Author: Daniel Henninger
Publication: www.OpinionJournal.com
Date: September 20, 2002
URL: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110002308
Time to toss those hyphenated American
labels into the melting pot.
It's beginning to look like the
time has arrived to climb into the attic of American antiques and haul
out the Melting Pot. The current formula for citizenship--ethnic identity
loud and proud in front of the hyphen, the American half just an afterthought--isn't
working very well.
The Yemeni-American community of
Lackawanna, N.Y., which dates back to the 1920s, now feels beset with antipathy
because five of the local boyos appear to be terrorists with ties to al
Qaeda. Believe us, say the neighbors; Sahim, Yahya and Shafal are great
guys. How their religious pilgrimage to Pakistan could have ended up in
Osama's boot camps is a mystery to us.
Just days before, a nice lady named
Eunice, who takes her morning coffee at the Shoney's in Calhoun, Ga., understood
the three darkish-looking men seated nearby to be discussing terror-like
acts against Miami, and within hours the whole country was watching tapes
of the cops spilling the contents of the aspiring doctors' cars all over
a Florida highway. Needless to say all three were quickly on Larry King,
declaring: "We walk in anywhere and things stop," and "We want our dignity
back."
For about 20 years, we've been told
that the Melting Pot was a myth, and a myth that needed to be discarded.
And so it was. In its place we've been taught--in the schools, in print,
in corporate workshops--that it is better to "recognize our differences."
It looks like that lady in Shoney's did exactly that, and it's not surprising
that the victims are upset that they were singled out for those differences.
It appears that after 20 years of
diversity indoctrination, the result is that the differences are about
the only thing most people recognize, maybe even in themselves. The United
States is well on the way to psychologically balkanizing its own population,
a wondrously nutty thing to do. Is anyone as tired as I am of having to
keep track of these endless hyphenations? Arab-American, African-American,
Hispanic-American, Italian-American, Irish-American, Polish-American, Asian-American,
Chinese American, Native-American, Filipino-American, Mongolian-American,
Ugandan-American, Turkish-American, Greek- American, Korean-American, Azerbaijani-American,
Serbo-Croatian-American, Australian- American (oops, we don't want to make
it start sounding silly). Even George Bush and John Ashcroft now feel obliged
to apologize to Muslim-Americans everywhere any time another bad apple
gets caught.
You have to wonder how the Lackawanna
Five, by the almost universal account of neighbors just nice boys from
the Yemeni community, got it into their heads that the attractions of family
life in western New York were as nothing compared to weapons training with
Osama's fanatics in the Afghan outback, a place even more bereft than Lackawanna.
America, truth to tell, really isn't such a bad place, but perhaps these
young Americans didn't have a clue about the history or manifest virtues
of the country in which they lived. Why would that be?
Most likely it is because no one
ever told them--not Mom or Pop, not the local teachers, and most likely
not the local imam. In fairness to the imam, the average Christian minister
hasn't had much good to say about American society either for at least
40 years.
Several years ago, the Washington
Post did a series called "The Myth of the Melting Pot." One of its themes
was that a great many of the new immigrants coming to American weren't
trying to assimilate and don't feel American in any particular way. This
upsets some long-time citizens who wish the new immigrants would go back
where they came from. But how different is their ignorance from that of
the dumb and dumber, all-American college students whom Jay Leno routinely
interviews on the street about the most basic questions of U.S. history.
"Who was LBJ?" "Um, a rap singer?"
In the very week the Yemeni enclave
in Lackawanna complained of being tarred, George Bush decided to address
the larger mess with a solution: Start teaching civics again. "Ignorance
of American history and civics weakens our sense of citizenship," Mr. Bush
said, irrefutably. "To be an American is not just a matter of blood or
birth; we are bound by ideals, and our children must know those ideals.
They should know about the nearly impossible victory of the Revolutionary
War, and the debates of the Constitutional Convention . . . and why the
Berlin Wall came down." Which of course they don't. But we'd better start,
because the census bureau predicts that in 50 years, the U.S. population
could grow as high as 550 million people. Who was George Bush? Um, a rap
singer?
Mr. Bush is proposing that the National
Endowment for the Humanities take the lead in reviving the teaching of
civics--which is as much about how the government's plumbing works as it
is about great deeds; indeed it is one antidote to importing more homeland
tensions. Good luck, though. Insofar as this is a good idea, the teachers'
unions naturally will oppose it. (Many good private schools never stopped
teaching civics.)
Mr. Bush is looking for allies for
his teach-civics project. How about if the Yemeni community in Lackawanna
volunteered its schools to be first in line? Fat chance, I suspect, what
with all the energy needed just now to project pain over maligned ethnicity,
as the larger Arab-American spokesgroups do daily.
I'm hardly saying that a grounding
in American civics alone could have kept the Lackawanna Five home and happy.
But if we in this country have learned anything the past year, it's that
whatever the ethnic modifier that happens to dangle in front of the hyphen,
we know we're all in this together now--whether as the bull's-eye for the
world's crazy, embittered people or indeed as the project of common national
purpose conceived by the Founding Fathers.
The ethnic diversity movement has
propagated a degree of self-referencing that is ultimately neurotic. Anyone
would go crazy obsessing over their "cultural identity" all the time (with
some disappearing into medieval religious fanaticism). The Founders' vision
of commonality was right the first time. In the United States that means
that you never have to forget where you came from. But it does mean understanding
where you are.
(Mr. Henninger is deputy editor
of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays
in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.)
