Now and then there rose among the Europeans the still-radical thought that people of different beliefs might live in peace with each other. In the mid-sixteenth century, a man named Francis David founded something called the anti-Trinitarian movement, also known as Unitarianism. Francis David wrote, “There is only one Father for whom and by whom is everything … . Outside of this God there is no other God, neither three nor four, neither in substance, neither in persons.”
Later, Francis David taught that Jesus was a man. The son of God certainly, but not God. Normally, he would have been killed on the spot for this idea, but Transylvania, where Francis David proposed such a radical thing, was a pretty unstable place at the time. John Sigismund, the prince of the independent principality of Transylvania, ruled over a population of German Catholics and Protestants, Protestant Hungarians, Orthodox Romanians, and some Jews. The Turkish empire extracted tribute from Transylvania but it hadn’t conquered it. Turkish policy did not interfere with people’s religious beliefs. In that respect, Islam during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was much more tolerant than Christianity. Transylvania was a quintessentially multicultural region, and Prince Sigismund’s rule depended on keeping this unstable religious and ethnic gumbo in a state of peaceful coexistence. Francis David’s religion appealed to him. He asked the representatives of the major religions to tell him what they would do if they became the official religion of his principality. Both Catholics and Protestants answered that they would rid the country of all the others. Only Francis David said that he would let them be to worship as they pleased. And so, for a brief period of time, Transylvania became the freest, most tolerant region of Europe. When Prince Sigismund died, things reverted to their usual form. Francis David was imprisoned and tortured—and died not long after.
At just about this time, and just about when Europeans were all set on killing each other completely, the world became startlingly bigger with the discovery of America. Here, suddenly, was a place that was described by explorers as “heaven on earth,” a place of bountiful riches and beauty where the Garden of Eden, inhabited by innocent and naked savages, could be found. In less than a century, Europeans populated this Garden of Eden and began killing its innocent savages, in no small part because they were “naked,” which is to say, defenseless in the face of European weapons and diseases. It didn’t take very long for Europeans to take their hatreds and animosities to the New World but, for reasons that I will explain later, these did not transplant as well as the bigots of the Old World might have wished.
In the nineteenth century, long after the settlement of the New World, a new religion, the most deadly yet, appeared in Europe: it was called nationalism. Different ethnic groups asserted first their independence, then their superiority over their neighbors. In the 1930s another German pied piper made his appearance and piped away a whole generation of children. This time, he wasn’t satisfied to merely take them over the mountains to settle there in relative comfort. He piped them to war and by the time it was all over, in 1945, Hitler’s magic flute had piped to death about one-fourth of the world’s entire population. Hitler’s nationalist religion was based on hatred of what he called “inferior races,” particularly Jews and Slavs. Intolerance was the official state religion of Nazism, and it did not disappear with Hitler and Germany’s defeat.
By the time I was born, in 1946, shortly after World War II, the adversaries had changed, but the hatreds prevailed. Instead of Catholics and Protestants and nationalists, we had communists and capitalists. The fascists had just been defeated but class struggle replaced religious intolerance. But for the quirks of Transylvanian politics I should not have been born. The Nazis certainly intended to kill my entire family because they were Jewish. But as fate would have it, they only killed half of them, the half that stayed behind in Northern Transylvania, which was occupied by pro-Nazi Hungarians. My mother, my grandmother, her sister, and her sister’s husband escaped over the mountains into Romanian Transylvania on the night of the Hungarian occupation. They survived the war because the Romanians, while fascists, were not as good and as efficient at killing Jews as were the Hungarians and the Germans.
The Soviet Union liberated or occupied—depending on whom you ask—Romania in 1944. In 1947 they established a communist regime, and for the next four and a half decades, this regime did its best to eliminate anyone who questioned or disbelieved the communist ideology. My uncle Rihard, who had escaped the Nazis, ended up in a communist prison.
It became evident to us, as it had to millions of Europeans since the eighteenth century, that Europe was a nasty and unlivable place and that the ideal place to go to try to live in peace was America. We saw America as a place where one was free to believe whatever one chose. Besides, America was rich. “In America,” my grandmother used to say, “dogs walk around with pretzels on their tails.” Loose translation: “The sidewalks are paved with gold.” But it wasn’t riches that counted foremost: It was the simple and yet so complicated right to live your life without being killed for thinking or worshipping differently. This right, as we all knew, had been written into the founding of the United States of America by the constitutional Bill of Rights. Foremost among these was “the right to free speech and freedom of assembly.”
This idea, originally born among the eighteenth-century revolutionaries of Europe, had taken genuine root in the New World. In 1965, following in the footsteps of millions of immigrants, my mother and I were able to obtain exit visas and head for the U.S. We arrived in New York in March 1966 and headed for Detroit, where a refugee organization sponsored us.
