Immigrant Nation
I dutifully attended a wake last night for a close friend of my wife’s parents, who are now themselves deceased. The older I am, the more of an obligation these remembrances become.
I was speaking to the son of the deceased—I’m guessing he’s now in his thirties, though I don’t know him too well; I know his sisters better. He’s the youngest of three children—said he’d just left the DC area bound for Texas—said “he couldn’t take the politics here” and wanted his own son to attend an elementary school where the teachers didn’t “indoctrinate the kids like they did in Falls Church.” Like Texans don’t ever indoctrinate their offspring. He volunteered that he was VERY conservative and was looking to live with his fellows, though he didn’t mention Greg Abbott, and crazy man Paxton by name.
I’m curious, wondering how well the son of immigrants survived his own elementary school years, and how much he was persecuted in the traditional way of kids ganging up on the new boy.
I knew his mother; she was the last of the two couples, immigrants all. She and her husband had done well for themselves in their adopted country. I never met her husband, a doctor as was she; he’d died long before. She’d only last year come to my mother-in-law’s funeral in a wheelchair, upset and lost at the loss of her friend, no doubt feeling her own life was nearly done. She and her husband practiced medicine in Egypt; they immigrated to the States, leaving the old world looking for better. She’d been able to qualify for a medical license in the States, a no mean feat, and retired comfortably. She visited my in-laws’ house regularly, accompanied or not by her children, rolling into the driveway in her grand Mercedes—the most expensive car in my in-laws’ neighborhood.
Visiting my future in-laws, from the start their home seemed like stepping back into an earlier time, with old world icons, a portrait of the Coptic Pope Shenouda, the thick smell of garlic and spices—and a culture they continued even as they didn’t isolate themselves from their adopted country. Both excellent cooks, he the raconteur who loved social gatherings, and she the quieter, practicing Copt. Neither of my own parents had graduated from college as my Egyptian in-laws had. Only the vaguest connection between Irish Catholics and Coptic Christians joined my wife’s family to mine.
The Copts are an ethnic-religious minority almost invisible in Egypt today, though before the English were expelled after World War I, Copts were the backbone of Egyptian civil service, better educated and wealthier than their Muslim neighbors. Theirs is a heritage going back at least to before the Byzantine Empire—and long before the Arabs overran North Africa.
The Brits were kicked out of Egypt. The Egyptians fired their king and then Nassar took over—skipping a few steps—and the Copts, one of the original Christian sects, became anathema, hated nearly as much as the Jews by the extremists among the Muslim population. After the Arabian conquest of Egypt, the once Eastern Orthodox country became Muslim.
In that part of the world, changing one’s faith is a well-practiced survival instinct.
The Mediterranean shores have been washed in repeated invasions, the European, Middle Eastern and African sides, as regular as the tides, major empires and minor principalities rising and falling until the best historians and anthropologists can do is discuss the tangled influences. Though the Copts, like the Jews, remain their own minority in a heredity dating back millennia.
The Puritans of New England, the Catholics of Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Huguenots of the Carolinas—all were fleeing persecution for religion and culture—and Roger Williams was fleeing the Puritans in founding Rhode Island. The Irish from County Clare were only fleeing starvation by British indifference, but arriving as Catholics to a country founded by Protestants was their own trial.
So it wasn’t altruism that stayed on the minds of those writing our national Constitution, more the keen understanding that the best compromise regarding religion is to excise it from politics. It helped that Washington, Jefferson, Franklin among others were deists descendants of the Enlightenment. Tying the disparate colonies together was an feat we tend to ignore—and sometimes strive to undo.
“Why should we care what the Founding Fathers believed or did not believe about religion? They went to such great trouble to insulate faith from politics, and took such care to keep their own convictions private, that it would scarcely matter if it could now be proved that, say, George Washington was a secret Baptist. The ancestor of the American Revolution was the English Revolution of the 1640s, whose leaders and spokesmen were certainly Protestant fundamentalists, but that didn’t bind the Framers and cannot be said to bind us either. Indeed, the established Protestant church in Britain was one of the models which we can be quite sure the signatories of 1776 were determined to avoid emulating.”
from Christopher Hitchens’s essay, Gods of Our Fathers: the United States of Enlightenment, included in his book, Arguably Essays.
Here is what the current crop of right wing politicians chose not to grasp: when they weaponize religion—whether believers or not—against the godless liberals they claim to oppose, it cannot end any better than it had for countries suffering under Spanish Inquisitors, Papists, Cromwellians, to the modern Islamicists. Religion in the pursuit of power corrupts both faith and politics.
Yet the pharisees are still among us.
