Whose Homeland Is It?

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/19111/

 

Whose Homeland Is It?

 

By Annette Fuentes, In These Times

Posted on June 30, 2004,

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/19111/

 

A week after the 9/11 attacks, I spoke to my nearest neighbor on our sparsely

populated road in rural upstate New York. John is a city transplant with a

Queens accent and the coffee-colored complexion of his Lebanese parents. He's a

plumber and a tough guy who has been tossed from several local saloons for his

fisticuffs, but now fear was in his voice. " Right after the attacks, this

asshole at work came up to me and said, 'You people did it again!' " he recalled.

" I looked at him and was about to tell him to go fuck off and then I thought,

no, I better keep my mouth shut. "

 

Racist stereotyping, harassment and self-censorship all played out in that brief

encounter. John thinks of himself as American, but one hate-filled man in one

moment could challenge his identity and sense of security. I wondered at the

time how many other such scenarios were unfolding in communities around the

country in this tense, overheated climate.

 

Homeland, the newest work by journalist Dale Maharidge, answers that question

and raises many more about the impact 9/11 had on the psyche of a nation already

divided by race, class, religion and, most fundamentally, by different

understandings of what it means to be American.

 

In the years since, publishers have cranked out hundreds of books about 9/11.

But where was the reporting on the real and perceived changes in communities far

from New York and the Pentagon?

 

In Homeland, Maharidge breaks new ground in the genre of 9/11 journalism by

heading into heartland America, his old stomping grounds from three earlier

books with photographer Michael Williamson.

 

For two years, Maharidge traveled the country, from Chicago to West Virginia to

Maine, practicing what he calls " Star Trek journalism " – going where no

journalists have gone before. He reports the stories that the news media ignored

while Williamson documents the story with photos that are poignant and

frightening evidence of America's pulsing heart of darkness.

 

On September 11, 2002, while the herd produced predictable flag-waving and

maudlin reportage, Maharidge went to a Chicago suburb where ethnic whites staged

a violent rally in an Arab neighborhood. " It seemed every journalist and writer

and producer in America was working on a 9/11 anniversary story that day, " he

writes. " I was no different. But where I was going there was no national press,

no bands, no politicians working a crowd, no emotional tales of heroism or

loss. "

 

The tales Maharidge relates expose the synergy between economics and racism in

Rust Belt communities, whose residents are the victims of post-industrial

collapse and what he describes as a " 30-year war against the working class. "

Maharidge aims to " draw back the curtain " on the anger of white working-class

people like Nancy and Jim, a mother and son from Oak Lawn, Illinois. Behind

their flag-waving and anti-Arab pronouncements are real financial fears. Jim,

35, had two heart attacks and has $200,000 in medical bills he can't pay because

he is uninsured and hasn't held a job in two years. Nancy, 56, needs a knee

operation but her HMO won't cover it. They are riled up, believing Arab

immigrants get " the best medical care " free.

 

September 11 didn't transform the United States from a nation of tolerant,

freedom-loving citizens into one seething with the brand of racial intolerance

Jim and Nancy display. It uncorked the genie. " People had hate, they had anger, "

Maharidge says in an interview. " But it was directionless. After 9/11, it had

direction. George Bush was channeling the anger. " To what extent are economics

and what Maharidge documents as a deepening depression in most of the country

responsible for the currents of racism and xenophobia? That is an important

question.

 

As Homeland came out, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington arrived in bookstores with

Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, the intellectual

equivalent of the nativism expressed by Jim and Nancy. Huntington posits that

Americans faced with a growing immigrant population need to protect

Anglo-Protestantism as a shared culture. He writes that during economic

downturns " white nativist movements are a possible and plausible response to

these trends. " But if Huntington sees nativism as " plausible " and hence

defensible because of his own identification with its basic tenets, Maharidge

sees nativism and racism as fundamentally anti-democratic, the curdled

byproducts of a failed economic system and the betrayal of working-class people,

whatever their color or creed.

 

Maharidge finds historical precedents in post-World War I Weimar Germany for

what he found as he traveled post-9/11 America " harvesting " stories of reaction

and rage. Germany's political and economic fall from power and the accompanying

nationalism fed Hitler's rise to power. Maharidge sees in today's America the

awful possibilities of a similar angry nationalism. " Many Americans long for a

nation that is powerful – at least in economic terms. Americans may not be

lugging bushel baskets of money to buy bread, but they are trying to live on

Wal-Mart wages paying Silicon Valley-level prices for mortgages and rents in the

hinterlands. These Americans want back the America they remember. " Conservative

talk radio, Maharidge writes, is " a virtual beer hall " where right-wing thugs

like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly whip up their listeners with inflammatory

racist and anti-immigrant – not to mention homophobic and sexist – blather.

 

But all is not darkness in heartland America. Maharidge also tells stories of

courage and conviction. Chief among them is how 15-year-old Katie Sierra faced

down the thugs in Sissonville, West Virgina, " a community that relished being

redneck " and waved the Confederate flag as " a talismanic symbol that guards the

town and announces: no minorities. No gays. No pinkos. No 'other' of any kind. "

In fall 2001, Sierra became an outcast in her school and the town of Sissonville

for opposing the bombing of Afghanistan and trying to organize an anarchist club

whose manifesto opposed hate or violence. Maharidge followed Sierra as she went

to court to challenge school authorities and, indeed, the very definition of

civil liberties and democracy in one small town. For Sissonville's residents,

being patriotic Americans means conformity and obeisance to authority. To Katie

Sierra and her civil liberties attorneys, patriotism includes and encourages

dissent and individual expressions of unpopular

views.

 

Who will get to define patriotism and democracy in post-9/11 America? Will it

be, as Maharidge describes them, the " thousand mini-Ashcrofts scattered around

the country – 0n school boards, in newspaper publishers' offices, among some

college administrators, on local police departments " – or will it be the Katie

Sierras? Homeland poses this fundamental question. It is one that all of us who

are committed to social and economic justice must ultimately answer.

 

 

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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