29th June, 2006

Dear T,

As an “American-to-be” whose descendents, if they will be any, would only be able to make a less romantic claim of a Boeing 747 arrival, I can understand your concern and distress on hearing criticism of America, which in your opinion is either mistaken or born out of ignorance. After all no one, even the people offering criticism, would like it when a central part of their strongly held identity gets criticized. I also agree with you, to a point, that the “others” (which I will, partly, always be) really “don’t get it”.

I say this, because even though I am still an “alien”, I find myself helping the others “get it” at VILLA, especially when I hear broad and general criticisms of America. The quick explanation I can come up with is that they haven’t been here long enough after all to see what it is all about. As for the rest of the “others” ( many of who would also like to be ‘we” who “hold these truths to be self-evident”) beyond the tightly guarded (except the slightly more porous Mexican) borders, America, and the ideas regarding America arrive in one of two packages: 1) culture (McDonald’s, Hollywood, CNN, consumer goods, fashion, and in less common cases such as myself, as the novels of Steinbeck, Faulkner, Mark Twain and poetry of Whitman and Dickinson) and 2) geo-politics & military interventions (cases, historically and popularly, considered good: World War II; (few) cases considered less than good: Kermit Roosevelt run CIA boondoggle in Iran in the 1960s, the still painful Vietnam war – I suppose a significant number of Vietnamese didn’t exactly see GI Bill as their best hope against Communism, and the current situation in Iraq).

Thus as I see it, the “others” view America, primarily through these twin Pavlovian lenses, desire and fear. The desire, at an individual level, to be and to do, what Americans do routinely here without a second thought (when I was a kid, and had encountered America via Archies’ comics, one of my intense desires was to taste this thing Jughead, one of the characters, routinely liked to have in his high school cafeteria: a sundae), and then the fear, at a collective level, of America’s awesome military prowess. A cruise missile sadly is indifferent to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, and resembles something that The Old Testament god might have hurled at one of those pesky tribes who chose to disobey him (or her or it), or even more heretically, chose disbelief.

Given this, my understanding of this place I have come to love (I can tell you, it is quite difficult to write ecstatic hymns in many Indian cities unlike over here at Lullwater) has become more ying-yang like, and less dualistic (darkness vs. light or good vs. evil), as the speech (or rhetoric) writers to various American politicians would like the “others” to believe. For me personally, America (for that matter any other ‘real’ country, which will be necessarily composed of multiplicities and opposites) in symbolic terms is similar to a large expanse of white with a black dot of time-variable size embedded in it. Yes, there will always be “others”, some of them quite murderous, who will choose to see this black dot as America entire, as there will be those within, who will want to superficially whitewash this black dot away.

Finally, invoking Whitman’s line “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear”, I would ask you to please take this letter, with its gentle dissent, as one of those “varied carols”, in response to your “carol”, even though for now I can only claim to be an aspiring Whitman’s “rough”.

Love, S

And quite a refreshing perspective. you write really well. keep up the good work.

girl_from_ipanema, even though sometimes my prose tends to get Herny James-ish, with run on sentences etc.