Homeland Elegies(9)

I’ve wondered what he might have been thinking as he stepped into the all-purpose room in the quaint town hall of the suburban enclave where he lives, a room likely filled that day mostly with the whites he thought too concerned with their summer vacations; I’ve wondered, as he walked into that room and showed his ID and took his place in line—did he know yet? Or when he stepped into the voting machine, drew the curtain, and stared at the cleft column of names—what was he feeling? What moved him to lift his hand for the tiny lever on the red side and press down on it? I’ve wondered if some part of him didn’t really believe he was doing it, or believed it wouldn’t matter—for wasn’t it a foregone conclusion at that point that Hillary would win? And if he voted for Trump only because he really thought she would win, what was he really trying to say? What private thought or feeling was he honoring? What fidelity did he not want to betray? I don’t think it was misogyny; he loved Benazir Bhutto, was gutted by her killing. No. I think it was his enduring love of Trump.

What was this attachment to the man? Was it really just the memory of the helicopter rides, the spacious suite, the hooker, a tailor’s tape, a lapel pin? Could it really be so banal? Or were those things standing in for something else, something more encompassing and elusive? Father always called America the land of opportunity. Hardly original, I know. But I wonder: Opportunity for whom? For him, right? The opportunity to become whatever he desired? Sure, others, too, but only insofar as others really meant him. And isn’t that what Mary was saying all those years ago? That our vaunted American dream, the dream of ourselves enhanced and enlarged, is the flag for which we are willing to sacrifice everything—gouging our neighbors, despoiling our nation—everything, that is, except ourselves? A dream that imagines the flourishing of others as nothing more than a road sign, the prick of envy as the provident spur to one’s own all-important realization? Isn’t this what Father saw in Donald Trump? A vision of himself impossibly enhanced, improbably enlarged, released from the pull of debt or truth or history, a man delivered from consequence itself into pure self-absorption, incorporated entirely into the individualist afflatus of American eternity? I think Father was looking for an image of just how much more his American self could contain than the Pakistani one he’d left behind. I think he wanted to know what the limits were. In America, you could have anything, right? Even the presidency? If an idiot like Trump could get hold of it, couldn’t you? Even if you didn’t want it? After all, the idiot apparently didn’t want it, either. He just wanted to know he could have it. Or maybe the emphasis there needs to shift: he wanted to know he could have it.

Yes. I think that’s right.

Elsewhere, I’ve referred to Trump’s ascendancy as the completion of the long-planned advent of the merchant class to the sanctum sanctorum of American power, the conquering rise of mercantilism with all its attendant vulgarity, its acquisitive conscience supplanting every moral one, an event in our political life that signals the collapse not of democracy—which has, in truth, enabled it—but of every bulwark against wealth-as-holy-pursuit, which appears to be the last American passion left standing. De Tocqueville would not be surprised. My father is no exception. Trump is just the name of his story.





Footnotes


1 I found Trump’s description oddly poetic. Father always said he found the man sharp. It was a measure of how far Trump had finally fallen in his eyes by the fall of 2019 that, when I told him I was writing these pages, he offered to get me into the office where he no longer worked—at that point, he was retired—so I might be able to peruse Trump’s medical file. Though tempted, I didn’t see the need. Father remembered so much of his time with “Donald” and remembered it so well; he could call up details of even the most trivial exchanges with a vividness usually reserved for the recollection of a great romance.





II.





On Autobiography; or, Bin Laden




Not quite ten years after 9/11, I wrote a play in which an American-born character with Muslim origins confesses that as the towers were falling, he felt something unexpected and unwelcome, a sense of pride—a “blush” is how he describes it—which, he explains in the play’s climactic scene, made him realize that, despite being born here, despite the totality of his belief in this country and his commitment to being an American, he somehow still identified with a mentality that saw itself as aggrieved and other, a mind-set he’s spent much of the play despising and for which he continually uses, to the chagrin of those onstage (and many in the audience), the term Muslim. Later, the play’s only other character of Muslim origin refers to the 9/11 attacks as something America deserved and a likely harbinger of more to come. When the play went on to win a Pulitzer and be performed around the country, and then the world, the one question I would be asked more than any other—and which I’m still asked fairly often—is how much of me is in it. Over time, I’ve gleaned that what I’m usually being asked is whether I, too, felt a blush of pride on September 11, and, if so, whether I believe America deserved what it got; and finally, if I, like my character, think that further Muslim attacks on America are likely. When they ask if the play is autobiographical, what people are really asking me about is my politics.

For years, I deflected. Had I wanted to write an autobiography, I could have done so; had I wanted to write an anti-American screed, I could have done that, too. But I hadn’t done either. Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not. To most of my questioners, I discovered, my demure evasions were really affirmations. My choice not to disavow having had such feelings myself was taken as a tacit confession of guilt. Why else would I stay silent? In other words, while those asking couldn’t identify with having feelings like this, they certainly could identify with not wanting to admit them if they did. As ever, interpretation has more to do with the one interpreting than the one being interpreted.