imagined that religion is the fundamental and most irreducible part of an identity in what is characterized as the Muslim world?  Was it not the ‘Muslim world’ that Obama addressed last year, and can one imagine a Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist leader addressing the ‘Christian world’?  Why is it even that the ‘Muslim world’ comes so effortlessly to the tongue of most people, including those we suppose are intelligent and even leaders of free societies, but that the phrase ‘Christian world’ would strike the same people, even when they are observant Christians, as awkward?

The unseemly controversy over the mosque has brought many other considerations to the fore.  No one who has been keeping abreast of events in recent months, never mind the last nine years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 brought down the Twin Towers, could have failed to notice the rising tide of Islamophobia.  Considering how little intelligence has been displayed by some previous occupants of the White House, such as his grey eminence George W. Bush, one should expect almost nothing of the likes of the Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee, who came up with this inexcusably stupid formulation:  “You could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion or it is a nationality, way of life or cult, whatever you want to call it.”  One of the highest-ranking retired officers in the American armed forces has openly stated that practitioners of Islam are not entitled to the protections accorded to the adherents of other faiths in the Bill of Rights.  And so might one continue in this vein, but all this gives rise to the glaring question:  is the US in the grip of Islamophobia?  Some will suggest that Muslims have replaced communists:  it is not difficult to fathom the argument, certainly, that the gargantuan military-industrial complex is constantly in need of new enemies.  But there are other, more interesting, complexities to this Islamophobia.  The remarks now so cavalierly bandied about as characterizations of Islam would not be tolerated if they had been made apropos the practitioners of another faith.  One is tempted to say that the abuse of Islam is the new and fashionable anti-Semitism of America.

Let us consider also another distinct oddity in the present debate.  Among the ‘national’ organizations that have expressed their strong displeasure at the proposed construction of the Islamic Center and mosque is the Anti-Defamation League.  So just what is it that rankles Abraham Foxman and the League about this mosque?  Unless Jews, or more precisely Zionists, have some proprietary interest in this matter, why should their opinion matter so much or at all – their opinion, that is, as Jews rather than as human beings who may, like any one else, feel invested in this subject — and why should they even presume to suppose that their have more of a vested interest in this mosque than Hindus, Buddhists, or Sikhs, all of whom are represented in not insignificant numbers in contemporary America?  At a demonstration last month against another proposed mosque in Nashville, Tennessee, protestors appeared waving American and Israeli flags.  All such evocations of jingoism are nauseous, but should we not be mystified at the presence of demonstrators carrying Israeli flags?  Should we suppose that this signifies that America is fundamentally a country built on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and are Israeli flags meant to put Muslims on notice that any assertion of Muslim identity, even if this is taking place in a country purportedly built on the edifice of individual liberties and religious freedom, will be taken to be an affront not only to the US but to Israel as well?

That the word ‘Muslim’ itself signifies acute discomfort in the United States is also signaled by what, to people with a modicum of intelligence, must appear as the rather comical and persistent confusion about whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or not.  According to one poll conducted last week, almost a third of all Americans now believe that the American President is a Muslim.  The word ‘now’ is underscored since the figure increased from 18% only a short while ago:  Obama’s apparent defense of the right of Muslims to build a mosque ­at Ground Zero has fostered the impression that he belongs to the Muslim faith.  If other words – at Ground Zero, for instance — in my own discourse have to be underscored,  it is only a sign of the fact that nothing in this discourse is as it seems.  Far from being a Muslim, Obama, according to a White House press release, is a practicing Christian who consults daily with spiritual advisors.  We can marvel at a more apt moment about Obama’s intense religiosity and pray that he does not turn into another Tony Blair, the once boyish-looking Prime Minister turned into an evangelist.  I suspect that the degree to which Obama has now become a fervent and emboldened Christian has some proportional relationship to the degree to which he is imagined to be a Muslim by a good number of Americans.

There are, then, many elements of the discourse surrounding the proposed and inaptly named ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ that need to be parsed in substantial detail; and I shall do the same in subsequent posts over the next few days.  In the meantime, however, the larger meaning of this controversy should not be obscured.  The ‘debate’ – a rather dignified word to describe some of the squabbles in front of the ‘hallowed’ ground, not to mention the rantings of the right that have filled the airwaves – implicates many of the central questions in American history since the ascendancy of the European colonists.  Just what is signfied by the ‘American way of life’?  Why does every dispute become an occasion to affirm, for those on either side of the divide, an American exceptionalism?  Is American exceptionalism itself the pretext for permitting Zionism a special place in American politics, a place that exempts it from the critiques that one might direct at other ideologies?  Why, and in what respects, is religion so critical to the American imagination, and does the United States truly know how to live with religious and cultural difference?  Is the United States at heart a Judaeo-Christian civilization, and, if so, what does it portend for the more recent wave of immigrants?  Is American-style multiculturalism the only template for contemplating diversity and pluralism?  Can American Islam assist in shaping the future of Islam worldwide?  What role if any might Muslims in the United States play in the arguments that seem to inform most contemporary discussions about Islam?   As we begin to unravel these questions, much will be revealed about the meaning of ‘America’ – a meaning in which, for better or worse, every nation is heavily invested, considering the nonpareil symbolism that American presents to the human imagination.

See also Part II, Some Notes on the Politics of Place and Name