A few days later I woke up in a Washington hotel and got dressed for my first day of work at the American Enterprise Institute. But I discovered that the office was closed: it was Labor Day. The first pang of my homesickness for Holland came with the realization that Labor Day was not on the first of May, as it is everywhere in Europe, but on the first Monday of September. I had a lot to learn.
This wasn’t just a new job, it was a new country: new culture, new holidays, new history. Even my old friend from Kenya, the English language, seemed very different on the streets of the District of Columbia. Would I ever take root here?
I went back to my hotel and thought about it. The first and most striking feature of America is its ethnic diversity; that was the first thing I noticed at the airport when I made my first visit to New York. Everywhere I went I saw Africans, Asians, Hispanics, and more ethnic blends than I could even dream of identifying. I noticed too how positive they were about America. Immigrants spoke easily about how glad they were to have come to this country, that they had no intention of going back home because America offered their children opportunities that were unthinkable where they came from. This was so different from the constant complaining about Holland that I was used to hearing from immigrants who sent their money home and who remained cultural and emotional foreigners for generations.
Unlike many immigrants to Holland, when I immigrated to the United States I already spoke the language of my new country and I already knew a few people. I had a visa in my passport that was reserved for people possessing “extraordinary talents” that were “indispensable” for the United States of America, a visa for “exceptional aliens.” I enjoyed the phrase, but I wondered: What extraordinary talents did I really have? This visa meant that I was being given a very smooth, privileged admission into a nation where many people in the world would give a lot to go. Other immigrants endure a much more arduous and lengthy application process.
I told myself to be worthy of that visa. It had been given to me because I was a Muslim woman who had found her way to freedom and independence, who was actively propagating the ideals of democracy.
I quickly felt that I belonged at the AEI. The week I arrived in Washington I was introduced to a man I had long hoped to meet, Charles Murray, who in 1994 cowrote The Bell Curve. When his book was published I was still a student at the University of Leiden, where it seemed everyone was talking about this horribly racist book that argued that black people were genetically of lower intelligence than white people. I read it, of course, and I found it to be the opposite of racist, a compassionately written book about the urban challenges that confront black people more than white. All black people should read it.
When I was introduced to Murray, I couldn’t help thinking that even his head was shaped like a precise bell curve. While we exchanged greetings, I mentioned that I recognized his name from reading his book, at which point he gritted his teeth, no doubt bracing himself for another attack from an offended black person. When I said how great I thought his book was, his smile was so broad and so surprised. We became instant friends.
Despite my initial suspicions and my Dutch friends’ prejudice against the AEI, my fellow scholars were well-read and knowledgeable, as well as friendly. Far from being dogmatic warmongers, they showed themselves entirely capable of criticizing the Bush administration. Chris DeMuth proved to be a man of exceptional intellectual depth and breadth, who asked sharp questions about matters ranging from the Iranian nuclear program to the moral crisis of feminism.
In the main, the AEI’s focus is on economics, and the major principles on which the scholars seemed in rough agreement are individual responsibility and limited government. Working at the AEI wasn’t like working for the think tank of a political party in Europe, where people are obsessed with preparing elections and avoiding controversy. I was able to write, to read, to think, and to attend discussions chaired by the other scholars on subjects that ranged from national security to religion, genetics, Medicare, global warming, and development aid to other countries.
It added to my pleasure in my new life that Washington, D.C., is such a miraculously easy city to navigate, laid out in straight lines, with streets whose names run through the letters of the alphabet and the numbers up to twenty-six. I felt I could never get lost.
When my memoir, Infidel, was published in the United States in February 2007 I began promoting the book around the country. This was very instructive. To my amazement, it could take five or six hours simply to fly from one city to another; there were four different time zones (five, including Hawaii) and numerous different weather zones. Of course, I had known these facts since my school days, but it was now that I finally grasped the sheer staggering physical scale of the United States.
In Holland, after you drive for two hours you’re already in another country. The land there is flat and all the fields are manicured squares; every acre of Holland has been touched and engineered by man. In contrast, entire European nations could fit inside a big state like Texas or California. The rugged landscape of America, with valleys, mountains, creeks, ravines, and canyons, is almost as untamed and challenging as Somalia’s. Flying across the country, peering out of the small windows of airplanes, I began to see why people in the rural United States believe they have a right to carry guns.
I always feel a sense of wonder when facing the geography of America. I traveled for over an hour from Santa Fe to Albuquerque without seeing a single human being. The land was a moonscape of strange rock formations and craters studded with cactuses, and though it was warm in the car, snow-topped mountains rose in the distance.
