The least plain words are probably those of the Emancipation Proclamation, which show that Abraham Lincoln’s years as a country lawyer and rhetorical pedant were not wasted. But in splitting the difference between a war-winning measure and a liberating one, he nonetheless achieved magnificence, by demonstrating to those who had seceded from the protection of this document the folly and wickedness of what they had done. To have stood as straight as a spear and as hard as a rail through four years, and to have insisted every single day, often against his own generals, that the writ of the United States Constitution still ran in every tiny county of the remotest part of the indissoluble and above all undissolved Union: it’s almost forgivable that people confuse it with the Thirteenth Amendment because when scrutinizing the moment you actually do hear the sound of a “trumpet that can never call retreat,” and you do understand why Hegel said that history was the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself.
Inching along less dramatically and agonizingly through 1865 and 1870 come the workaday, necessary amendments finally doing away with involuntary servitude and racism in the franchise. Direct election of senators arrives in 1913. One step forward, one step back: 1919 sees Prohibition but then only the next year the Nineteenth Amendment extends suffrage to women. In 1951 the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting presidential terms to two, reflects the vindictiveness of a Republican Congress after the three drubbings taken by the GOP at the hands of FDR. Things go quiet for a bit until in 1964 the poll tax is abolished as a test of eligibility to vote, and in the dry words of this constitutional guarantee one can detect all the distilled spirit of Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham (which I then re-read, marveling again at the nerve of the fifty-two poor parishioners led by the Reverend Shuttlesworth on that Good Friday, little knowing that their church would soon be dynamited), and of other landmark cases like my personal favorite, Loving v. Virginia, which in 1967 struck down the law forbidding “mixed” marriages. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, setting the voting age at eighteen in 1971, is the way in which I suppose my own “generation” has engraved itself on this great tablet of freedom under the law.
The next day was a Day of the Beast (the 6th of June 2006 or 6/6/06) and this seemed auspicious enough as I drove out to Fairfax County and stopped just off the highway named for Robert E. Lee. In the waiting room, under portraits of George W. Bush and Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, there sat the sort of rainbow constituency that I had become used to joining on the various stages of my application. A woman from Barbados recognized me from the TV and asked shyly if I knew how soon she could hope to get a passport since she needed to travel. We chatted about the fact that both our current countries had the same Queen. Husbands and wives were testing each other on sample questionnaires. There were some basic toys on the floor for the many children who had to be brought along. For some reason cellphone use was forbidden. I picked up a leaflet which explained naturalization procedures, including the posthumous ones for military personnel who had died before getting their citizenship papers. (This had been true for many Hispanic soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, though usually the grant of citizenship had been made automatic and retrospective for such men and women and for their families.) Finally Ms. Lopez was ready for me.
The questions didn’t take very long: I can boastfully say that I got top marks on the history and Constitution test. I decided not to show off: when asked who said “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” I replied “Patrick Henry” even though I strongly suspect, and have written, that the line comes from Addison’s play Cato, which was vastly popular with American audiences at the time of the Revolution. There were then a few loose ends: I had listed all the political organizations of which I had been a member, including quite recently the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.” Asked about this I said I technically was no longer a member, since the Committee had been wound up. “I suppose,” said Ms. Lopez matter-of-factly, “it’s not needed now that Iraq has been liberated.” I wished I could share her certainty there.
She left the room and came back. “Congratulations!” she said. I stood up to shake her hand. “You have passed the examination. But unfortunately I cannot welcome you as a citizen today. You will be notified in due course by mail.” No explanation was forthcoming for this disappointment. It was a moment of bathos and anticlimax; a poor sequel to my smoke-ringed, vinous reverie on American grandeur the previous night. Could I stand yet another pointless ninety-day delay, perhaps to be extended again even as it expired? Yes, in point of fact I could, if it came to it, but what about the lady from Barbados who had started the day so full of American expectation?
Not very many nights later I ran into Michael Chertoff, the head of the Homeland Security Department, at a reception at the embassy of Kuwait. (It’s only a detail, but in 1990 all the embassies of Kuwait were demanded by Saddam Hussein as his personal property, as part of his annexation of the country, so I always feel a slight frisson when on Kuwaiti soil.) As we were introduced, he said that he’d heard somewhere that I was becoming an American. Now, at the time, I was also a named plaintiff in a major lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the Department of Justice, petitioning the courts to put a halt to the warrantless wiretapping of American residents and citizens. So I thought of unsettling him and asking how on earth he knew my movements and plans so well. But it seemed more opportune and more serious to say a word about how tough a time good people were having, backed up in apparently endless lines, as they tried to negotiate the “golden door” that is mentioned on the Statue of Liberty. In fact, probably making him regret that he had ever asked, I gave the examples of several friends who had been abysmally hampered and insulted, and who wanted only to be allies of the USA.
