Revisiting a Classic II: American Propaganda

The word propaganda has sinister connotations. Hearing the word makes me think of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, whose secret to success was defined in his famous quote: 

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

It's also makes me think of the current dictator of Russia who recently used the feckless Tucker Carlson as a vehicle to distribute nonsense, trying to justify his criminal invasion of Ukraine to any American willing to listen.

But propaganda is not the sole domain of tyrants, and while it implies bias, it needn't consist of misinformation or outright lies.

Does that mean there can be good propaganda? I guess that all depends upon whose propaganda it is and which side you're on.

In the mid-1930s, Americans were reeling from the Great Depression. Many men in this country who were approaching middle age were still living with the memories and the effects of what was arguably the most terrifying war from the viewpoint of the average soldier, World War I. 

The same was true in Europe only more so. The big difference is in Europe, another war was on the horizon. And the vast majority of Americans at the time wanted no part of it. Who can blame them?

The support for isolationism and non-intervention in foreign wars among Americans in the thirties was overwhelming. So much so that Congress passed several neutrality acts late in the decade, which not even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in marked opposition to them, would dare veto.

The chief problem with those acts is that they were blanket declarations, forbidding any kind of participation or aid in a foreign conflict, even in support of an ally who was attacked. Roosevelt understood the threat that Hitler and the Nazis posed to the free world, but politically there was little if anything he could do about it until September 1, 1939.

On that day, the Nazis invaded Poland resulting in Britain and France declaring war on Germany. This changed American public opinion only slightly. FDR managed to push through arms sales to the Allies on a cash and carry basis which passed with only a small majority in Congress. Eventually the Allies' reserve of liquid currency began to run out and Britain, alone in Europe in the fight against Hitler after the Nazis marched into Paris, was desperate.

Enter Lend-Lease, Roosevelt's plan to send arms and materiel to the Allies free of charge with the stipulation that the supplies be returned after the conflict. The president used marketing, (another word for propaganda) to explain his plan to the American people by appealing to their sense of self-interest. He used the simple analogy of a homeowner lending a neighbor his garden hose to put out a fire. The logic was that A) putting out the fire while it was still small not only would save the neighbor's house but perhaps also the home of the lender and B) the hose would be returned when it was no longer needed. 

Roosevelt succeeded in passing the Lend-Lease Act which was signed in March of 1941. Again, much of the country balked. 

That is exactly where the United States stood when the main action in the film Casablanca takes place.

In one of the film's most famous scenes, Rick is alone, drinking himself into a stupor after earlier that evening, the love of his life walked into his nightclub in the arms of another man. It is very late, long after the joint has shut down for the night. Sam walks in and tries to console his friend but to no avail. Rick asks Sam a curious question: "It's December, 1941, what time is it in New York?" "My watch broke" replies Sam, We understand the question better with Rick's next line: "I bet they're sleeping in New York, I bet they're sleeping all over America." 

 

Then comes one of the most famous lines of the movie: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

I saw Casablanca probably a dozen times before I noticed the "It's December, 1941" part. During all those viewings I just assumed Rick was commenting on how really late at night it was; if they're asleep in New York, it must be at least 3am in Casablanca, if the rest of America is asleep, even later.  

But if it was December, 1941, they were also figuratively asleep all over America, as Europe and the Pacific were going up in flames. On the seventh day of that month, we were finally awakened.

Until I noticed Rick curiously pointing out the date, the ambiguity of that line was lost on me, along with one of the film's most important aspects. Along with being a splendid wartime drama and love story with elements of film noir, mystery, suspense, and even comedy thrown in, above all, Casablanca was a propaganda film.

The message the film was marketing to the American people and to the rest of the world was clearly anti-fascism. We learn in the film that in the years before the action takes place, its protagonist Rick Blaine had actively fought on the Republican side against the Franquistas in Spain and had run guns to the Ethiopians in their struggle against Fascist Italy. Meanwhile the other hero Victor Laszlo was busy fighting the Nazis. 

The line with the double meaning was written before December 7, 1941. but the film wasn't shot until the following year, well after the United States had entered World War II. Why then bother including the line in the film which wasn't originally set to be released until 1943, long after we as a country had supposedly woken up?

My theory is that as much as Casablanca was making a clear statement against our enemies in the war, the film is also a critique of American society, at least the part of it that still had reservations about our participation in the war, many of whom had sympathies with and philosophical ties to the Nazis. 

There was a great deal of anti-Nazi sentiment during the thirties in Hollywood. Warner Brothers (who produced Casablanca) was especially active having closed all its operations in Germany back in 1934. But American film companies were hesitant to make anti-Nazi films as the Hays Office (see my last post), strongly discouraged production of movies that had biases against foreign countries including Germany, out of fear of offending both the country, and this nation's German speaking population,

So rather than making overtly anti-German films, in 1937, Warner Brothers produced two movies that were set in the United States, but were unmistakable allegories for what was going on in Europe at the time. Black Legion, (with Humphrey Bogart) was a fictional story about a white supremacist group in Detroit modeled after the KKK. They Won't Forget (with Claude Rains), was a fictionalized account of the real-life story of Leo Frank, a young Jewish man who was (by most accounts wrongfully) convicted and lynched for the murder of a 13 year old girl in Atlanta. 

In 1940, after the war began in Europe, Warner Brothers purchased the rights to Everybody Comes to Rick's, an anti-Nazi play written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The film company paid a king's ransom for the work, all the more so as the play had never been produced. By then, other film companies felt the time was right to make anti-Nazi propaganda films. Some were forgettable such as Hitler-Beast of Berlin, others were classics like Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator. 

Yet there were still Americans who felt the time wasn't right to offend the Nazis. In 1941, members of Congress conducted hearings investigating Hollywood's anti-Nazi "motion picture propaganda". The two senators who initiated the hearings were Gerald Nye of North Dakota and D. Worth Clark of Idaho.  Both senators had ties to the America First Committee, a group founded in 1940 to promote isolationism. Two of the group's most prominent members were industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, both barely concealed anti-Semites. On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh who had Nazi sympathies, gave an infamous speech in Des Moines where bemoaning "the Jewish problem", claimed that Jews were controlling "our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government” all in the effort along with FDR and the British, to lure us into the war. 

