That same year, Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, one of the first great novels since September 11 to address the war on terror, had provoked some controversy because its protagonist smiles as he watches the Twin Towers fall on television. The character, Changez, is a Pakistani Princeton graduate and wealthy consultant living in New York. “Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased,” Changez says. “I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees.” Hamid’s character is telling this story to an American, in fact, and so as to extend his empathy, the Pakistani says that he is sure the American has such feelings, too. “Do you feel no joy at the video clips—so prevalent these days—of American munitions laying waste the structures of your enemies?” Hamid seems to know both that Americans have those thoughts and that they do not see the parallel.
Was Changez’s smile not also the recognition that America was finally vulnerable like everyone else? Perhaps in some way, their reactions expressed the hope that Americans might now empathize differently with the suffering and death of others. “No country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries,” Hamid writes, “frightens so many people so far away, as America.” If when our mortal enemies, the Iranians, sat vigil for us after the attacks, was it also because they understood the pain we might be experiencing? The Iranians might have felt sympathy for us because they knew us. Americans were human to them, real things, real people. Which, for us, Turks, Iranians, Iraqis had never been.
In his novel, Hamid describes the post-9/11 New York that I had lived in throughout my twenties. “There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honor,” he writes. “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back.” Hamid was unquestionably correct about those days. But what shook me as I sat in Istanbul reading these words was how much this description of America reminded me of the Turkish nationalism I despised.
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I GREW UP without a sense that the patriotism that saturated my life was somehow different from the nationalism of any other country, mainly because I hadn’t known of those countries’ existence. I grew up in a town in New Jersey called Wall, a Shore town that did not have its own beach. There were wealthy areas along the river, and winding avenues of white-fenced and red-barned horse farms, and poorer parts closer to the railroad tracks and the high school. Much of it was a landscape of pavement, plastic signs and Dunkin’ Donuts, metal-framed shopping carts in vast parking lots. There was no center, no Main Street, as there was in most of the pleasant and plentiful beach towns, no tiny old movie theater or architecture that bespoke some sort of history or memory. On the timeline of suburban and exurban development, Wall felt stuck somehow.
During my childhood, I wasn’t very conscious of anyone’s professional life, but most of my friends’ parents were teachers, nurses, cops, and electricians, except for the rare father who worked in “the City,” and a handful of Italian families who did less legal things. My parents were descendants of working-class Danish and Italian and Irish immigrants who had little memory of their European origins, and my extended family ran a small public golf course (eighteen dollars a round), where I worked as a hot dog girl in the summers. Like many families, we owned guns; I am not sure I was ever exposed to the “liberal” argument about gun control, but I also never saw anyone shoot their gun. I felt, though, an undercurrent of violence in the town. I knew girls who had abusive boyfriends; the one gay kid in the school was pushed into garbage cans in the cafeteria. Kick your ass. Get your ass kicked. He beat the shit out of that guy. Every year, it seemed, someone died in a car accident, usually from drunk driving; one time, the high school displayed the smashed-up car on the school lawn.
We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we would’ve been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays until church time was usurped by soccer games. I do not remember a strong sense of civic engagement; not with the community, or for the environment, or for poor people. I had the feeling, rather, that people could take things from you if you didn’t stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, cookouts in the backyard. The lone Chinese kid studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.
My father didn’t fight in Vietnam, so the world did not come to me through those stories. “Only ten percent of the country were hippies,” my father said once. “It’s misrepresented in movies.” “Did you protest the war?” I asked. Oh, of course, my mother would say, everyone did. My father didn’t answer. Why did the war happen? Money, he replied. My parents hated “Washington,” so sometimes they sounded like Ralph Nader and sometimes like Ronald Reagan; and they complained about Wall Street, New York, lawyers, Ivy League snobs, and Bill Clinton, who they seemed to believe had been elected president just to torture them.
In school, we did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been long ago phased out of state curriculums. America was the world; there was no sense of America being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the Soviet Union seemed something more like the Death Star, flying overhead and ready to laser us to smithereens, than a country with people in it. I have television memories of world events; even in my mind they appear on a screen: Oliver North testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings, the scarred, evil-seeming face of Manuel Noriega, Gorbachev and the maplike purple mark on his bald head; the movie-like quality, all flashes of light, of the bombing of Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Mostly what I remember of this war in Iraq was singing on the school bus—I was thirteen—wearing little yellow ribbons and becoming teary-eyed as I remembered the MTV video of the song.
And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free
That “at least” is funny. We were free, at the very least we were that. Everyone else was a chump, because they didn’t even have that obvious thing—whatever it was, it didn’t matter, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did, and we were proud and special. Even more, it would always be there, since of course I had no knowledge of why or how we had gotten that freedom, or what it meant. We were born with it. It was our God-given gift, our superpower.