America was not at all like I’d imagined it. Detroit was a big, industrial city where people of different colors lived in segregated neighborhoods. The city had no cultural center where one could stroll about on foot. Everyone, it seemed, lived inside cars and drove long, exhausting miles to and from work. Some young people at that time were at war with their elders over the war in Vietnam, while the rest of young people my age were at war, in Vietnam. Everywhere I looked, I saw fierce and seemingly unbridgeable conflicts between people on account of their political beliefs, their race, or (surprise!) their religious beliefs. In 1967 Detroit burst into flames during a huge riot, and I saw what I had never actually seen in Romania: army tanks rumbling up the middle of the city, on Woodward Avenue, enforcing a 6 P.M. curfew with machine-gun fire. I was living in a combat zone in a neighborhood torn by strife, in a country divided by the war.
It would have been a true nightmare, if it hadn’t been for something I observed right away. The expression of divergent points of view, no matter how different or how seemingly incompatible, was conducted publicly, without any censorship. The newspapers, the television and radio, gave every point of view a forum, and when these media became insufficient to accommodate public discourse, many people founded their own media, a so-called underground media that took public discourse to places I could barely imagine. In Romania, the press had been censored and unauthorized publishing landed one promptly in jail. And so, although I was only an immigrant, I found myself able to discuss in public matters I had only whispered about in private.
The U.S., I soon observed, was a place of tremendous diversity, as well as tension. Varying interests competed for attention with great intensity. This has been the case since the very beginning, when Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman to whom we return so often when we reassess American democracy, noted, “In Europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire for riches, and an excessive love of independence as propensities very dangerous to society. Yet these are the very elements that ensure a long and peaceful future to the republics of America.”
How was it possible that unrest, civic strife, demands and counterdemands contributed not to dissolution but to greater freedoms? The sixties were an extreme time, when the contradictions that make up our society appeared in stark contrast. Life has become considerably calmer since then, but the animosities and conflicts that were r
evealed so dramatically back then haven’t gone away.
When I first came to America, Romanian immigrants were a rarity, and immigrants, in general, were not treated with the suspicion with which they are viewed today. Differences that were acknowledged back then, though not fully tolerated, have taken on much fuller dimensions now. There is something paradoxical about this: Today, after the Cold War, the United States is the most powerful country in the world. We are enjoying a time of unprecedented prosperity. There is discussion in Congress now of huge upcoming budget surpluses, something unthinkable a few decades ago. But instead of satisfaction, American people feel anxious. Right-wing nuts blow up buildings with children in them. Religious fanatics are attempting to censor books in the library and programs on television. Racists are crawling out of the slimelight and into the limelight, blaming minorities for their own shortcomings. David Duke and Pat Buchanan want to close our borders both to immigration and to the free trade that is partly responsible for our new prosperity. The policy of human rights that was largely responsible for the collapse of the communist empire has been abandoned to the point where our president can receive a dictator like Jian Zemin of China and allow him to pronounce bold-faced lies to our Congress and press. The reason is that China wants to buy our nuclear technology and jets and, when it comes to business, human rights must take a backseat, at least to this administration. In other words, intolerance is increasing while tolerance is being paid only lip service.
On the other hand, the facts are pointing elsewhere. Immigrants are enriching this country, just as they have since they started arriving. The Chinese are reviving the economies of the inner cities, while Hispanics in California, Texas, and elsewhere are doing the jobs that Americans no longer want to perform, for wages Americans no longer accept. Business has proven now and then that flexible hours, concern for worker morale, respect for the environment, and ethical principles pay off in the long run. Tolerance for other people’s religious beliefs and reasonable trust in science work to make us all better. Strong ethical stands and compassion for oppressed people still living under dictatorships gains America the gratitude of the world.
There are some who see America today breaking into myriad separate entities, into racial, sexual, generational, cultural, and linguistic ghettoes. I don’t believe it. I believe that there are those who would like to see the assertion of difference as an excuse to promote their political agendas. And there are, of course, those who wish to see such breakups in order to fulfill various doomsday scenarios. And those who feel overwhelmed by the rapidity of change are using this vision as an excuse for withdrawing from public life.
Many of the arguments now used to divide us are posited in the wrong terms, the “gap” terms. Some of these gaps are real, but others are not. Take, for example, the argument between the advocates of “English only” and those promoting ethnic-language education. It shouldn’t be a question of either/or. Bilingual education combined with ethnic language education makes sense. The language of the land is English—or American—so it makes sense that foreign-born residents should learn English first of all. Not to do so would condemn them to a linguistic ghetto, which would prevent them from fully joining American life. On the other hand, we should promote a partially bilingual and ethnic-language curriculum in those places where immigrants live in sizeable numbers. The fabric of America is multiracial and multicultural today. That’s a fact. This is what gives this country its vitality and its substance. America is not a one-race, one-ethnicity, one-church national state of the kind that has been the cause of war in Europe for centuries. Her fabric stretches and changes. Not to admit this is a disaster. To deny education to immigrants or to promote an alienating curriculum will force them into linguistic ghettoes and cut off their access.