In response President Roosevelt commented:

When I read Lindbergh’s speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.

It all became moot after December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later the America First Committee was no more. We were at war with both Japan and Germany and work was well underway to turn Everybody Comes to Rick's, which the writer James Agee claimed was the worst play ever written, into the screenplay for what was to become Casablanca, which some to this day claim to be the best movie ever made. 

My argument that Casablanca should be in the running to be considered among the best of the best*, is the fact that over eighty years after its release, it continues to speak to us in its universal themes of love and sacrifice, of values and forgiveness, of right and wrong, of the importance of looking beyond our self-interest, and the lengths we would go just to survive. 

In light of the last decade, especially the last two years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and even more recently, the war in Gaza , Casablanca is especially relevant today. 

My current obsession with the movie was inspired by the resemblance of the late Alexei Navalny, the heroic Russian opposition leader, to the character Victor Laszlo. Mind you it is only a superficial resemblance at best. Once out of harm's way in a German hospital after being poisoned in Russia, the real Navalny returned to Russia to carry on his work, where he knew he would end up in prison, standing a good chance of meeting an untimely death as is the case with everyone who runs afoul of Vladimir Putin. That chance became a reality this February 16 in a gulag in Siberia.  

Navalny's life and tragic death touched people's lives far and wide. Even Putin's two most useful idiots in the United States couldn't stay silent. Without placing any blame, Tucker Carlson said: "The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it." Donald Trump went one step further paying Navalny the greatest compliment his twisted mind could come up with, comparing Navalny's ordeal with his own.

The fictional Victor Laszlo's life was peaceful by comparison, escaping Europe for the relative safety of America. But there is one particular line in the movie that by changing a few words, could define Navalny's legacy. 

As he is interrogated by the antagonist in the film, Major Strasser of the Gestapo (Conrad Weidt), Laszlo is offered his freedom if he divulges the names of the resistance members all over Europe with whom he has been in contact. After refusing to comply he explains to the Major the inevitable futility of the cause of the Nazis and all totalitarian movements: 

And what if you track down these men and kill them? What if you murdered all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands, would rise to take our places. Even Nazis can't kill that fast.

Relevant or not, an eighty-year-old movie is bound to appear dated, especially when it comes to current attitudes, values and sensibilities, and Casablanca is no exception. I generally shy away from judging the past through the lens of contemporary standards; however I believe that blindly dismissing acts of the past as simply products of their time is a cop-out. 

One objection I've read about Casablanca is that despite being a movie about refugees from Nazi Germany, no Jews are depicted. On one hand, this is a curious assertion as while there was no attempt to identify characters in the film as being Jewish, there is absolutely no reason to believe they were not Jewish. The fact is a great number of people responsible for making Casablanca, from the authors of the play it was based upon, to the screenwriters, the director, and the producer of the movie, to the owners of the company that made the film, were Jewish. Even more telling is that a high percentage of the cast was Jewish, themselves refugees from the Nazis. 

Perhaps the film makers elected to portray World War II as a crisis affecting all of humanity by not singling out any one particular ethnic identity as its victims. 

On the other hand, the dark side is that the makers of the film had to have been cognizant of the fact that had they emphasized the Jewishness of the refugees, they would have been called out in the antisemitic climate of the U.S. by folks such as Lindbergh, as being producers of Jewish propaganda.  

Another bone the filmmakers threw at potential American censors including the OWI, (Office of War Information, the official department of U.S. wartime propaganda) was to give the impression that America was the great beacon of hope for the world's oppressed, who opened its arms to anyone who sought refuge here. That could not have been further from the truth as the U.S. imposed strict immigration quotas even on refugees, based upon ethnicity and race. 

In 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis departed Hamburg with 937 passengers aboard, nearly all of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The ship was bound for Cuba where the refugees hoped to stay until visas for them to enter the United States were granted. During the trans-Atlantic voyage, the government of Cuba rescinded its offer to accept the refugees. When the ship docked in the port of Havana, only a handful of passengers, those with the appropriate immigration documents were allowed to disembark. The ship with rest of its passengers aboard sailed north toward Miami where they hoped to land safely. But the immigration quota of the U.S. was already filled, there was in fact a waiting list a mile long and welcoming the refugees aboard the St. Louis into the country would have meant they would have "jumped in line" ahead of those who had already applied for entry. 

Rules are rules after all.

The United States could have raised the immigration quota on humanitarian grounds but the vast majority of Americans, many of whom were sympathetic to the plight of the refugees aboard the St. Louis, were still opposed to changing the quota. The same situation applied in Canada. 

Without any other option, the ship sailed back to Europe where some of the passengers were granted asylum in Great Britain. Those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones ended up in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, all of which would become occupied by the Germans. Some of those refugees were eventually able to obtain immigration visas to the United States. Of the rest who did not, 254 souls, more than one quarter of those who departed Hamburg on the St. Louis for a new life in America, perished in the Holocaust. 

The refugee situation only got worse in the States as the war waged on. Among the refugees aboard one ship headed for the United States was a confirmed Nazi spy. The government used this bit of anecdotal evidence to mount a case for the inherent danger of allowing refugees into this country, and further restricted immigration, despite the mounting evidence of genocide in Europe.

While the race and ethnicity of the refugees depicted in the movie were never established, the character of Sam was unequivocally black. That goes back to the original play, where the character of a different name who would become Sam in the movie, was identified throughout the play's script simply as "the NEGRO". The screenwriters gave Sam a little more humanity, identifying him by name in the film script, but they wrote his lines in what could best be described as a white person's idea of the way black people speak. 

Here's a little snippet of the script's dialog between Sam and Rick:

RICK:

Sam, Ferrari wants you to work for him at the Blue Parrot.

SAM: 

Ah likes it fine here.

RICK: 

He'll double what I pay you here.

SAM:

Ah ain't got time to spend what ah makes here.

