Hitch-22

reference to the Titanic. It was called “My Country Right or Left.” I slightly recast this to say to myself, about the USA: My country after all.

I was still only offering a general solidarity without paying the full price of the ticket. Two things had not yet happened. The fantastic, gigantic international campaign of defamation and slander of the United States had not yet got under way, and the argument about the deployment of its sons and daughters to the frontiers had not begun to take on the shape that it has since assumed.

It’s only with a conscious effort now that one can recall the supposed moment of international pro-American solidarity that ensued from the September 11 assault. There were vigils and candles, solemn editorials and sonorous pronouncements. President Bush (who had run away and disappeared on the day itself) did his best to muddy the waters by saying that it was a matter of “Amurrka” versus “the terrists” (sometimes he seemed almost to say “tourists”) and didn’t appear to acknowledge, or even to know about, the huge number of non-American citizens who had perished in downtown New York. But even without this clumsiness on his part, I believe that the venomous propaganda would still have been coming. Within a few days, the Muslim world had been infected by the base, hysterical lie that all Jews had left the World Trade Center just in time to avoid the airstrike. At the New York film festival, held while lower Manhattan was still giving off evil-smelling fumes, I debated with Oliver Stone, who expressed the cheery view that the “uprising” that had occurred downtown would soon link up with a generalized anti-globalization movement. Next up was my magazine The Nation, whose publishing wing cashed in with a hastily translated version of a deranged French best-seller, alleging that the Pentagon had not been hit with a civilian plane carrying my friend Barbara, but rather by a cruise missile fired by the Bush administration. The disgusting “Reverends” Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were also on hand to announce that the United States had merited the devastation because of its willingness to tolerate sexual deviance. Here was an unexampled case of seeing all one’s worst enemies in plain view: the clerical freaks and bigots of all persuasions and the old Charles Lindbergh isolationist Right, the latter sometimes masquerading as a corny and folksy version of a Grassy Knoll conspiracist “Left.”

I took it upon myself to defend my adopted homeland from this kind of insult and calumny, the spittle of which was being gigglingly prepared even as the funerals and commemorations were going calmly forward. I was impressed to see who rallied and who did not. Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis all wrote outstanding articles, expressing the support of non-Americans for the United States against this unashamed cult of death. Norman Mailer, John Updike, and even Susan Sontag—to say nothing of Noam Chomsky—appeared to be petrified of being caught on the same side as a Republican president, and often contented themselves with inexpensive, unserious remarks about American machismo or Bush’s “cowboy” style. It was fatalistically agreed in almost all polite circles that even if one could kill or capture Osama bin Laden, it would only mean that others would spring up in his place (and that’s if you believed, unlike Gore Vidal or Michael Moore, with whom I also debated later on this point, that he was in fact the culprit).

I decided to venture back to the epicenter of jihad and wrote an essay—“On the Frontier of Apocalypse”—which said that the problem country was actually not so much Afghanistan but Pakistan: our oldest regional ally and the working model for a nuclear-armed, failed-state “Islamic republic.” I am still fairly proud of that article. I also began to hear more from my Iraqi and Kurdish friends about the very mad, menacing way in which the Saddam Hussein regime was celebrating and even praising the 9/11 attacks. Ba’athist rhetoric was frequently a matter of dementia, as I well knew, but this was at a time when even Iranian and Saudi Arabian circles were trying to look and sound sympathetic. Amid all this chaos on the various frontiers what I increasingly thought was: thank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United States of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity. As it was, the Taliban were soon in full flight from the celebrating people they had for so long oppressed, and Al Quaeda was being taught to take heavy casualties as well as inflict them. I was not against this.