It wasn’t an absolute or mathematical consequence, but the next time I ran into him he again asked me how it was going and I said, look, the waiting in my case is the closest I have attained to a truly Zen experience of boredom and absurdity. Did I need anything? Well, sure, since he asked, I would like a personal citizenship ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin, replete with cherry blossoms, on 13 April next, which would be my fifty-eighth birthday and would have been Thomas Jefferson’s two hundred and sixty-fourth.*
The first trip I had taken, after arriving in the United States in 1981, had been down to Charlottesville to see Jefferson’s house at Monticello: perhaps the most interesting private home in America. Here the great polymath had done the two things I most wished to do for myself if I ever became a house owner. He had designed and indexed a personal library and created a proper store of wine (some of it made with his own grapes). In a public dialogue between Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco I had once heard the latter define the polymath as someone who was “interested in everything, and in nothing else.” Jefferson might have excelled as a lawyer, an architect, an engineer, a draughtsman, a botanist, an agronomist, a literary critic: almost anything in fact except a public speaker. At a time when smallpox vaccination was being denounced by leading men of god like Dr. Timothy Dwight of Yale as an interference with god’s design, Jefferson helped devise a method of keeping Jenner’s life-saving physic cool for conveyance over long distances, taught Lewis and Clark to administer it during their long trek across the interior, and saw to it that all his slaves were inoculated against the scourge. Mention of the system that underwrote his prosperity (and that I suppose had at a great remove also helped underwrite the scholarship that his descendant Mr. Coolidge had provided for me) was still slightly hushed when I first toured Monticello and asked to see the “servants’ quarters.”
But by 2007, when I had published my Jefferson biography, we had essentially ventilated the whole matter. Thanks to my friend Annette Gordon-Reed, the whole story of Jefferson’s other family had become an open page for any reader, and one could even begin to dare see Sally Hemings as one of the unacknowledged “founding mothers” of that multiethnic American republic that Jefferson himself could never have foreseen. So the a
uthor of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was a man who owned other people. (Part of my education in the subtleties of racism had been learning to cope with American historians who could easily accept that Jefferson had owned Sally Hemings and had indeed acquired her as a wedding present from a man who was his father-in-law and her actual father—this making the girl his wife’s half-sister—but who could not bring themselves to believe that in addition to inheriting her and owning her, our third president had also gone so far as to have fucked her.) In taking on American citizenship, I was not invoking some sentimental Emma Lazarus idea of a country of refuge from the houses of bondage. I was consciously accepting that many people who later asserted themselves as Americans had originally, as James Baldwin phrased it, been brought here not from but to a house of bondage. Thus, when Michael Chertoff rather generously called and said: all right, we’ll see you at the Jefferson Memorial after lunch on 13 April, I gave some thought to the guests I would have at my ceremony.
I first invited Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the heroine of feminine resistance to the living death known as sharia. I had met her at a conference in Sweden when she was still a relatively unknown Dutch dissident member of Parliament, trying to warn Western liberals against the sick relativism which had permitted them to regard “honor” killings and genital mutilation as expressions of cultural diversity. Since September 2001 she had taken ever more forward and courageous positions, and seen her friend and colleague Theo van Gogh (distant descendant of the painter) ritually murdered in the streets of Amsterdam as an obscene vengeance for the film about Muslim female “submission” that they had jointly made. The knife that burst the ventricles of Theo’s heart also pinned to his body a barbaric message that told Ayaan that she was next. Ever since then her life had been one of those “maximum security” nightmares where an over-nervous state had overcompensated for its previous negligence in confronting theocratic terrorism. And then the Dutch government, tiring of its strenuous commitment, had abandoned Ayaan to the tender mercies of the free market, while her pious Amsterdam neighbors demanded that she be evicted from her home lest she spoil their chances of a quiet life. What was left for her, after this double European betrayal, but to turn to the United States? When we met again, her magically beautiful face was alive with humor. Before escaping from Somalia she had survived brutal circumcision as a child, numberless beatings from clan members, the dull horror of an arranged and forcible marriage, the misery of tribe-based civil war and religion-based domestic tyranny, and the arduous transition from refugee to exile status. Yet she was—in all the right senses—glad to be alive. “You’ll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist.” I told her that I was indeed happy to learn of this. “Yes, I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.” Pure music. Edward Gibbon once wrote that if all of European civilization were to be destroyed, it could be reconstituted from what had been transferred across the Atlantic: this now holds true for other societies as well.
My old Oxford comrade Andrew Cockburn and his wife, Leslie, had been allies and friends of mine in every sort of crisis and companions at every sort of celebration from the births of our children to the nuptials of theirs. Both as writers and as makers of documentaries they had expanded the frontiers of radical investigative journalism: the sort of work that the First Amendment and the Freedom of Information culture makes possible. For another Irishman I chose Captain Seamus Quinn of the U.S. Marine Corps. “Tell it to the Marines” had been an insult in my father’s house and it’s amazing how durable the taunts of interservice rivalry can be, but the U.S. Marines I have met have been exceptional in their mental breadth and their ability to be self-critical. Stationed in Anbar province during the hottest and nastiest period of the war against “Al Quaeda in Mesopotamia,” Seamus had given me regular email updates on the death-grapple with these foulest of the foul, and thanks to him I’d had some advance intelligence of what later became known as “the surge”: the combination of deadly force and political agility that had not only defeated Al Quaeda on the battlefield but discredited it in a region of Iraq that it had once dared to think that it might own.