Fortunately, Dooley Wilson who played Sam, toned down the patois considerably. 

In the line that immediately proceeds this dialog, the aforementioned Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) offers to buy Rick's nightclub, along with its piano player Sam. Rick responds: "I don't buy or sell human beings." That line was obviously written to help establish Rick's left-of-center credentials. It was hardly revolutionary in 1941, nearly eighty years after the issue of slavery was resolved in this country. But you can begin to appreciate the line when you consider that a mere three years earlier, Hollywood produced Gone With the Wind, a movie that earnestly celebrated the antebellum South and the institution of slavery with as much glee as Mel Brooks's farcical music number "Springtime for Hitler" celebrated the Nazis. 

In his commentary to Casablanca that I linked to in my previous post, Roger Ebert argues that Sam, a black man and Rick, a white man are equals in the film, something unheard of in Hollywood at the time. Well, the being equal part is not entirely true as Sam is in Rick's employ. But he is Rick's best friend and only male friend whose relationship is not transactional. Yes, Sam gets a paycheck from Rick but as is made abundantly clear, he could do better elsewhere if he chose.

As tempting as it is to say that Casablanca was ahead of the curve if only slightly in terms of the way Hollywood portrayed black people, there is one word in one line of the film that sends everything into full scale retrograde. It's Ilsa's first scene where she and her husband walk unawares into the club owned by her former lover Rick. She spots Sam who was with Rick and her in Paris. Trying to play it cool and not let on about what happened while her husband was away in a concentration camp, she says to Captain Renault in front of Victor, "Captain -- the boy who is playing the piano -- somewhere I have seen him." 

Dooley Wilson was 56 when he played Sam, Ingrid Bergman who played Ilsa was 27.

It is the cringiest line of the movie and has been for at least six decades. No amount of explaining or putting it into the context of the era can change that.**

No one has ever accused Casablanca of being ahead of the curve as far as women are portrayed in the movies. By 1941, although it was the exception rather than the rule, Hollywood had given us a number of films featuring strong female characters in firm control of their destiny.*** Let's face it, Ilsa Lund, the spouse of Victor Laszlow, is no Yulia Navalnaya, the spouse of Alexei Navalny. After her husband's death, Navalnaya pledged to carry on her husband's work making herself not only persona-non-grata in her own country but also risking becoming a dead-woman-walking wherever she is as Putin's pathological fear of opposition and his homicidal impulses know of no national borders. 

By contrast Ilsa, not long after learning erroneously of her husband's death, falls in love with Rick in Paris. Then to the consternation of a great many contemporary feminists, once reunited with her husband, AND her lover, she tells the latter that she can no longer stand being separated from him and leaves the decision of how to proceed up to him. 

But for most feminists, far and away the most unsettling part of Casablanca is its treatment of the character of Captain Louis Renault. 

If you were to take the most corrupt police official you have ever read about in the news, then multiply that person's malfeasance tenfold, you would still come up a bit short of Louis Renault.

The crazy, inexplicable and for many, unacceptable thing about him is that despite being a despicable individual, he is one of the most likable characters in the movie, he gets the funniest lines and in the end, becomes a hero to the cause, so to speak. Among the many unspeakable acts and outright crimes he commits while abusing his role as the Chief of Police of Casablanca, Renault routinely extorts women by offering highly coveted exit visas to them, in exchange for sex. 

Casablanca was obviously made several decades before the women's movement gained momentum and several more decades before the advent of the MeToo Movement. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that while the attitudes about sexual harassment and the exploitation of women were different eighty years ago, there was no justification then or now for finding light in the actions of Renault, and that the filmmakers by making Renault a likable character despite his crimes are guilty of obfuscating and trivializing his actions. 

I have a slightly different take on that last part, namely that the filmmakers did not cover up the actions of Renault in the slightest, but rather made them crystal clear and out in the open. It is we the viewers who through our fondness of the character over the decades, have overlooked his actions and trivialized them. 

Let me explain.

The Spanish have a humorous expression: Mas lento como el caballo del malo, (Slower than a bad guy's horse). It refers to the predictable Hollywood Westerns of old, where characters were clearly defined, and the good guy always caught the bad guy because for some reason, the bad guy's horse was always slower.

In a widely referenced and decidedly not so silly essay despite its title: Casablanca, or, the Cliches are Having a Ball, philosopher Umberto Eco describes the film as a pastiche of several historical literary and dramatic themes, taken from works ranging from Homer to the most current popular entertainment of the time. According to him, set into those themes are characters who, like the Spanish idea of American Westerns, are "stock figures, either all good or all bad." 

 

It's at this point in the essay where it appears that Eco and I had not been watching the same movie.****

From my point of view, there are only two characters in Casablanca who fit Eco's "stock figure" description. Representing the forces of good versus evil, in one corner is Victor Laszlo, the noble Resistance fighter risking life and limb to defend freedom and democracy. In the other corner, equally devoted to his cause of preserving, protecting and defending The Third Reich, is Major Strasser of the Gestapo.

In the end, just like the Westerns, the horse belonging to good guy dressed in white, Victor Laszlo, ended up being faster than Major Strasser's, as if by design.

As portrayed in the film, Victor Laszlo is an extraordinary person. I suppose in his one-dimensionality, so too is Major Strasser. The rest of the characters in the film are ordinary people doing their best to survive under extraordinary circumstances. 

In other words, they're complicated.

I honestly can't name any character in Casablanca (with the exception of Major Strasser) who is all bad, but Captain Renault comes mighty close.

His trademark line "round up the usual suspects" defines Renault's approach to his job, that is to say throw as much shit against the wall to see what sticks. If nothing sticks, at least it looks like he's doing something. 

Before we even meet him in the film, we witness one of those brutal round ups he speaks of, as officers under Renault's command terrorize the streets of Casablanca, capturing any character they deem suspicious looking.  One unlucky soul is even shot dead in the back as he runs away from the thuggish cops. Renault may not himself be a Nazi, but without people like him, the Nazis would never had been able to wreak the amount of havok they did. 

