Posted on 07/08/2014 2:41:31 PM PDT by Kaslin
Americans have many blessings to count, not least among them the foreigners who come here to learn from us and wind up teaching us. The most insightful of them understand us better than we do ourselves, can see us more clearly than we see ourselves, and in their own way become more American than the Americans.
How do they do that -- see what we couldn't before they drew our attention to it? Maybe their vision is so clear because America is still new to them. Familiarity not only breeds contempt, but blurs the vision -- and the rest of us can't see what strikes the foreigner about us so forcefully. And could even be the key to unlocking the question that has intrigued visitors to these shores since Crèvecoeur: "What then is the American, this new man?"
Another Frenchman -- by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville -- supplied an answer to that question in two magisterial volumes that explored Democracy in America, a work that has long outlasted the Jacksonian America he toured. His insights, almost two centuries old now, remain relevant. And not just relevant but indispensable.
However our French visitor would fare when he returned to the turmoil of revolutionary and then counter-revolutionary France, he would become the quintessential American -- except for one difference: he was fully aware of how exceptional America was.
Maybe that's why there hasn't been so perceptive a study of us since his. For he noticed, and recorded, both our greatest strengths and most dangerous weaknesses, and showed where each might lead. O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!
Happily, the Tocquevillean tradition continues. Its latest practitioner and personification was Fouad Ajami, who has just died at the too-young age of 68. A student of the justly celebrated Orientalist, the great Bernard Lewis, he not only learned from his teacher but may have taught his renowned mentor a thing or two -- for Fouad Ajami was a man of two worlds, the Middle East he came from and the America he settled in. With that double vision, he could see what others didn't, or just didn't want to see. And his honesty made them furious.
Can that be the reason for my momentary hesitation before using the term Orientalist? The word has become a red flag to the kind of blinkered intellectual who specializes in what George Orwell called goodthink in his now classic and all too real dystopia, "1984." Goodthink is the opposite of real thought and you can still see it at work in contemporary intellectual fashion, purging any idea that doesn't fit in with today's post-mod, multi-culti ideology.
Once a simple way to describe scholars who explored and studied the Middle East, Orientalist has become a pejorative in these politically ultra-correct times, and none dare use what was once a perfectly respectable word.
Ours is a time when anyone who defies fashion and thinks for himself risks being cowed into submission by today's ever-vigilant thought police. Fouad Ajami wasn't. On the contrary, he defied the ideologues. He said (and wrote) what he thought. He had become an American.
One of Fouad Ajami's specialties was the same question that had so intrigued Bernard Lewis and others fascinated, even obsessed, by the Middle East: What went wrong? How did one of the world's great civilizations become the sordid, violence-riddled, hate-filled place it is today? Europe was still sunk in its dark age when Arabdom was the world's bright center -- its great hope, home to the liberal arts and sciences, a wellspring of poetry and mathematics, heir and guardian of classical Greek and Roman learning, still open to new thought and discoveries....
How did it become such a heart of darkness, home of terror and repression, a pool of infection that keeps running over to threaten the rest of the world? How was Islamic civilization's legendary tolerance and chivalry replaced with their opposites? How was its courage and daring reduced to nothing but a brutish fanaticism? How was its soaring philosophical speculations superseded by hateful little ideologies and strange conspiracy theories?
Fouad Ajami, born in Lebanon of Persian ancestry, refused to avert his eyes from what had happened to his old homelands. Instead he described the Middle East's slide into decadence in excruciating detail, and spoke out for what was left of truth and honor in that part of the world. He was not only a scholar but a diagnostician, and understood that a lover does not ignore a terrible sickness when it strikes what he loves, but faces it:
"A darkness, a long winter, has descended on the Arabs. Nothing grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and populations given to perennial flings with dictators, abandoned to their most malignant hatreds. Something is amiss in an Arab world that besieges American embassies for visas and at the same time celebrates America's calamities. Something has gone terribly wrong in a world where young men strap themselves with explosives, only to be hailed as 'martyrs' and avengers." -- Fouad Ajami, "Arabs Have Nobody to Blame but Themselves," Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2001.
You needn't be a foreign observer to see what is all around, and understand that others would prefer not to admit. You need only be a Southerner in this country, and encounter one of those unreconstructed Confederates who still longs for the grace -- and myopia -- of antebellum times, when all was glorious as Southern belles danced and curtsied, Southern gentlemen fought duels in defense of fair ladies or just their own overweening pride, and happy slaves sang in the cotton fields back home all the live-long day and ... well, you've seen "Gone With the Wind."