There’s nothing wild about Holland. There the protected species are muskrats and certain obscure insects; anything larger was eliminated centuries ago. In the United States, simply hiking up a hill I have seen trees so tall they seem primeval, and among them coyotes and elk.
I admired the vast new landscape of America and liked my job in Washington, but I felt most at home in New York City, which I often visit in order to stay with friends. One beautiful weekend late in June 2007 I took a walk in Central Park. Summer was about to begin—I could tell from the thunderstorms and torrential rain we’d been having—but that morning was glorious: bright and sunny, with hardly any wind. It was the sort of day for running around in the park in a bikini.
I walked past the bronze statue of the Angel of the Waters and her four cherubs and on toward the lake. A couple of roller skaters dashed past me; a woman with two children in a twin buggy jogged up. All around me Europeans were talking in familiar languages: Italian, French, and Scandinavian. The dollar was low and the weather was great.
I was tapped on the shoulder and almost jumped. A nice young Dutch couple, in jeans and leather jackets, were smiling broadly, cameras in hand. It was a reminder of my last, lost home. It was also a reminder of my continued insecurity. My bodyguards moved closer. I gestured that I was okay.
“Mevrouw Hirsi Ali,” said the man, in Dutch, “may we take a picture with you?” Mevrouw in Dutch can mean “Miss.” or “Mrs.”
“Of course,” I said, smiling back, and one of the bodyguards offered to take the picture with their camera. As we posed the woman asked me, “Will this ever come to an end?” She meant my needing bodyguards.
“I don’t know. I don’t know when it will end.”
“Do you still receive death threats?”
“It is hard to say. I get threats via e-mail. But people who mean real harm will not bother to send me an e-vite.”
During my book tour for Infidel I was scheduled to give a talk at the Philadelphia Public Library. A week before, I was informed by my security detail that threats against me had been intercepted on a Muslim website. They were explicit about the venue and the details of my talk and outspoken about their plans to prevent me from carrying out my engagement. I was sitting in a restaurant in Los Angeles when I was given this news and was advised to cancel the appearance. Without hesitating I exclaimed, “You cannot be serious. This is a free, democratic country. I will give this speech, and it is because I have protection that I am able to do so. This is exactly why I have protection!” Once I had calmed down, I called Chris DeMuth at the AEI to ask his advice. I didn’t want to risk other people’s lives. Without hesitation he said, “You go and do what you should.”
The speech went ahead as planned, thanks to the concerted efforts of a number of security organizations, including the local police.
People often ask me what it’s like to live with bodyguards. The short answer is that it’s better than being dead. It’s also better than wearing a headscarf or a veil, which to me represents the mental and physical restrictions that so many Muslim women have to suffer. Still, the irony of my situation has not escaped me: I am supposed to be a great icon of women’s freedom, but because of death threats against me I have to live in a way that is, in a sense, unfree. It’s not much fun to be followed around all the time by members of a team of physically intimidating armed men. It’s a little like wearing an astronaut suit, a protective casing that prevents your contact with the elements. It slows you down and makes every movement very conscious and stiff. I don’t like to be watched all day and night.
Yet bodyguards keep me safe. They make me feel less fearful. When you live with death threats all the time, you do feel fear, and you do have horrible nightmares. When a car is parked outside for too long, I ask myself whether I am being watched. If the man at the newsstand stares at me, I wonder if he knows who I am. If a delivery boy rings the bell, I hesitate: Is he really who he appears to be? Should I answer the door?
I try to stay vigilant. I don’t keep a routine. But I have decided not to stop writing, not to stop drawing attention to the plight of Muslim women and the threat that extremists pose to free thought, free speech, and democratic governments. If I were to stop, I don’t think it would help my situation, because once an enemy, always an enemy. There will always be someone happy to take me with him to the hereafter.
In a way these threats motivate me. They have given my voice more legitimacy.
That afternoon in Central Park I lingered for a moment in the sunlight, talking to the Dutch couple. They told me how upset they were at how I had been treated in Holland and how much they would like to give me support. It was a lovely encounter, completely surprising, as it often is when I encounter Dutch people; some are hostile to me, but most are very loving, extremely warm. This chance meeting gave me a pang of homesickness for Holland. Hearing Dutch in Manhattan produced the familiar, affectionate, almost unconditional feeling of being connected that a people share when they are from the same place. It is the feeling that a nomad is always grasping for: that elusive sense of family.