We don't see the death of Signor Urgate (Peter Lorre) while in the custody of Renault, we only hear the Captain mention his death while debating casually, as if he were deciding what to order for lunch, whether to report that Urgate committed suicide or was killed trying to escape. 

 

And we never see Renault assaulting women, he only alludes to those actions with little more than a wink and a nudge.

What we do see is a prolonged scene with one of his prospective victims deeply searching her soul, pouring her heart out to Rick by contemplating what appears to be the only chance to get her and her husband out of Casablanca. Check out my last post which features both a video clip from, and the script of that scene.

Yet bad as he is, at the end of the film Louis Renault gets to walk arm and arm into the mist with the hero Rick in the last shot of the movie, redeemed by his sudden conversion into a patriot, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

All is forgiven and our sense of justice is thrown askew because Renault's horse turns out to be the swiftest of all, not quite as we think it should be.

Is it an injustice of the filmmakers to portray a scumbag such as Renault as a likeable character?

Well in the real world, bad guys' horses aren't always slow, despicable people sometimes can be quite charming when they're not doing despicable things, and in a time of war, combatants don't have the luxury of screening allies for their moral character. Remember, by the time Casablanca was released, Joseph Stalin was our ally.

 

No, I think given the two distinct sides of Louis Renault, it's up to viewer to decide. It's the kind of moral dilemma that Alfred Hitchcock, a master of telling stories with moral dilemmas, would be proud of. *****

 

If we end up liking Louis, it's on us, not the filmmakers. 

Back when I was an impressionable youngster studying film, I pooh poohed Casablanca for its over-the-top sentimentality and its heavy-handed dialog, but especially because the film theorists whom I respected were dismissive if not outright hostile to it. In other words, it wasn't cool to like Casablanca. 

But I got older and stopped caring so much about what other people told me to like. I grew to love the movie simply because it was so entertaining, especially the performances from the leads, to the greatest supporting cast ever put together in a motion picture, to the bit players who only have one line of dialog if that, to the of hundreds of extras, a great many of whom were themselves refugees from the Nazis. It's spectacularly beautiful to look at, thanks to the efforts of the director Michael Curtiz and the cinematographer Arthur Edison. And the screenplay despite its hiccups, gives us a story filled with characters we care about, not to mention all the great lines that have become woven into American culture.

It's a movie that stands up to multiple viewings as every time you see it, you pick up on details you missed before. By now I've probably seen Casablanca fifteen times and am still discovering new things, whether they be unnoticed comic gems, or clues that give heretofore unrealized insight into one of the characters. Some of those moments from my most recent viewing helped guide these two posts. It's a work of extreme economy, there's not one superfluous scene or even shot that is not essential to telling the story.

Mostly it stands the test of time.

That's especially true given the current state of the world. We've always had police corruption, sexism and racism, but I never thought I'd see the following again, especially in the United States: 

• A return to pathological self-interest and isolationism as expressed by the term "America First."
• Indifference and outright hostility to the plight of the refugee.
• An acceptance of totalitarianism because of its apparent efficiency.
• Joseph Goebbels inspired "alternative facts" making a comeback. 
• A criminal European dictator with absolute control and impunity being admired and embraced by a good many Americans including a former and possibly future president of the United States. 

Before getting on that plane to Lisbon, Victor Laszlo's parting words to Rick are: 

Welcome back to the fight, this time I know our side will win.

Watching Casablanca today and exploring it in the context of the time in which it was made as we just have, makes us realize we've been through all this before. Today our world is not in an altogether different place than it was in the late thirties/early forties. Because of that, in our own time we share something with the original viewers of the film more than eighty years ago:

Our story is still being written.

The best either of us could do is hope and pray that Victor Laszlo is right.

More than eighty years after it was made, Casablanca still has something to say to us.

We should listen.

Here's looking at you kid.

NOTES:

* Well, in the top one hundred films at least, in my humble opinion.

** That's not to say people haven't tried to explain that line away. One explanation is that in French, the official colonial language of Morocco, the archaic colloquial term for waiter is "garçon", in English, "boy". It might stand to reason that for folks of a particular social strata like Ilsa's, there would be no distinction between the workers in a nightclub, as they would all have been considered "the help". Consequentially, restaurant staff whether they be waiters or musicians might all be addressed in a similar fashion. In the words of a comment I read, it would be "a classist" form of addressing someone rather than a "racist" one. 

I think the most logical explanation is the line was directly lifted from the play as were many others, and it simply didn't set off alarm bells in the minds of the screenwriters or anyone else involved, as it certainly would today. Regardless, the choice of Ilsa referring to Sam as "the boy" is a truly unfortunate, disrespectful one. 

*** Three strong female characters immediately come to mind: Rosalind Russel's Hildy Johnson from Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, the eponymous role in Ernst Lubitich's Ninotchka .played by Greta Garbo,  and much as Scarlet O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone with the Wind was not particularly admirable as a character, it would be hard to argue that she was not truly badass.

**** Umberto Eco over-plays his cliché card when he writes the following: "And so we can accept it ... when whores weep at the sound of “La Marseillaise.” The character he is referencing is Yvonne (Madelaine Lebeau). When we first meet her, she is at the bar at Rick's, obviously quite smitten by its proprietor and not a little tipsy. We can tell they've having a relationship or did, because he treats her shabbily. The next evening, Yvonne walks in with a German officer, obviously an attempt to get Rick's attention. Later that evening when the Germans start singing their patriotic tune Die Wacht am Rhein, Laszlo with Rick's approval, commands the house band to strike up the Marseillaise, and the voices of the rest of the patrons at Rick's singing along drown out the Germans. It's Yvonne's face we see in extreme closeup, tears in her eyes, singing the French national anthem more fervently than anyone in the room. When the tune finishes, she yells “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” That is her entire contribution to the movie. Did I mention that she was a prostitute? No, because there is no reason to believe she was, clichés be damned.

