http://techcentralstation.com/051304A.html
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Right now the Middle American psyche is being overwhelmed with reasons to hate the entire Arab world; and yet the Bush administration insists that we are in Iraq to help the Arabs. Unfortunately, the administration seems to be completely unaware of how sick and tired of Arabs the average American has become...
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Many Americans simply wish the Arabs would go away; others wish to blow them away -- and wish to blow them away not because they see this step as inevitable and tragic, but because they rejoice at the prospect of getting them back for what they have done to us. Most normal Americans today just don't care any more about the Arabs and their welfare, or about their humiliation, or about their historical grievances, simply because all the images that come to us from their world horrify and appall us, including the disturbing images of Americans doing things that no normal American would ever dream of doing to other people back at home, if only because they would never be given the opportunity.
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This sounds about right to me.
In fact, it sends a shiver of recognition up my spine as I recall a conversation I had with a conventionally successful Arab-American colleague a few years before Sept 11, '01.
We were discussing racism American style -- its history and present shape -- at one point, he insisted, with good, middle class verve, that he existed outside of what he called the "black/white nexus of conflict" since he was a thriving immigrant, a professional and associated with success instead of failure (as in slavery, poverty and general disagreeableness).
I think my head snapped back a bit at this but I recovered fairly quickly because I'd heard similar stuff before from up-and coming, non-Euro immigrants. I recall telling him that with Americans, you just had to wait for some trigger event -- like an OJ Simpson trial or something -- for latent tendencies to come to the fore.
At the time, neither of us could have anticipated the 'trigger event' would be so overwhelming. Since 9/11 and the wars that have followed, he's discovered the other side of American life -- that fearful and racist reflex he thought his class credentials shielded him from.
Nowadays, he tells me, with a kind of bitter sadness, that I'm a 'friggin genius' for seeing the future shape of things, even if the exact details were impossible to predict.
.d.