By Christmas of 2009, three years after my immigration to the United States, I was more than ever living the life of a nomad. I did not spend much time in Washington. My job was a cross between academic work and activism. In research I discovered that debates on Islam, multiculturalism, and women had been exhausted in the late 1980s and 1990s, long before September 11, 2001. As far as I could see, there was nothing original I could add to the existing volume of scholarly work. My academic job as I defined it was to follow closely new attacks in the name of Islam. The activist part of my job took me all over America as a speaker. This meant I spent much of my time traveling from one city to another on the lecture circuit and to conferences.
Globalization and the threat of terrorism are best experienced at airports. Most of the American airports that I have used are better than those in Africa and far worse than those in Europe, except for London’s Heathrow. The Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles airports are excellent, while Chicago’s O’Hare is as confusing as Paris’s Charles de Gaulle but not quite the nightmare that Dulles and JFK are. The further inland you go, to places like Aspen, Beaver Creek, and Sun Valley, the smaller and more efficient the airports become. These little airports are almost a relief to travel through.
My first taste of an American airport was in 2002. I landed at Kennedy Airport, en route to Los Angeles. For a minute I thought that there was some mistake, that I had taken the wrong flight to somewhere in Africa. Crowds of people huddled in large groups, some in transit, others just arrived. At Immigration there were stanchions with lanes marked by ribbons that wound around for hundreds of yards to keep us moving along in an orderly way. The civil servant who checked my passport spoke poor English and seemed to be angry, probably because he was trapped in such a tiny cubicle. The lines seemed to last forever; the luggage carousels spilled over with bags, and some men were throwing the bags back onto the few empty spaces that were left. People in uniform were yelling at passengers, and a cacophony of voices came from loudspeakers admonishing us, as did the television screens at every gate, “Do not leave your bags unattended. The terror alert is on orange.”
I soon grew accustomed to such scenes at major hub airports. If anything, the Departure areas were even worse: endless lines of people slowed down by the new safety rules; laptops removed from their bags; shoes and belts and even jackets tediously put in gray plastic trays. Flights operated by almost bankrupt airlines nearly always departed much later than scheduled. The erratic American weather—thunderstorms, hurricanes, wind gusts, and snowstorms—periodically threw everything into chaos.
I had come to America looking for a new home, but I soon found that I was living out of a suitcase, moving from airport to airport and from hotel to hotel. I began to consider the obstacles of modern travel to be similar to those of the caravans Grandma used to talk about. In her time the risks came from marauding warlords and their militias, from severe drought or floods, from beasts of burden that were overused and underfed. In modern America the equivalents were terrorist alerts and snowstorms.
After months of such nomadism, my American friends took pity on me. It was time, they said, to discover that life in the United States was not all about work. One friend asked if I had ever been to Las Vegas. My immediate thought was gambling. That was the only sin I had not yet committed that is expressly forbidden by Islam. “Not Las Vegas,” I stammered. “It’s a place of crime, gambling, and fierce neon lights. I don’t think I want to go there.”
“Oh, come on,” replied my friend Sharon. “You don’t know what you’re missing. It is such a part of America, you must see it.”
So one weekend she drove me from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. L.A.’s sprawl can seem infinite, but as we sped along the highway the buildings eventually became fewer and fewer and the landscape became steadily less green until there was only desert, barren land with mountains, hard rock, soft mounds of sand whitish in color but brown and gray too. We passed by places with bizarre names like Zzsyk. My interest was caught by a sign proclaiming “Ghost Town Road.”
“Spooky,” I said pointing to the sign.
“Maybe we should stop in one of those places on the way back,” my friend replied.
After several hours of desert landscape we finally reached Las Vegas. I was dazzled. Turning right at Mandalay Bay was like entering a magic island with surreal replicas of New York, Paris, and Rome. At the Wynn Hotel, where we stayed, there were not only bedrooms and restaurants but also full-scale shopping malls; high-end European stores with the latest in fashion; jewelry stores displaying gold, platinum, and diamonds and other precious stones; and at the center of all this splendor, rows and rows of gambling machines and gambling tables. And of course, strip clubs for men and spas for women.
Sharon urged me to try one of the machines. I lost eight dollars and won a dollar twenty-five at one machine; at another I won ten dollars and lost twenty; and at a table we played a game called blackjack. Sharon and I put in a hundred dollars. We lost sixty. It was weird. We had to buy chips of five and ten dollars each; the game started with fifteen. A dealer gave you two cards while he held two. You could play a hand or ask for an extra card. If all three cards added up to twenty-one, you won—that is, you won more chips.