 

***** Ah but did the writers have the intention of setting up a moral dilemma for us, or was it just an accident? Did they simply assume viewers in 1942 wouldn't be bothered by Renault's actions? Let me point out one line that makes the answer pretty clear to me. When Rick first sets his eyes on young Annina, the Bulgarian girl set to be Louis' next conquest, the first thing Rick says to her is "Hey you're underage, how did you get in here?" Frankly I don't know how a typical 1942 audience would judge Louis coercing adult women to have sex with him. But extorting a child to have sex is another story. There was no reason to portray Annina as a minor other than to illustrate Loius Renault's depravity. The writers knew what they were doing.

Talking Point Number Three: Islamophobia

As long as I could remember, my mother dreamed of visiting Greece. While celebrating Christmas Eve 1994 at my parents' home shortly after her retirement, I opened a small package with my name on it under the tree. Inside was a ticket for an Aegean Cruise which was to be spent with my parents. Already in my thirties, I was between relationships and feeling particularly alone at the time, so it was the perfect moment for such a trip. "Maybe you'll meet someone" my mother suggested.

The trip took place in spring of the following year. It began in Athens, a city fascinating for its antiquities, less so for its more contemporary aspects. We spent a few days there before embarking on the cruise. It so happened there was a strike of dock workers at the port of Piraeus where we were scheduled to board the ship, aptly named the Marco Polo. That strike proved fortunate as the travel company arranged for us to meet up with the ship farther down the coast enabling us to visit more of mainland Greece including the ruins of the city of Corinth whose first century Church was the recipient of a series of letters from Saint Paul which would become part of the New Testament. 

Close by we boarded the ship which took us first to the picture postcard islands of Mykonos (famous for its windmills) and Santorini, before sailing to more substantial places, first south to Heraklion, the capital of Crete. There we visited the most ancient site of our trip, the Bronze Age Palace of Knossos, center of the ancient Minoan Civilization. From there we sailed east to the island of Rhodes where my mom and I took an excursion to the city of Lindos, featuring its own city in the air (Acropolis), its magnificence in my estimation anyway, eclipsing the more famous one in Athens. 

The following day was spent entirely at sea with a sail-by (if there is such a term) of the island of Patmos where legend has it, the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. 

Had our trip ended there, it would have been a smashing success. But in retrospect it was just getting started. We were headed for Turkey.

One of our stops on the western coast of Turkey was the city of Çanakkale, strategically located at the entrance to the Dardanelles (also known as the Straight of Gallipoli for you WWI buffs), the narrow inlet that connects the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara, then via the Bosporus which bisects the city of Istanbul, the Black Sea. About one half hour from Çanakkale sit the ruins of the ancient city of Troy. 

With that visit in mind, to get into the spirit of the trip, I bought along a copy of the Odyssey to read during our time at sea. As is often the fate of good intentions however, there were far too many distractions to seriously consider Homer's epic poem: attending to my father's fragile health, the result of his over-exposure to the Aegean sun, thoughts of my own sad state of affairs back home, and perhaps most of all the female members of the ship's staff, sunbathing topless on the top deck of the ship. 

My own twentieth century Odyssey, complete with the semi-naked sirens, ended up in Istanbul, the most breath-takingly beautiful, exhilarating, fascinating, complicated, exhausting, frustrating and magnificent place I've ever visited.

But that's a story for another day and besides, I'm way off track of the subject at hand.

I bring this up because of all the great experiences of our trip, there is one thing that has stuck in my head perhaps more than anything else with the exception of our time in Istanbul. It was a comment made by our tour guide in Kuşadası, Turkey en route to the location of another place that plays a key role in the history of Christianity, the city of Ephesus. Our guide was a Turk about my age who in addition to his engaging personality and encyclopedic knowledge of the material he presented to us, had a great command of colloquial English. As this was our first port-of-call in Turkey he took it upon himself to introduce us to the Turkish nation, its culture, its history (selected parts of it anyway), its language, and the predominant religion of its people, Islam. Then he made the comment I will always remember. He said emphatically:

"We are Turks, NOT Arabs."

That little tidbit was not news to me nor I'm guessing was it news to most of our fellow travelers, although I could be wrong. We Americans, who constituted the majority of our group, have a deserved reputation for being remarkably ignorant of the world outside our borders, as has been made quite obvious since the events of this past October 7, and I'm sure our guide was aware of that.

Of course, I can't read his mind nearly thirty years after the fact, but by the way he made that comment, not as an aside but rather as a talking point, I couldn't help but think what he was really saying to us was this:

"We are not terrorists."

For a little context, remember this was 1995, a little more than six years before the mother-of-all terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. By 1995, acts of terrorism were commonplace all around the world and their perpetrators were a varied lot with a diverse set of axes to grind. The terms jihad, al-Qaeda and Islamophobia were not yet household words in the non-Muslim world in 1995 and international terrorism was far from the exclusive domain of Arab-Islamic extremists, as it remains today.

Yet they were up there.

Shortly before our trip, the deadliest act of terrorism (at the time) on American soil, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building happened in Oklahoma City. 168 people lost their lives and hundreds more were injured. I distinctly remember early speculation on who were the perps. Al-Qaeda, who had already committed several acts of terrorism directed at Americans overseas was high on the list. Of course that was wrong, the barbarous act in Oklahoma was committed by home grown American ultra-right-wing extremist terrorists.

In my last post I mentioned that there is a problem with the term Islamophobia. It was probably coined in the 1920s but came into common usage sometime in the 1990s, resurrected some say by Islamists as a parallel term to antisemitism, that is, the distrust and hatred of Jewish people. Beyond describing hatred of Muslims, in a cynical sense this word could be used to deflect criticism of Islam, equating the criticism of the religion with racism, much as the charge of antisemitism is sometimes used to deflect criticism of Israel.

Let me say this: hatred directed at Muslim people is real and like antisemitism, it is a scourge on humanity. There should just be a better word for it.

The problem with the term "Islamophobia" is that it does not, at least in its etymological sense, mean the hatred of a people as does the word antisemitism *, but rather the fear of a religion.

As our friend the Turkish tour guide pointed out, Islam is not confined to a single ethnicity or race. Because it is a missionary faith like Christianity, anyone can be a Muslim.

