“And the winner of this year’s Miss America title is…” the host dressed up like Las Vegas boomed excitedly into the microphone then paused to add to an already blistering sense of suspense, a few spry camera sweeps captured a glimpse of the faces in the auditorium brimming with excitement and the view of the pageant hopefuls themselves standing in a dazzling colonnade of color and grace, a spectacular tableau of beauty, splendor and the unappeasable temper of human ambition. I didn’t watch the crowning ceremony, I never watch beauty pageants because I think they demean women and I don’t like to judge a human being unless their person and character are completely known to me. But that’s how I imagined the event unfold when I heard that this year’s Miss America is an Arab American gal named Rima Fakih.
The news about an Arab American winning a pageant spurred some importunate morning after moans from the American media which seldom depicts an amicably smiling Arab. ‘Beauty Pageant’s political fallout’ read the headline exhibited on Yahoo’s main page with menacing immediacy. Knowing the American cultural mindset I immediately drew my own conclusions, yet despite the mounting sinister reckoning I clicked on the headline in the hope that it may all be about a Janet Jackson Super bowl-style stunt that Fakih may have unwittingly pulled. It wasn’t, although in part the rambling was about some pole dancing videos that Fakih had apparently made to no glory a few years ago, the highest pitch, however, was spared exclusively for the discussion and consequent maligning of Rima Fakih’s ethnic background. Daniel Pipes weighed in his pounds by claiming that the pageant may have been rigged as part of some nefarious affirmative action plan. Debbie Schlussel, a conservative talk radio mad hatter called the new Miss America ‘Miss Hezbollah’ saying that Fakih’s family back in Lebanon maintained ties with the terrorist organization based there. Another radio pundit named Seymour Bigotsrave, a sauna room buddy of Ralph Reid and John Hagee, claimed that he witnessed a first hand account of Fakih French-kissing Mohammed Atta right before he boarded the plane. Ok I made the last one up, but how far away are we from such wide eyed delusions, apparently not that far if you read some of the comments left by some of the article’s readers. ‘What do you expect?’ read one of the comments written by a whole wheat woman probably from a swath in Idaho, ‘our President is a communist’, ‘The contest was fixed, shame’ read another one with that bloated American conviction, ‘The wrong girl won’, ‘I’m never watching another pageant again’, ‘Rima I’ve seen better looking girls at Wal-Mart’, ‘9/11 happened only 9 years ago, Muslims caused this disaster, Islam is a violent criminal system…yet we elect a Muslim president’, ‘Here we have left-wing liberal Democrat political correctness run amuck’, ‘Akhbar allah’. There was a total of four thousand four hundred and forty one comments left at the foot of the article when I last checked, most of which are deeply in favor of a post 9/11 global Islamo-socialist plot to conquer America.
America is a racist nation, Americans need to wake up, smell the Folgers and face the truth. When I say that America is a racist nation I don’t mean that every American is a racist, my reference is to the average American and by average I don’t mean the American arrived at after totaling the population and dividing it by land area, the average American is the American on the street, the American who dwells in that vast plot of land between the coasts, the Joe six-pack, the Larry the cable guy and the Joe plumber who will only come to fix your house if you are white and evangelical. Americans feel no shame from the paradox they create when they wish for their soldiers to be received with candy and Hallmark cards as they invade Kabul and Baghdad but refuse to accept the fact that a Muslim girl won a ticklish little beauty pageant in Atlantic city, or when they elect a black president for the first time in their history only to lambaste him shortly thereafter and accuse him of facilitating the Islamic takeover of America. Americans are the new Orientalists and like the Flauberts, Chateaubriands and Jaegers of yesteryears, they have arbitrarily assigned themselves the duty of reconstructing and recasting a whole new view of the Arab/Islamic world; a model they’ve schematically sketched without as much as consulting the people whom they seek to represent; the millions of Arabs and Muslims who are always more than willing to speak and present their case, culture and point of view. The Americans with their ‘war on terrorism’ chessboards have categorically presented a picture of the Arab/Islamic world as a wicked den at the nethermost anal point of human civilization crawling with eternal schism and murderous discord, and characterized the Arab/Muslim as a bloodthirsty villainous being impossible to assimilate or accept. Unfortunately this image persists in the database and memory-bank of everything American and it doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon.
Then again it may all just be yet another frothy splash in the sea of the most quarrelsome nation the world has ever known, the place where gossip and wrangling over trifling matters are a national pastime. However, it is not undue to mention that the American mind is credulous and crotchety prone to the most outlandish assertions and beliefs and I’m not even referring to the ineffable mesmerisms of religion. Americans slavishly believe what they see glaring on their TV screens and blaring from their radios, they believe the lie if it’s sonorously mouthed by a patriotic demagogue or melodiously sung by a teenage heartthrob, they believe it if it’s made in America and if it sets them further apart from the rest of the world, they believe it because…they said it. Americans love a controversy and where there isn’t one around they make one. None of this should ever come as a surprise, America has always been the way it is from the Plymouth Rock landing to this very day despite how ardently most Americans believe that they have come a long away. Problems don’t go away or disappear in America, they only quietly retreat into the less visible backgrounds where they seethe and stew before intermittently appearing to foment blind feverish rancor again and again.
What is to become of the Arab American community in light of all this heat, how are they to continue living in the rough and tumble of such an unending war, how much longer are they expected to resist the fray of American vengeance and hate for. Perhaps the solution available is one that no one is willing to recognize or be at ease with any time soon, relax Mr. Pipes I’m not about to suggest a violent solution. The Arab American community needs to withdraw farther back into its enclave to redraw the authenticity of its Arabness and emphasize the strain that ties it with the rest of the Arab world. While in this period of isolation the Arab American community needs to focus on its own strengths and deal with its own weaknesses as a community existing within a larger predominantly alien culture. It needs to prove to itself and the rest of America that it is indeed a strong, highly productive, law abiding and self-sufficient community able to exemplarily project its own values and tradition. It needs to introduce to the American society a horde of learned, efficient, erudite and technologically savvy individuals who are proud of being who they are. It needs to cultivate within itself a sense of social urgency and vigilance that will enable it to properly address the challenging issues and calumnious attacks against its character as they arise. The Arab Americans have a lesson to learn from their Semitic cousins who have for centuries adopted a strategy of enclavism to remarkable success; planning, thriving and wielding an enormous influence on the host society’s mainstream without ever fully emerging from their seemingly marginal backstage role. The Arab American community and all other immigrant Arab communities for that matter need to build a more potent and influential identity by developing sagacious lobby groups and broad-based advocacy campaigns that will project the manner, interest and aspiration of the Arab against the insurmountable odds.
August 2, 2010 at 12:54 am |
another good one