When I was growing up in the American South, my parents were friends with a couple from Britain. The woman was English; the man, Scottish. She was my father's secretary, which is to say the entire staff of a hole-in-the-wall agency. (Think The Maltese Falcon, adapted to advertising.) He was a landscape gardener who had come to the New World to oversee a project and had, appropriately, put down roots.
Both were estimable human beings. By no design of their own, they were also, to me, emissaries from the outside world. The wife was a kindred spirit of certain American aunts — ladylike, kindly, becardiganed — but a spirit brought on the wind from far away where the Queen's English was spoken. The husband was a revelation. Compact, angular, brown as a nut, clear in his thinking, which he set forth in the Queen's English insofar as the royal diction rose to his own, he was a Scot among Scots and, no doubt, a gardener among gardeners. It was a fact that he knew more of the world than anyone else in our living room. He was unfailingly civil, but he was not a man to be bested in a matter of opinion. His effect on me can be gathered from my older brother's complaint that I hung on his every word (having theretofore hung on my brother's).
This man's sister and their aged mother once came over from Scotland to visit. Naturally, they joined the occasional gathering at our place. The mother was quiet and retiring. The sister was quiet but not retiring. Her quietude was that of serene self-assurance. Whereas her brother had stimulated my mind, she began to captivate it. There was no flirtatious charm involved in this. I no longer remember a word she said. I don't even positively remember the subject matter. What I do remember are her voice and manner as she talked to me — to me alone, at one side of the group, addressing me by name again and again. Her speech had a plaintive lilt that suited it to the work of moral enthrallment. I found myself being gently thrown off balance and made to feel that I could recover only by coming around to her way of thinking; that not to come around would be to prove unworthy of a rare mentor.
Perhaps the conversation had to do with religion. If so, it was hardly my first experience of religious exhortation. It was, though, my first exposure to that lilt; or, rather, to the oracular foreignness which it signified. It was my first encounter with the Magical Other.
That encounter had two salutary effects. It awakened me to the world and, at the same time, to the threat of manipulation. I'm pleasantly surprised to recall that I was capable of noticing that threat, especially in an Other who was undoubtedly benign and undeniably possessed of lulling gifts. To the extent that her spiel instilled a sense of guilt and a fear of unworthiness, it stirred wary reflection. Why, I wondered, should I feel this way?
The wariness of that moment prepared me for subsequent encounters, both direct and mediated, with Magical Others. To a green American, the most bewitching of Others are those who hail from what was once called the Third World (after the dominant capitalist and communist worlds) and is now called the Global South. Individual personalities may come across as abashingly unspoiled or as penetratingly shrewd, but all benefit from a sense that these people have lived, that they're of the real world. While we have nestled in lofty plastic-feathered nests, they have roamed barefoot down among nature's truths. So runs our tremulous conceit. But if we're even half as intelligent as we're green, we'll notice that truths are not the foremost things that endure out there in the world of down-to-earth Others. Parts of that world owe their otherness to a lack of virtues that rightly matter to us very much. Those unborn virtues are most easily named as superannuated vices: inescapable hierarchy, crushing patriarchy, and entrenched corruption, to name but a few.
I once had a neighbor who had immigrated to the United States from a country in South Asia as a young man. During our first extended conversation, he turned to musing on something he missed about the old country: a style of community life in which one could always drop in at a friend's house unannounced. In our suburban American community, that was out of the question. I began to deplore the spreading influence of American culture, which threatened to change the character of countries like his native one; but the first words were barely out of my mouth when he turned on me in undisguised exasperation as if to say, "Not that again! Not you, too!" He went on to explain that his old country was, apart from certain fondly-remembered graces, in dire need of such a change. There, every phase of society had been customarily corrupt for so long that no indigenous process of reform was possible. The only hope of improvement, he said, lay in wholesale Americanization. That was the word he used. Not modernization, not democratization, but Americanization. And he was sternly in earnest.
Then there's bigotry. The concept of race may be a European invention, as our own social-justice authorities tell us, but bigoted non-Europeans have always managed nicely without the concept. What is race, after all, but one of many motifs for lumping people together and thereby submerging their humanity? What color is to one bigot, clan is to another, and caste is to yet another. Each classification, to the respective bigot, is a far deeper thing than any rationale for classifying that meets the eye of an outsider. "Let me tell you about those people," says the exotic oracle. "You don't know them as I do." Thus begins a bitter tale of perfidy, rapacity, exploitation, and aggression — all on the side of "those people" and all inherent in a collective character. General calumnies that would get a domestic bigot banished from one's circle may pass for revelations because one fails to reflect that there is such a thing as an exotic bigot. American society doesn't differ from others in the existence of racism, but in the constant grappling with it.
Most of the American students currently devoting themselves to passionate "pro-Palestinian" (effectively pro-Hamas) activism may, as thoughtful observers attest, be innocent of personal antisemitism. However, they've subscribed to a partisan view of a foreign ethnic conflict, a view in which agitation against the state of Israel is inseparably overlaid on Jew-hatred. The Columbia University campus newspaper has identified Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group allegedly linked to Hamas through a fiscal sponsor, as organizers of the protest encampments at Columbia and beyond. As far as US-based supporters of Hamas are concerned, the underlying antisemitism can remain hidden. Or it can be implicitly displayed in a callous attitude toward atrocities against Israeli civilians. Or it can be treated as a lesson long since learned by Magical Others and now imparted to green Americans: that Jews are proper objects of loathing.
Hamas itself is fundamentally antisemitic, even unto its antecedents. Its 1988 charter makes that clear, and the 2017 revision which apologists tout as a laying-down of religious fanaticism and a taking-up of respectable nationalist aspirations is merely the sort of update that might be suggested by a public-relations consultant. It rings the changes on its subject in a way that brings it within the affective sphere of civilized discourse while substantively leaving it where it began. SJP, with its blatant antisemitism and its endorsement of violence, appears to serve as the terminus of a supply chain for importing poison seed into America.
Leftists' cool indifference to the bestiality demonstrated by Hamas on October 7 — the sadistic massacre of civilians that spared neither infants nor their grandparents — the orgy of rape and mutilation — is something new. It's literally alien to the American political arena. This acceptance of the utmost depravity is no outgrowth of American hatred or American arrogance, much less among Americans who fancy themselves progressive. It had to sprout from seed brought from far away where pitiless war on other Others is destiny.