Given that, it should be obvious that the fear of a particular religion is not the same as the hatred of a people. The next question then should be this, can it be reasonable to fear a religion?

Well, when someone invokes the name of God before blowing him or herself up along with several innocent people on a bus, or intentionally flying an airplane into a skyscraper filled with thousands, or raping, torturing and butchering men women and children in their homes as they go about their daily lives, I'd say, yes, it is reasonable to fear that.

It is argued that all of these acts when done in the name of Islam, are a perversion of the religion, that Islam actually condemns in no uncertain terms the killing of innocent people. I have argued that myself in this space. 

Unfortunately like all religious dogma, there are loopholes. 

Some, such as the contemporary atheist philosopher and popular commentator Sam Harris, would say there are more such loopholes in Islam than in other contemporary religions, making it particularly dangerous. As I am far from an expert on Islam, I am not in any position to say if that is true.

What I do feel qualified to discuss is my own faith tradition, Christianity, specifically that of the Roman Catholic Church.

One obvious loophole in Catholicism is perhaps its most beautiful attribute, the spirit of forgiveness raised to an act of God through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, otherwise known as Confession. By openly revealing our sins we humble ourselves before God (through the intervention of a priest) and come to terms with the fact that yet another thing that binds us humans together is that we all make mistakes; we all fall short of the perfection of God. Most important of all, while forgiving our sins, God calls upon us to "forgive those who transgress against us". 

For me, one of the most powerful passages of the New Testament concerns forgiveness:

Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Matthew 18:18

In other words, we are bound by our grudges big and small that we carry around through life like millstones around our necks. Forgiveness unbinds us of the millstone. Forgive, and we will be free of the burden, and can be forgiven ourselves.

This is one of the central tenets of Christianity.

However, in practice, like so many aspects of Catholic dogma, confession long ago came to be a ritual whose spirit got lost somewhere along the way. For many Catholics, reconciliation is all about one's own redemption while forgetting all that other boring stuff. Confession to many, is like a get out of jail free card in Monopoly, justifying bad actions in advance, knowing full well that a trip to the confessional and the penance of few Hail Marys will make everything AOK.

Obviously, that's not how it was intended to work. 

Yet for innumerable Catholics from little old ladies picking flowers without permission to professional hitmen, from priests abusing children to their bishops who swept their actions under the rug, sins big, small and enormous are intentionally committed by Catholics with the full expectation that God has their back, so long as they jump through the right hoops.

So much for good intentions.

Now anyone with a shred of history in their head, knows that the sins of the Roman Catholic Church are profound and numerous. The Crusades, the Inquisition, need I say more? I could go on all day but I won't. If there ever was a religion worthy of inciting fear, it would be the one in which I am a member.

I'm not certain how much the two acts of the Church I just mentioned were inspired by Christian scripture, or simply the acting out of tribal instincts in response to socio/political/economic events of the day, while using a cut and paste version of scripture to justify them. I suspect more the latter than the former. My guess is that Sam Harris would agree when he compares Christianity favorably to Islam, (remember he's an atheist so he rejects both). When Harris compares the two faiths as he has done recently, he doesn't point out those quite obvious examples of brutality committed in the name of Christ. Instead, Harris argues that morally speaking, we in the West (whatever that entails), as a civilization have come a long way since the days of the Crusades, and that the East has a lot of catching up to do. This, according to Harris, is a result of Islam holding them back. 

Sam Harris is not alone in defying current political correctness by singling out Islam as a backwards force. Here is link to a video of a lecture given by the popular astro-physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson introduced by Steven Weinberg, discussing the relationship between Islam and science.

I'm fairly certain that a vast number of people in the non-Muslim world, are not aware of the golden age of Islam of which Professor Tyson speaks. Coinciding with the Arab Empire, at the time the largest empire the world had ever known, it was a period of tremendous breakthroughs in human knowledge all brought to the world by Arab scholars, inventors, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers and other learned individuals. All this took place in what we in the West refer to as the "Dark Ages", a time when in Tyson's words, "the Europeans were busy disemboweling heretics". I might add that the Europeans at the same time, under the authority of the Church, were also busy burning books, attempting to destroy much of the accumulated knowledge of the world at the time, especially that written by pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, under the assumption that the only knowledge worth preserving was to be found in the Bible. 

Meanwhile the Arabs were taking much of that knowledge and translating it into Arabic. Had they not, scores of works of ancient philosophy, science, medicine and mathematics, may have been lost forever. 

And then it all stopped according to Tyson; scientific inquiry among Arabs ground to a halt somewhere in the 13th Century. He attributes this decline to one man, Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. According to Tyson, al-Ghazali codified Islam, much in the same way that St. Augustine codified Christianity. Among the tenets that al-Ghazali came up with Tyson says, is that "mathematics is the work of the devil." 

"Nothing good can come out of that philosophy" Tyson retorted.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has made a brilliant career of making complex scientific ideas accessible to the masses. I am a member of those masses. But simplification in order to explain an idea is not the same as dumbing something down in order to make a point, which he unfortunately does here. 

Parts of his premise are correct, in the period between 750 and 1258 CE, corresponding to the years of the Arab Empire, or more accurately the Abbasid Caliphate, centered in Baghdad and extending from Spain through Persia, there was an explosion of ground-breaking contributions made by Arabs in the fields of science, medicine, philosophy and education. He is also correct about the decline of those contributions, (although not nearly as abrupt as he claims) at the end of that period and from which there has been no significant recovery.

And yes, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, was indeed a profoundly influential Muslim cleric. some say second only to Mohammad himself regarding his influence on the faith. But al-Ghazali was also a polymath: an intellectual, a scholar, mystic, philosopher as well as theologian. He was as much a part of the golden age of Islam as anyone, as well as being a great influence on many non-Muslim philosophers including Maimonidies, Thomas Aquinas, and David Hume. 

Tyson states that al Ghazali taught people "how to be good Muslims", implying that to mean strict, unquestioning fealty to the Quran being the cornerstone of the faith, and that all earthly pursuits such as mathematics and science were not only fruitless but also contrary to the teachings of scripture. 