I must have looked as if I had walked in straight from the bush. To play, you had to make tiny gestures, like moving your forefinger back and forth or waving your palm slowly to and fro as if you were stroking the table without touching it. The dealer would nod and my friend would nod back in a strange way. Blackjack is supposed to be the simplest of the card games, but I felt that it would take me a long time to grasp all the secret signs, and even longer to analyze the probability of what the next card would be. By then I would have run out of cash. So we stopped playing.
To round off the night we went to the Palace Hotel to see the musical Jersey Boys, which tells the story of a band of poor kids growing up in New Jersey. I was soon captivated by this classical American account of the price of fame. At first it seems like a good idea to form a band, though their path to success is strewn with obstacles. When at last success comes, not only has the band split up, but the protagonist’s marriage breaks down, his girlfriend leaves him, and he loses his daughter to drugs; sadly he sings about being abandoned by everyone. The show ends with solos from all four men as they look back on their lives.
On the way back to L.A. we stopped for gas very close to where Ghost Town Road went, winding up a hill of colored rocks. “Would you like to take a look at the town?” Sharon asked, remembering my earlier curiosity.
Why not? I was up for more adventure. We drove to the ghost town of Calico.
At the entrance to what was once the town is a cubicle with a thatched roof manned by a guard who collects a small fee from the tourists. The ghost town is essentially an open-air museum. A century and a half ago Calico was known for silver mining and attracted crowds of prospectors who wanted to get rich quick. It had had a couple of provisions stores, a couple of shops that sold garments and household goods, and a saloon with a brothel attached to it. A simple family home had been restored to give you a glimpse of how people had lived in the Wild West.
A nineteenth-century stove caught my attention because it was far superior to the charcoal braziers we’d used in our homes in Mogadishu and Nairobi and which are still in use in many African homes today. Even the rustic furniture in this old and abandoned home was better-designed and sturdier than ours. The townspeople of Calico had walked about two miles to fetch their water, as many Africans have to do; they washed their garments (uncannily similar to many still worn in Africa) by hand. Their woven floor mats, bowls, and placemats transported me back to Mogadishu, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi. Grandma used to spend hours weaving such mats.
The ghost town vividly illustrated the difference between my grandmother’s traditions, which insist on keeping things as they are, and American traditions, which continuously innovate. The American mind seeks new, better, and more efficient means of cooking, washing, and finding fuel, the most basic and most universal activities of human life. In my grandmother’s tradition people get stuck, almost imprisoned, by the cycle of finding food, preparing it, and eating it. I can’t think of anything useful a Somali man or woman ever invented to make that cycle easier.
Even this long-abandoned ghost town in the no-man’s-land between Nevada and California contained relatively more luxury than my mother’s house did. Moving from that town back to L.A., I saw how incredibly fast the early settlers in America had moved forward, how swift their progress had been.
A couple of months before my Vegas trip I was back on the East Coast, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Wim Pijbes, and the Corporation of Tulip Breeders had proposed to hold a small ceremony in my honor. I was to be given a hundred Black Tulip bulbs as a symbol of (so Pijbes explained) diversity in the Netherlands. I invited some of my closest American friends, and Pijbes invited a few Dutch visitors. I mentioned that Chris DeMuth had a weakness for the artist Vermeer. Coincidentally the Met had just mounted as complete an exhibition of Vermeers as they could find.
Chris was late, but I went down to see the paintings, led by Pijbes. We paused for some time in front of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. Pijbes went into an in-depth explanation about the genius contained in that small painting: the precision, lights, colors, shadows, and the choice of a milkmaid as a subject. But as I stared at it what struck me was the room; it was poor, dark, and small. Many rooms in the neighborhoods of my youth were just as small.
After the short tour of the exhibition I got into a conversation with another of the Dutch visitors. I was disappointed to hear her recite the usual prejudices about Americans being plat. This is a very difficult word to translate; it means something like “plebeian,” unrefined and with little or no history of art or proper culture. In this view everything in American culture is pop, if not pap, and produced for the masses. Certainly much nonsense passes for culture in the United States, including an obsession with celebrities of all kinds. But that is scarcely representative of the vast wealth of extraordinary art, literature, and music produced by Americans in the almost two and a half centuries of the country’s existence.