And you also know the kind of Professional Southerner who hates to see the movie end. For then he'll have to emerge out of the darkness into the glaring sunlight, and maybe even realize that all our cares and woes are not really the fault of those damyankees. And that we have nobody to blame but ourselves. It's not an easy thought to bear. It's much more comfortable to stay in the cool dark and just hate, hate, hate them -- whoever Them happens to be at the moment. Yes, it's much better to stay in our fantasy world. Who says Southerners and Arabs have nothing in common? Just call us Ishmael.
This guy needs some serious psychological help.
All this is to him, is another chance to support immigrants.
This isn’t normal rational immigration. It’s an all out invasion.
A Jew wrote that?
(long sigh)
What's he smoking, or will he be?
I noticed that too. You’re right to mention it.
This guy is blinded to what is really at play here.
I resent the fact this guy is trying to turn this into blatant bigotry if we don’t buy into being occupied by foreign nations.
I’m fed up with this nonsense. This is blatant agitprop.
And forced to pay for it at the expense of our children. To equate this wave of "immigrants" to that which Toqueville witnessed is beyond dishonest. These people have NO intention of becoming Americans, but instead wish to live off the benefits.
I’m fed up with this nonsense. This is blatant agitprop.
Yep, and you're getting agitated too ;-)
Yes, you’re right. I am.
And yes, it is the children of this nation who are forgotten as they use the children of other nations to steal our kid’s future.
The Ishmael comment puzzles me. The article is clearly critical of Islam and the accomplishments of Arab Muslim culture in the middle east. He seems to pull it out of thin air, comparing Southerners who blame the problems of the South on Yankees of two centuries ago to Muslims who blame their problems on Jews. I'm not sure it's a legitimate comparison, he's at best talking about a small subset of Southerners who to my knowledge may talk conspiracies of sorts at a BBQ, but don't strap bombs on their children. My best guess, it might be an Arkansas thing.
In truth, I don’t know enough about either player to make a rational response. Greenberg may be a good guy. I haven’t consciously read enough about him to know. Perhaps I should have and it’s my own fault here, but it is still true.
As for Ajami, here’s another guy I’m not knowledgeable about. The comments quoted in Greenberg’s article seem sound enough. Evidently Ajami does recognize weaknesses/failings in the Arab world. I’m just not sure he hasn’t addressed the evils of America as well.
As for the Southern States being comparable to the Arab world, it’s bogus on several counts.
Someone on the tread touched on the fact that Southerners don’t strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up in crowded public places. I think it’s also notable that when the Southerners did feel that the North had gone astray, they didn’t conduct a war of terrorist and anarchist dreams come true. They adopted a military uniform declared their sovereignty, and fought face to face with their enemy.
Agree or disagree with the policies of the South, they conducted themselves by honorable (if you can ever say that about war) accepted tactics.
There are times when people try to be all-encompassing to curry favor with readers. It’s a ploy that says, “See, I am even honest about our own shortcomings. I’m not just taking others to task.” In this instance, Greenberg went toi far.
I don’t buy into his comparison of the South to the Arab condition.
Granted there may be some pockets of contempt for the North today, but there is contempt between high school student bodies. It’s human nature to dis some other group. It’s irrational on the face of it, but it is normal. Every nation in the world experiences this. It’s just human nature.
We could say the South compares to the Brits, or the French, or the Germans, or the Russians, or the Chinese, or the Japanese. In each culture, region, or town, there are people who blame their fate on someone or something else.
The good thing is that this more often than not doesn’t materialize into anything tangible. I think most folks realize that although this silly situation exists, in most instances it isn’t acted on.
Of course it is at times though. These are the places where hot spots surface around the world. No place does it surface like it does in the Islamic world though.
Our South like the Arab (read that Islamic) nations? Wow, is he off base.
Terrorists
Suicide bombers
Mutilating their women’s sex organs
Treating Women like cattle
Killing private citizens en mass
Stoning women because they were raped
Beating them if they don’t remain covered in public
Trying to kill all Jews
Attacking Israel without provication
Swearing an oath to not stop until Israel is pushed into the Sea
Greenberg made a bit of a mistake here. He stuck both feet in his mouth. Sad really...
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