A certain irony exists in conservatives forgetting their previous opposition to John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president—back then questioning whether a Catholic president would pledge allegiance to the Constitution or a Roman Pope—now cheering the newest Supreme Court Justice, a Catholic of Catholics. The conservative Catholics solve that problem today by ignoring their Pope. Had Kennedy be a conservative, one wonders what their position might have been. Strange bedfellows.
Though lest we overlook the far leftists, their saving grace is an inability to cease arguing with their fellow travelers—if they could ever get their act together, with purity tests abounding, they’d make the Puritans appear laid back.
A wide range of immigrant communities exist in the DC area. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the new group arriving after each of our overseas wars. The Black community in DC itself was founded by former slaves fleeing our Civil War. When I first passed through DC in the 70s, it was still a recognizably Southern city, complete with a thriving Black counterculture dating back to before Duke Ellington hit the scene.
If one need confirm which recent immigrant wave has arrived in Washington, catch a cab from National Airport. Some are studying for college degrees, and others are still learning English and working through transitions from where they came. And with each new wave comes the opportunity for we “rightful” Americans to look down on these foreigners.
Studs Terkel, the Chicago left-leaning commentator, spoke of how it seemed the previously arrived immigrants often became the least tolerant of those coming after. As much as he was frustrated by such sadly ironic retrenchments, Terkel stood with the working class, the poor and disadvantaged.
Candid news photo of Studs Terkel—photo in Wikipedia
“There’s one of the ironies. The ones who most condemn ‘big gov’ment’ are the ones whose daddies’ and granddaddies’ asses were saved by ‘big gov’ment’ during the Great Depression.” Studs replying to Charlie Rose. Studs Terkel interview (2000)
In the same interview, he talks about the John Birch Society cabdriver who he interviewed, learning the man had been fired from being a prison guard for becoming ‘too close’ to the Black inmates—Terkel explaining that people are complicated like that.
It’s probably true, if we were all of the same political bent, life would be boring—at least to the Irish among us in need of a good argument. And this wouldn’t be the mixture (melting pot?) of peoples the country has been since its inception. What stayed with me from last night’s encounter at the wake was a certain resignation, remembering that conservatism hadn’t always been a reactionary rear guard—the Republican Party had been originally founded on the opposition to slavery.
Sadly, the hate white Southerners held following the Civil War has poisoned large parts of today’s right. It’s hard to equate a claim of Christian piety against the hate of the Other, be they Black, Native American or simple immigrant. The inherent contradiction has to give them migraines—much in the same way the far left struggles—though presently the Trump extremists seem to be winning the shouting match.
Yes, as Studs pointed out, the poor can be as intolerant as the rich, a reminder of the smallness of the prize. Jefferson, ever the political optimist, argued educating the unwashed masses would make them better citizens. Raising the standard of living has helped with the washing, though Yale still regularly cranks out another Ted Cruz. The Ivy League easily maintains the same grip that its plant-based namesake has on trees.
I can appreciate the good doctors’ son, and his concern for his own son’s success. In his thirties, seeing his son growing up in a country with serious political ruptures, he wants what’s best for him. He has the rest of his life to learn a more tolerant view. Some ten years earlier, I’d attended his wedding—as an adjunct to my wife’s family and thus an honorary member of the Coptic diaspora.
After hearing how the young man hadn’t felt welcome in Northern Virginia, and now he did in Texas, I wanted to tell him we lived not three miles from the Falls Church neighborhood he’d departed, and that it was a real community, but this was his mother’s wake, not a time for discussing political differences. Nor did I reference one of Barcroft’s most famous residents, Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer cum jurist who helped drag the Old South kicking and screaming into the modern era.
D and I were married by a Jesuit in an outdoor ceremony on the lawn of Montpelier, an eighteenth century Maryland plantation house, which had seen slaves tending its fields. D’s father had very much wanted her wedding to happen in a Coptic church—the one he and his wife had helped found in the States. Though a wide number of his Egyptian friends and family attended that beautiful June day. And my younger son walked with his cousin as part of the ceremony. I have the photographs for proof.
Ryan and Susan—photo taken by Cathy Summers, © 1994
And in our very blue neighborhood, this morning I read the following on the community list serve:
“Hello Generous Barcroft Neighbors, I'm working with an organization that has started to run out of items to furnish homes for Afghan refugees (see Facebook: NoVA RAFT (Resettling Afghan Families Together). I've recently noticed a lot of giveaways on LakeLink, but have not been able to respond fast enough before the items are claimed. If you are considering putting furnishing or gently used toys out at the curb, please consider getting in touch with me first. I'll be happy to arrange for pick-up. Also, if you are interested in helping this organization, there are many ways to participate (donations, home set up teams, family support teams, emergency response teams, and temporary family housing). NoVa RAFT works through Lutheran Family Services which is a government-sanctioned organization.
Thank you for your consideration. J.”
There’s indoctrination for you.