Politics: If it's Tuesday, then it must be bombing
I suspect we'll be dropping bombs on Tuesday evening in Baghdad. It will take that long to get the UN inspectors out, let this farcical deadline expire and alert the media.
Of course, the next thing will be the violence against Arab Americans. It always is. As an Arab American, I am explicity certain that the American people, who have demonstrated such maturity so far in this presidentially-manufactured conflict will not fail to once again show their stupid, close-minded, worst-among-us true colors again with a coming conflict with an Arab nation.
Let me tell you about the first Gulf War. I was in high school, a senior, and I was a chubby nerd. Remember, now, that the first Gulf War was a stunning display of U.S. military might. We ran sorties from January 17th until February 24th. During that time, as expected, the U.S. air forces destroyed a huge amount of Iraqi infrastructure and the light show led to mass desertions and speedy surrenders by a huge portion of Iraq's conscript army.
In light of these news reports, my gym teacher, who already resented me because I was not a presidential fitness scholar (I would, modestly, refer to myself as something of a regular scholar), decided to make fun of Arabs, knowing that I was an Arab American, during a class period. He joked with the class, egged on by some of the class assholes, about how "Them Arabs got good armies, huh? They're really giving us a run for their money, huh?"
I didn't care what this asshole had to say. Everyone knows that if gym teachers were sensitive, caring individuals, they would probably get beat up in their own classes. I knew as a matter of fact that this particular gym teacher once had a crush (though he was married) on a women who played in my grandfather's band. He would come to their shows and sit way off to the side so he could see her legs work the pedals as she played piano. He was a sad, lonely, racist, piece of shit in a little dung heap of a town that my mom still lives in. The town is still full of racists and idiots, whose eyes remain firmly sewn shut against almost every aspect of reality. They don't see that this war was started months and months ago as a strategy for Karl Rove to break the six-decade long mid-term election slump for the party in the White House. They don't see that the eminent threat to the United States by anyone will only be exacerbated by a war against a weakened, well-contained despotic regime while stronger, better-armed, and more terrorist-connected regimes flourish with the very weapons of mass destruction we'll be using as a raison d'etre when bombs start falling in two days.
Those racist people are the ones I'm most afraid of. They are the ones who vote, and let the television think for them, and harbor these strangely out of sync beliefs. My grandmother hallucinated about Mexicans when she was in the hospital a few months back. She's never met a Mexican in her life. My father in law urged my wife and I not to name our July-due baby "something crazy," which was his way of asking us not to call him Mohammed or something he would be ashamed of.
I'm certain I won't be the first person to state that this nation has a shortness of tolerance. I've never even liked the word tolerance, because it's very utterance indicates that you are thinking of hating something, but instead you'll tolerate it for a little while. But what's horrible is that we just keep moving the intolerance around, and we don't really seem to grow any new tolerance. At the dawn of the 20th century, we had plenty of intolerance. The white American upperclass hated the Italians, the Irish and the Jews. We hated the Poles and the other Slavs. Who had time to hate the blacks, who were already mostly "in their place" according to many. No, we saved our enmity for the not-quite white enough immigrants. Then the focus shifted, and we turned our ire on the blacks, who we punished and pushed from our small towns to our goddamn ghettoes. Even today, there is only an uneasy peace between black Americans and an increasingly large group calling itself "white." (Oddly, this group contains many who were hated only a hundred years ago, the Irish and the Italians and the Slavs.)
But recently, a new group has drawn our hatred, forming under the shadow of our stale-mated conflict with the African-Americans. We now hate our immigrants, and now institutionally, we hate our Arab-Americans. We feel comfortable indicating that their presence in our economy is a security threat. We send ten dozen FBI agents to arrest one computer science doctoral student and intimidate scores of his friends in a small town in Idaho. We don't care what it looks like, we say, we're at war.
What if that pile of racist Americans I'm so afraid of decide they don't care what it looks like, we're at war? Who will be in charge of protecting the car dealers, the shop keepers, the Halal butchers, the taxi drivers, the college professors, the physicians, the scientists and project managers? Who will stop the harassment of my family members at airports? Who will protect us from ourselves?