You can see the benefits not just of tolerance, but of celebrating difference, in the work of artists. The Nuyorican poets use both Spanish and English simultaneously to create rich, plastic expressions of a new kind of identity, an identity that is wholly American, not hyphenated. Their work is not the work of Puerto-Rican Americans, or Mexican-Americans, but the work of Americans, simply, the newest Americans. The same can be heard and seen in the performances of Guillermo Gomez-Pena, the work of muralistas, and the reflections of other émigré artists on the ambiguities of cultural translation. They all use language and other materials provocatively. The point is that we live with contradictions and absurdities in our private and political life. To look at them with candor and humor—which is to say, creatively—is to bridge them. Implicit in all viable art is the demand for everyone to be an artist. Good art makes art-communities because it speaks to the myriad gaps that are present in our lives.
Good art today is creole, mestizo, mixed, like American society. How is it still possible, after the civil-rights era, after the psychedelic age, to continue looking at things in black and white? We are no longer living in the era of the Cold War. How is it possible for some politicians to revive racism by using codes like “crime” and “IQ” to mean race? Racial purity is a myth. It is an artist’s job to expose and subvert these insidious codes, as well as to thoroughly mix the palette.
The problem is not “race” or “immigration” or “free thinking” or “the media” or any of the numerous scapegoats that this country’s paranoid right-wingers would like us to blame for our ills. Their solutions—censorship, repression, closing off borders, defending “patriotism” and “religion” with legislation—increase rather than diminish our difficulties. We have a reality gap in this country as big as the very real economic disparity between the poor and the rich. The discussion of social class in America has been fatally compromised of late by the ideology of capitalism-uber-alles that dominates the media and the political discourse. This obscuring has created a perfectly viable climate for hate mongers, Nazis, and other radical enemies of democracy who, in the absence of a significant discussion of class inequities, have been left in charge of the moral welfare of the dispossesed. They make up the armies of Louis Farrakhan and of the patriotic white militias.
There are those who celebrate and look for imaginative, tolerant, even loving solutions, and those who hate. The American experience shows us that we can overcome hatred, xenophobia, and fear. The European experience has shown quite the opposite. The advocates of intolerance, division, racism, and xenophobia would like us to return to the implacable hostilities of Europe. I, for one, don’t believe that this is possible. The essence of America, as expressed in those sorely tested principles of the Bill of Rights, will not allow it. Unfortunately, those rights are not universally accepted even here, in the country that gave birth to them. They need to be reiterated, reaffirmed, and defended over and over. It’s not a job just for the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s everybody’s job.
The Anxious Middle Class
ONE OF THE DEVIL’S FIELDS OF NOUVEAU TRIUMPH
The pundits are already declaring the nineties the Age of Anxiety for the middle class. Give us a break. The middle class invented anxiety. The poor have despair and the rich have ennui. That leaves anxiety, the middling emotion. The middle class is anxious about savings, its children’s future, and old age. It is this anxious middle class that Bob Dole addressed by holding before it the vision of an unanxious middle class from the fifties. Back then, the sugarplum Republican fiction goes, everybody liked Ike and women were housewives and men had lifetime jobs and big cars. That’s true. Women were also on Dexedrine and Valium and highballs and got freaked out by their vacuum cleaners and frequented psychiatrists and mental hospitals. Anne Sexton, a fifties housewife, said, “Imagine it. A radio playing / and everyone here was crazy.” Men were breadwinners and alcoholics and sometimes drove their big cars all the way to the edge of the continent to escape what Henry Miller called “the air-conditioned nightmare.” Lest we forget, this is the generation that started the Cold War. Bob Dole’s postwar middle class was wretchedly unhappy with its burden of seriousness and tedium and worry abou
t its children, who turned into either hippies or casualties in Vietnam.
Today’s middle class shouldn’t be worried about its children: It should be worried about turning into the middle class of the fifties. That’s a reason for anxiety! As people get older they get duller, more scared, more boring, and more frail. Despite its vaunted religiosity, American society is quite pragmatic. The past half century was ruled by four doctors: Dr. Spock, Dr. Seuss, Dr. Ruth, and now Dr. Kevorkian. The first three were Okay, but this last one makes me anxious, too. The middle-aged middle class to which I also belong fears its own evanescence: That’s not anxiety, it’s common sense. But there is a new ingredient to our generational anxiety that was unknown in Bob Dole’s fifties: We contend with the insomniac floodlight of the news media. In the fifties the powerful made only powerful news and only the powerful made news. Now the powerful are under a microscope that reveals their every wart, which makes them just like us, which makes us anxious because we don’t want them to be like us, we want them to be better. At the same time, people just like us stand mercilessly revealed on confessional television. There is nowhere to hide and this lack of privacy is anxiety-provoking indeed. You can add to that the rivers of information and the fact that the young and the hungry are better at navigating them, and we can appear quite useless to ourselves. But fear not: right below us are the poor and they are pissed. And above us are the rich and they are bored and greedy. Something’s going to give.
The Angels in the Closet
In Luis Buñuel’s film Miss Liberty, everything we habitually share is turned upside down. People go to the bathroom together but eat privately. Schoolboys giggle over tourist postcards as if they were pornography. For Buñuel that was surrealism. For Americans at the end of the twentieth century, that’s just life. Everything that was in the closet is now on TV, and everything that was publicly extolled not long ago is in the closet.
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 17