Ever since I had been in Washington, Professor Norman Birnbaum had been a sort of mentor to me. Indeed, he had been a teacher to my earlier mentor Steven Lukes. He was a real veteran, present at the creation of the Old New Left, as he put it, and influential on the New New Left as well. If ever I needed an old copy of Partisan Review, he would either have it in his possession or in his memory, which was and is an institutional one. Internationalism is in Norman’s blood, as the Left used to like to say of itself, and if I was ever visiting any European country in crisis I would call him up to find the name of that local Jewish savant who had in his time done battle against both sides of the Hitler-Stalin pact. (“You’re going to Zagreb… Well you’ve certainly picked a nice time [this was in 1992, when the men in black shirts were openly back on the streets]… I should call up old Professor Rudi Supek if I were you.” The good professor turned out (a) to possess a good cellar and (b) to have been the elected leader of those Yugoslav partisans who had been deported to a German camp. “So you see, Mr. Hitchens, I cannot truly call myself Croat or Serb because it would betray those brave Yugoslavs whom I had the honor of representing in Buchenwald.” Yes, yes, I quite understand, but…) I was worried for a moment or two that Norman would not approve of my new friend Michael Chertoff, but he was as usual more than equal to the occasion, and told a surprised director of Homeland Security that he was sure he had known his father at City College in New York in the 1930s. It turned out that this was entirely possible. This was another moment at which to say “Only in America.” And then we were all bolstered by Susan Schneider, the glamorous and loquacious wife of Mark, whose career as a human-rights champion, from Edward Kennedy’s senatorial staff to the chairmanship of the Peace Corps, is barely to be equalled by any living person. (In El Salvador, there is a bridge named for Mark and Susan by a grateful citizenry. In Chile, if you get lost anywhere, just mention their names and people will instantly supply you not just with directions but with goods and services.)
There was a very stiff breeze blowing across the Tidal Basin but it served to give a real smack and crackle to the Stars and Stripes that Chertoff’s people had brought along. It didn’t take very long to administer the oath, or for me to swear allegiance and to declare that America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, were also mine. Nor did I take very long to give my little acceptance speech, merely noting Mr. Jefferson’s birthday and mentioning that, on his own tombstone, he had not cared to recall that he had been president, vice president, and secretary of state of the United States. Instead, he had asked to be remembered as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the founder of the University of Virginia, and the drafter of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom. For a writer to become an American is to subscribe of his own free will to a set of ideas and principles and to the documents that embody them in written form, all the while delightedly appreciating that the documents can and often must be revised, so that the words therefore constitute, so to say, a work in progress.
This was all rather well set out in the passport that I immediately went to acquire. When I first came to know young Americans at Oxford, the British passport was a many-splendored thing: a blue-gold hardback emblazoned with heraldry and speaking grandly in the tones of Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The American passport was a limp paperback by contrast, and spoke in costive Cold War terms of the number of countries, from Cuba to North Korea, where it could not be lawfully taken. The new-look United States travel document makes a real effort. On the inside front cover is an old engraving of what must be Francis Scott Key observing the siege of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, with the words of The Star-Spangled Banner inscribed in manuscript form. On the opposite page are the closing words of the Gettysburg Address, delivering the ringing triu
ne phrasing “of,” “by,” and “for” the people. On succeeding pages appear the Preambles to the Constitution and the Declaration, and brave words from Dr. Martin Luther King, the Kennedy inaugural, and a Mohawk chieftain. The illustrations maintain the note of uplift, with the Statue of Liberty, the Atlantic-Pacific railroad, and the spacecraft Voyager as it pushes beyond the edge of our solar system. The whole is a nice combination of the civically religious—only Jefferson and King mentioning a “creator”—with the great American accomplishments in mechanical and scientific innovation. It is possible to imagine handing it over, when one is being held up by some festering thug at some scrofulous checkpoint, and loftily asking to see his proof of identity in return. But more than that, it is possible to imagine the unfortunates, whose lives are temporarily under the command and control of this festering thug, aspiring one day to carry this same passport themselves. Human history affords no precedent or parallel for this attainment. On the day that I swore my great oath, dozens of Afghans and Iranians and Iraqis did the same. A few days later, I noticed that I had sloppily gummed a postage stamp onto an envelope with the flag appearing upside down. I am the most frugal of men, but I reopened the letter, tore up and threw away the envelope, invested in a whole new stamp and sent Old Glory on its way with dignity unimpaired. A small gesture, but my own.*
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