I can identify the moment when I decided to come off the fence and to admit that I felt that I had been cheating on my dues. I was keener on the foreign policy response of the administration than on its crude and hasty domestic measures, telling amused audiences that as long as green-card holders could be imprisoned without trial by Attorney General John Ashcroft, I felt I couldn’t pass up that chance. But the whole atmosphere was becoming less flippant by the day, especially as the United States began to ask the United Nations to live up to its resolutions on Iraq and on terrorism. One night I was coming back from a TV debate and talking to my Bosnian Muslim driver, who considered his own country of birth to have been rescued from dismemberment and genocide by an earlier American military intervention. “You citizen yet?” he asked me. I made some temporizing reply. “You should get on with it: America needs us.” For emphasis, he pressed on me the name of a good immigration lawyer. In a couple of days I called the number, to be greeted by a female voice which was as purely Irish as the summer day is long. I gave her my name. “And was it you that wrote that book about Mother Teresa?” Reckoning the chances that such an Irish tone would track with a Catholic girlhood, I confirmed that this was so and made ready to call another attorney. “That being the case,” said the disembodied loveliness, “this firm will be happy to take your own case pro bono and without a fee at all.” Not bad, I thought to myself: a pure coincidence between a secular Bosnian Muslim and an anti-clerical Hibernian. Only in America… When I went round to the office itself I was sure I recognized the lady but couldn’t quite “place” her, and she told me that if I’d ever been in the old Class Reunion saloon down by the White House, she’d once been the barmaid. That was in fact the true explanation, but by this stage I was almost beginning to feel that the warmth and geniality of the USA was beginning to overdo itself a trifle.

That was premature. The American bureaucracy very swiftly overcompensates for any bright-eyed immigrant delusions. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me.” The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human. When folded—along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco, the only department of state I had ever hoped to command—into the vast inner space of the Department of Homeland Security, the resulting super-ministry was more like the Circumlocution Office than a reformed bureaucracy. My Canadian friend David Frum, who was actually working in the White House and had had a hand in writing the famous “axis of evil” speech, had his personal paperwork lost when he applied to become an American. Ian McEwan was put under close arrest and hit with an indelible “entry denied” stamp while trying to cross from Vancouver to Seattle for a big public reading: it would have been of little use to him to plead that the First Lady had recently asked him to dinner. A Muslim professor of my acquaintance, a permanent resident of many decades’ standing, was detained and asked “Are you a Sunni?” When he replied in the affirmative, he was asked “Why are you not a Shi’a?” (Not something that Muslims get asked every day, and a question requiring quite a lot of time for reflection, an interval for which the interrogating officer had no patience.)

Innumerable times I was told, or assured without asking, that I would hear back from officialdom “within ninety days.” I wasn’t in any special hurry, but it grated when ninety days came and went. Letters came from offices in Vermont and required themselves to be returned to offices in states very far away from the Canadian border. Eventually I received a summons to an interview in Virginia. There would be an exam, I was told, on American law and history. To make this easier, a series of sample questions was enclosed, together with the answers. I realized in scanning them that it wouldn’t do to try and be clever, let alone funny. For example, to the question: “Against whom did we fight in the revolution of 1776?” it would be right, if incorrect, to say “The British” and wrong, if correct, to say “The usurping Hanoverian monarchy.” Some of the pre-supplied Qs and As appeared to me to be paltry: to the question: “Name one benefit of being a citizen of the United States?” the printed answer was: “To obtain Federal Government jobs, to travel with a U.S. passport, or to petition for close relatives to come to the United States to live.” This had a rather cheap and unimaginative, indeed rather Tammany tone to it. Q: “What did the Emancipation Proclamation do? A: “It freed the slaves.” No it didn’t: that had to wait until the Thirteenth Amendment, the first United States document to mention the actual word “slavery” (and not ratified by the State of Mississippi until 1995).

Having previously been made to go to a whole separate appointment in deepest Maryland just to be fingerprinted, I sat up on the night before my Virginia one, and decided to read slowly through the Constitution. I wasn’t especially nervous about flunking. I just felt like re-reading it. There are very few worthwhile documents in human history that are or were the product of a committee. I suppose that the King James or “Authorized” Version of the Bible is the best. Next to that—and of course very much shorter and rather less monarchical and tyrannical— the American Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the United States Constitution seem to me to rank