This could not be further from the truth. Al Ghazali was a firm advocate of reason and critical thinking and judgement. He insisted that earthly pursuits like math and science, which he groups together with philosophy, were essential studies, not in conflict with matters of faith. Reading a bit of his work, you can judge for yourself:

There are those things in which the philosophers believe, and which do not come into conflict with any religious principle. And, therefore, disagreement with the philosophers with respect to those things is not a necessary condition for the faith in the prophets and the apostles (may God bless them all). An example is their theory that the lunar eclipse occurs when the light of the Moon disappears as a consequence of the interposition of the Earth between the Moon and the Sun. ….

We are not interested in refuting such theories either; for the refutation will serve no purpose. He who thinks that it is his religious duty to disbelieve such things is really unjust to religion, and weakens its cause. For these things have been established by astronomical and mathematical evidence which leaves no room for doubt. If you tell a man, who has studied these things— so that he has sifted all the data relating to them, and is, therefore, in a position to forecast when a lunar or a solar eclipse will take place: whether it will be total or partial; and how long it will last —that these things are contrary to religion, your assertion will shake his faith in religion, not in these things. Greater harm is done to religion by an immethodical helper than by an enemy whose actions, however hostile, are in his yet regular. For, as the proverb goes, a wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend.

From  Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers)

In his thesis, Tyson gives little credence to the reasonable possibility that the decline of the scientific contributions of Arabs is likely to be attributable to the decline of their Empire after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols (incidentally, ancestors of the modern-day Turks) in 1258, and the subsequent centuries of invasions by the Crusaders.  Instead, he insists that the strict religion foisted upon the Muslim people by al-Ghazali is the sole culprit.

Why? 

Well, al-Ghazali gets the last laugh on this one as he seems to have anticipated Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments by some nine centuries:

The greatest thing in which the atheists rejoice is for the defender of religion to declare these [astronomical demonstrations] and their like are contrary to religion thus the path for refuting religion becomes easy if the likes [of this argument defending religion] are rendered a condition [for its truth].

Again, from  Tahāfut al-Falāsifa

As one commentator noted, had Tyson spent five minutes reading the Wikipedia entry on al Ghazali, it "could have prevented him from completely misquoting Al Ghazali and shamelessly misrepresenting history." 

Indeed.

Yet even the staunchest defenders of Islam are at a loss to fully explain why there was never a rekindling of the glory days of scientific inquiry in the Arab and more broadly, the Muslim world since the twelfth century.

And the same people are even more at a loss to explain the horrific acts committed in the name of Allah.

But in this respect at least, Muslims are not alone in lamenting the fact that some of their brothers and sisters in faith have used their sacred scripture to justify abhorrent acts. 

Here is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli people shortly after the 10/7 Hamas attacks in their country:

You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.

Amalek, or the Amalekites, were enemies of the nation of Israel from biblical times.  

This is from the First book of Samuel, Chapter 15:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ 

The God of the Old Testament didn't fool around.

It's hard to look at Israel's response in Gaza after the 10/7 attacks and not think this is what Netanyahu had in mind.

But for my money, historically speaking, the most devastating line of scripture found in any of the sacred texts of all three of the Abrahamic religions combined, (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is found in the same Gospel of Matthew of the New Testament that I quoted from above.

You probably know the story. Jesus has been brought to the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate by the people of Jerusalem who insist he be punished for blasphemy for claiming he was the Son of God, and for other stuff that pissed them off. Pilate, the story goes, was warned by his wife to spare the life of Jesus because she had a troubling dream about him the night before. Despite his efforts to grant his wife's wishes, the last thing Pilate needed was an uprising on his hands, so he gave in to the crowd but not before admonishing them and passing the responsibility of Jesus' fate on to them, literally "washing his hands" of the affair. Here is their response to him:

Then answered all the people, and said, 'His blood be on us, and on our children.'

Matthew 27:25

"The people" the writer of the Gospel is referring to here, are the Jews. There you have it, scriptural proof that the Jews killed Jesus who in the view of Christians is the son of God, This is their confession. Not only are they condemning themselves, but their children as well, into eternity. Two millennia and counting worth of antisemitism along with all the pain, suffering and unspeakable horror that came from it, can be summed up in nine simple words. They are scriptural justification for hatred.

Take a deep breath to put all that into perspective. 

Of course, anyone who has ever taken those nine words to heart, and there have been many hundreds of millions throughout history, didn't bother with a couple other crucial verses in the same story, one taking place a few hours before, the other a few hours later in the narrative. 

When the officials came to arrest Jesus, one of his disciples took his sword and cut off the ear of one of the officials. This is what follows:

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?

But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?

Matthew 26:52-54

If you are a Christian, you believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus are God's plan for the salvation of the world. That is why the day we commemorate Jesus' death is called "Good" Friday. Without Good Friday, there would be no Easter Sunday commemorating the central event of the faith.

The people who sent Jesus to his death were merely actors in God's plot.

And how are we to think of those people?

For that we turn to another Gospel:

And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment and cast lots.

Luke 23:34-35

There you have it, if Jesus himself is asking God for the forgiveness of the people who arrested him, spit at him, mocked him, beat him, nailed him to a tree to die then cast lots for his clothing, then who are we to condemn them?

This brings us to what I believe is the central question at hand, what comes first, scriptural verses that inspire hatred, or the hatred itself which becomes justified through a selected reading of scripture?

I would strongly advocate for the latter-- that hatred comes first. People who see religion only as a negative force in the world single out all the horrific acts that have taken place in the name of God, but are loath to point out the acts of good that come from religion. I've heard Sam Harris claim that you don't need religion in your life to be a good person, to which I agree. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, some of the best people I've known have been atheists. Conversely, I think it's obvious that you don't need religion to be a bad person either. Some of the gravest acts against humanity, especially in the last 150 years have been carried out without any religious pretext at all.