As a stranger to America I often find myself excluded from conversations because so many references are made to musicals and movies I have never heard of. Once in Boston while chatting with friends, I let slip that I did not understand some of the cultural references in the conversation we were having about prejudice. “Did you ever see South Pacific?” one friend asked. For some reason it sounded familiar, but I had not. (It is typical that a lot of American references sound familiar but really are not.) She and her husband promptly invited me to join them in New York to see it.
A love story in wartime told on stage with songs and acting that left you more cheerful than if you had been to a comedy, South Pacific enchanted me. It was a relief too, after European opera. Opera’s love stories almost always end unhappily, even though the lovers are accompanied to their doom by the most splendid music. By contrast, couples in American musicals can sing and dance their way around massive issues like war and racism, only to end the love story on a happy note. At the end of the show I found myself humming the tune “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
This show and the conversations that followed gave me a window into America’s seemingly endless struggle with the issue of race. More than any number of sermons from politicians or pundits, such songs designed for mass consumption served to weaken racial prejudice by ridiculing it.
Another couple took me to Leonard Bernstein’s ninetieth-birthday-gala concert in New York. I was a little embarrassed to admit that I did not know who Bernstein was. No problem, they said in unison. Tonight will be a good introduction. One of the performances that intrigued me was by a couple of poorly dressed teenagers who imitate an encounter with their neighborhood policeman and then sing about it:
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringin’ up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks,
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!
After the show I asked my friends about that song with the teenagers. They were astonished. “Haven’t you seen West Side Story?” Just a few days later I was watching it on DVD and savoring the swings that the lyricist took at the soft psychology that talked teenage delinquents into believing that they were “victims of society.” I also heard for the first time the unforgettable immigrants’ song, “America.” It is a conversation in song between men and women immigrants from Puerto Rico. Below are a few of the lines that I think are timeless; they also illustrate the different perspectives that people from the same place, indeed the same family, have on America. For the women it is a land of freedom and unlimited opportunity, for the homesick men a place of poverty and bigotry if you are not white.
I like to be in America …
Everything free in America….
Buying on credit is so nice.
One look at us and they charge twice.
I have my own washing machine.
What will you have, though, to keep clean? …
Industry boom in America.
Twelve in a room in America.
Lots of new housing with more space.
Lots of doors slamming in our face….
Life is all right in America.
If you’re all white in America.
Here you are free and you have pride.
Long as you stay on your own side.
Free to be anything you choose.
Free to wait tables and shine shoes.
Everywhere grime in America,
Organized crime in. America,
Terrible time in America….
I think I’ll go back to San Juan.
I know a boat you can get on.
Everyone there will give big cheer!
Everyone there will have moved here!
That dialogue still rings true today. For most immigrants, coming to America means exchanging a home plagued by joblessness, violence, and apathy for a new land where the alluring opportunities come packaged with residential grime, gangs, and organized crime.
By contrast, I have been exceedingly fortunate in having many of my American dreams realized almost on arrival. I have not only been to Las Vegas in the past year; I have been on a cruise to Alaska, where I saw high mountains, glaciers, bears both black and brown, and whales that sneezed meters of water straight into the air and then dove to show off their tail fins. At Thanksgiving another friend suggested, as if offering me a cup of tea, a ride on a four-wheeler on a Texas ranch. I ended up getting a riding lesson on a cowboy’s horse too. I have attended conferences at which the assortment of postprandial activities ranged from playing golf to tennis clinics to whitewater rafting.
I am lucky to have come here in the way I did. I am lucky to have the friends I have. But that does not mean that I underestimate what it means to come to America as an illegal immigrant, sneaking across the Mexican border, or to be born in the inner cities of Chicago, L.A., or New York. On my visits to the Bronx I have seen that there are indeed pockets of America where people barely have enough food to eat, where girls get pregnant at thirteen, where teenage boys acquire guns all too easily and shoot one another, where school entrances need to be bulletproof and students need to pass through metal detectors. In some ghettos the life expectancy of a black boy is estimated to be only eighteen.
These are serious social and political problems, no doubt. In some cases they are clearly more serious than equivalent problems in European inner cities. But they are not problems that affect mainstream America the way such problems in Africa affect that continent.
What is it that makes America different from Europe and Africa? Clearly it is not just the homicide rate in poor black neighborhoods. To answer that question I need to take you with me to a wedding. In the Stanford Memorial Church in Palo Alto, California, a week before my fortieth birthday, I watched my friends Margaret and John get married.