I suspect we'll be dropping bombs on Tuesday evening in Baghdad. It will take that long to get the UN inspectors out, let this farcical deadline expire and alert the media.
Of course, the next thing will be the violence against Arab Americans. It always is. As an Arab American, I am explicity certain that the American people, who have demonstrated such maturity so far in this presidentially-manufactured conflict will not fail to once again show their stupid, close-minded, worst-among-us true colors again with a coming conflict with an Arab nation.
Let me tell you about the first Gulf War. I was in high school, a senior, and I was a chubby nerd. Remember, now, that the first Gulf War was a stunning display of U.S. military might. We ran sorties from January 17th until February 24th. During that time, as expected, the U.S. air forces destroyed a huge amount of Iraqi infrastructure and the light show led to mass desertions and speedy surrenders by a huge portion of Iraq's conscript army.
In light of these news reports, my gym teacher, who already resented me because I was not a presidential fitness scholar (I would, modestly, refer to myself as something of a regular scholar), decided to make fun of Arabs, knowing that I was an Arab American, during a class period. He joked with the class, egged on by some of the class assholes, about how "Them Arabs got good armies, huh? They're really giving us a run for their money, huh?"
I didn't care what this asshole had to say. Everyone knows that if gym teachers were sensitive, caring individuals, they would probably get beat up in their own classes. I knew as a matter of fact that this particular gym teacher once had a crush (though he was married) on a women who played in my grandfather's band. He would come to their shows and sit way off to the side so he could see her legs work the pedals as she played piano. He was a sad, lonely, racist, piece of shit in a little dung heap of a town that my mom still lives in. The town is still full of racists and idiots, whose eyes remain firmly sewn shut against almost every aspect of reality. They don't see that this war was started months and months ago as a strategy for Karl Rove to break the six-decade long mid-term election slump for the party in the White House. They don't see that the eminent threat to the United States by anyone will only be exacerbated by a war against a weakened, well-contained despotic regime while stronger, better-armed, and more terrorist-connected regimes flourish with the very weapons of mass destruction we'll be using as a raison d'etre when bombs start falling in two days.
Those racist people are the ones I'm most afraid of. They are the ones who vote, and let the television think for them, and harbor these strangely out of sync beliefs. My grandmother hallucinated about Mexicans when she was in the hospital a few months back. She's never met a Mexican in her life. My father in law urged my wife and I not to name our July-due baby "something crazy," which was his way of asking us not to call him Mohammed or something he would be ashamed of.
I'm certain I won't be the first person to state that this nation has a shortness of tolerance. I've never even liked the word tolerance, because it's very utterance indicates that you are thinking of hating something, but instead you'll tolerate it for a little while. But what's horrible is that we just keep moving the intolerance around, and we don't really seem to grow any new tolerance. At the dawn of the 20th century, we had plenty of intolerance. The white American upperclass hated the Italians, the Irish and the Jews. We hated the Poles and the other Slavs. Who had time to hate the blacks, who were already mostly "in their place" according to many. No, we saved our enmity for the not-quite white enough immigrants. Then the focus shifted, and we turned our ire on the blacks, who we punished and pushed from our small towns to our goddamn ghettoes. Even today, there is only an uneasy peace between black Americans and an increasingly large group calling itself "white." (Oddly, this group contains many who were hated only a hundred years ago, the Irish and the Italians and the Slavs.)
But recently, a new group has drawn our hatred, forming under the shadow of our stale-mated conflict with the African-Americans. We now hate our immigrants, and now institutionally, we hate our Arab-Americans. We feel comfortable indicating that their presence in our economy is a security threat. We send ten dozen FBI agents to arrest one computer science doctoral student and intimidate scores of his friends in a small town in Idaho. We don't care what it looks like, we say, we're at war.
What if that pile of racist Americans I'm so afraid of decide they don't care what it looks like, we're at war? Who will be in charge of protecting the car dealers, the shop keepers, the Halal butchers, the taxi drivers, the college professors, the physicians, the scientists and project managers? Who will stop the harassment of my family members at airports? Who will protect us from ourselves?
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