At thirty-one, Margaret looked exquisite. John had the look of a man about to embark on a serious mission. I had never been to an all-American wedding before. In movies, it seemed to me, brides were always blonde and grooms always had dark hair. Margaret is blonde, John has dark hair, but beyond this nothing about their wedding was like the movies I watched. Weddings in movies are usually comedies: the priest messes up the vows (Four Weddings and a Funeral); the bride runs away (Runaway Bride); the parents get themselves in a fix (Meet the Parents). This, by contrast, was no comedy. The ceremony was impeccable. The food was plentiful and good, the wine excellent, the church breathtaking, the bride in her grandmother’s wedding dress had tears in her eyes, and the groom was visibly moved. Solemnly they took their vows. I quietly wondered if any human could keep such promises: “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
I was so stunned by the intensity of the service that I asked the female guest next to me, “This is pretty serious, isn’t it, for so young a couple?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Marriage has little to do with age and everything to do with family, and here in America family is serious.”
That day I learned that the core unit of American society is indeed the family. In theory, of course, the core unit in any truly free society is the individual, who is the starting point in a democratic constitution and in law. Individual responsibility is required and urged at all times. But pretty soon you realize that, to be happy and fulfilled, the individual must be embedded in a family. Americans are constantly asking after one another’s families. The American family is not as extended as in the clan culture I grew up in and not as tightly nuclear as the Dutch model. Nor is there any of the experimentation I encountered in the Netherlands.* In America I have met married couples, single people seeking to marry, engaged pairs on the point of marriage, and divorced ones who constantly talk about how to start the whole process afresh. Cohabitation, except in some circles, is not seen as a long-term option, and often couples who live together tend to be engaged. Only in New York does it seem acceptable to remain single on a long-term basis.
The other thing I learned at Stanford is that families are the building blocks of American society, for it is out of families that the communities grow that form the American nation. Margaret and John’s wedding exemplified for me so many of the characteristics of the United States I had come to appreciate.
America is a country with its own foundation myth, that of a new and virtuous republic, built in a virgin land by brave and hardy pioneers. This founding myth is told and retold in countless ways and through all available media, but for me the American wedding is the most powerful version. It is all there: the optimistic faith in the success of a new partnership; the lofty, Christian ideals and vows; and the patriotism that finds its way into every American family ritual. Most striking of all is the way so many American weddings epitomize the ideal of the unity of diverse peoples.
Margaret grew up in Colorado and is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the president of the United States from 1929 to 1933; her husband’s forebears came from Greece. The guests were even more diverse: the bridesmaids alone were of six different shades of color. In terms of class and religion, the guests ranged from local farmers to Stanford professors. There was not the faintest trace of snobbery. In the various speeches, this cocktail of races, religions, and classes was mentioned repeatedly with unconcealed pride. Look, they seemed to be saying to me, this is who we are: a family that welcomes all peoples who share our family values. That for me is America: a large family where anyone can belong, so long as you accept those values.
The big question, of course, is: What exactly are those values, and what if you do not accept them, or even take them seriously?
I admit I came to America full of African as well as European prejudices. One of those prejudices was that Americans were hypocrites when they lauded family values, particularly monogamy. In my first three years in America scarcely a month passed without some major public figure being exposed for cheating on his wife. The divorce rate seemed to bear out my suspicion that high-flown talk of family values in America was just that: talk.
But the United States is not utopia, and Americans do not aspire to be perfect. They aspire, above all, to be happy. And that means that if things don’t work out with a new venture, whether it is a marriage or a silver-mining town, Americans are much quicker than people from traditional societies to call it a day and move on, with as few hard feelings as possible.
What Americans are generally reluctant to do—and this is perhaps the most important difference between Americans and Europeans—is to call on the state (or “the government,” as Americans prefer to say) to help them out when things go wrong. They do it, of course, and never more readily than in a financial crisis like the one that struck when I was writing this book. But unlike Europeans, Americans feel instinctively that large-scale government intervention is wrong, is at best an emergency measure. In an ideal world Americans would form their families and firms, build their homes and workplaces, buy and sell their goods and services, go to a pizza place on Saturday and church on Sunday, and generally get on with their lives with the minimum amount of state interference.
That makes America a very different target indeed for the biggest challenge since Soviet Communism to confront the Western world: the threat of radical Islam.
*In Holland after the 1960s all sorts of new family models became fashionable: the Bewust Ongehuwde Moeder (the deliberately unmarried mother); the Bewust Ongehuwde Vader (the deliberately unmarried father); the Living-Apart-Together; the gay families, consisting of two lesbians and children of which one partner is the mother or gay men with adopted children; and the experimental communal families that vary in size and longevity but oppose the traditional family model of father-mother-children.