In defense of religion I will say this: fear and hatred are very natural human responses to adversity; they are self-defense mechanisms we inherited from our pre-historic ancestors. No, we don't need religion to teach us how to hate those who have done us wrong, real or imagined, we're all very capable of that on our own, thank you very much. 

But what about virtues such as kindness, charity, patience, selflessness, justice and the "golden rule" which all faiths promote and aspire to?

These virtues do not come naturally, they need to be taught.

What about loving our enemies as Jesus commanded? 

That idea is so outrageous, absurd and un-natural that despite all my doubts about whether God exists, it  is the one thing that truly confirms my faith, simply because it's hard for me to believe that this command was made up by a mere mortal as it goes against every instinct of our earthly being. 

Yet there it is.

Religion, like all human inventions (Artificial Intelligence immediately comes to mind), is a tool that can be put to good use and bad. Today being New Years Eve, it is customary to think of the people we have lost over the previous 364 days. The person I'm thinking about at the moment is Rosalyn Carter, who along with her husband the former president, spent the last half of her life in service, building homes with her own hands for the homeless. The Carters are examples of people who put their faith to good use. They are far from unique as there are people of all creeds in every corner of the planet who put their faith to good use in the service of others and help make the world a better place. 

Which makes me think of one of the humblest tools the Carters put into service in their work for Habitat for Humanity, the lowly hammer. 

In the right hands, that hammer can be used to build homes for the homeless and other wondrous things. 

In the wrong hands it can be used to bash somebody's head in.

Religion is no different. 

CODA

* There is a bit of a problem with the word antisemitism as well, as included in the Semitic peoples are Arabs. Yet the word is exclusively used to describe prejudice against Jewish people. 

** An even more demonstrable error in Neil deGrasse Tyson's lecture on Islam and science is his mention of a quote President George W. Bush made supposedly after the 9/11 attacks. Bush did say "Our God named the stars", loosely quoting Psalm 147:4, but he did not deliver those words after the terrorist attack, and certainly not as a means to compare and contrast Christians and Muslims as Tyson implies. 

Rather, Bush made the remark during a tribute to the seven astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. The president in fact made it crystal clear after 9/11 that Muslims are as much a part of the fabric of American life as any other group and denounced in no uncertain terms the prejudice and hatred against them that followed the attack and continues to this day. Here is a link to a speech the former president gave during a visit to the Islamic Centre in Washington, D.C., less than a week after the attack.

Talking Point Number Two: Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism

This is a subject wrought with pain and strife, one that not being not Jewish, I probably have no business talking about. But that doesn't stop anybody else so why should I be different?

Like all forms of bigotry, intolerance and racism, antisemitism is a blight on humanity, even without considering one of the darkest moments of history, the Holocaust. I think blight is a good metaphor because the primary use of the word is to describe a disease. This is definition number one of blight from Merriam Webster:

a disease or injury of plants marked by the formation of lesions, withering, and death of parts (such as leaves and tubers)

First and foremost, racism of any kind is a disease of the human condition, but not an anomaly. We are a social animal, but also a tribal one. By nature, we are distrustful of members of other tribes, one of the survival mechanisms our early ancestors picked up along the way. However, humans not only survived but thrived primarily by our ability to learn. One thing the species Homo sapiens has learned over nearly ten thousand generations of our existence is that we can accomplish much more and suffer much less by cooperating with members of other tribes, rather than fighting them. Yet we haven't quite learned how to get over our primordial instincts to distrust and hate one other. Consequently, our inability to see each other as fellow human beings, rather than as members of different tribes, whether they are defined by race, ethnicity, faith, ideology or whatever, has resulted in countless lesions, withering and death, caused by fear and ignorance fueled by our primitive instincts. As we now have the technological ability to wipe out our entire species along with all the others on the planet, with the possible exception of those belonging to the order Blattodia, the blight of racism may prove fatal to us all.

Antisemitism, the distrust and hatred of the Jewish people, has been a blight on humanity for thousands of years. It is particularly raw today because the effects of it including discrimination, oppression, segregation, ethnic cleansing, violence and genocide are still fresh in the memory of people still with us who lived through it not very long ago.

And it has not subsided.

It's been two months since the depravity of the Hamas attack on kibbutzim and a music festival in Israel just beyond the border with Gaza. 10/7 was the most devastating attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It came as a surprise to exactly no one that the Israeli government responded swiftly, resolutely, and brutally, leaving a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in its wake.

 

In the two months of war following the atrocity, the same talking points come up again and again from supporters of both sides of Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One of these is the conflation or conversely the differentiation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Yesterday the U.S. Congress passed a resolution equating the two. The inspiration behind the resolution were the hundreds of rallies in the United States, several of them on college campuses in support of the Palestinian cause. Many of these demonstrations took place immediately after the 10/7 attacks with the protestors openly expressing their support for Hamas and for their actions on that dreadful day.

Let me say unequivocally that I was as appalled as anyone by people who should have known better, celebrating the torture, rape, kidnapping and butchering of innocent people, many of whom were on the same ideological side in regard to the Palestinian cause as the protestors. As guaranteed by the First Amendment, the protestors were within their rights. But their rights do not extend to immunity from being called out for their heartlessness, ignorance, stupidity and yes, antisemitism. In a televised presidential debate the other night, candidate Nikki Haley indirectly compared the demonstrators to the Ku Klux Klan. She is not off the mark. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Let me also say unequivocally that supporting the Palestinian cause in itself should not be equated with antisemitism.  

Neither should criticism of Israel. 

Most supporters of Israel are quick to point that out by the way, but I'm not 100 percent convinced they all believe it.

So what's the deal with Zionism and what does it all mean today? Frankly I'm a bit confused. As I wrote in an earlier post, Zionism was the aspiration of a homeland for an oppressed and dispersed people, the Jews. It was a movement that had existed in different forms for several hundred years at least. 

Zionism became more than an aspiration when Great Britain during their mandate over Palestine between the two World Wars, declared its support of a homeland for the Jewish people in that land. And it became reality 75 years ago with the establishment of the State of Israel.

With the aspiration becoming a reality, where does that leave Zionism and anti-Zionism today?

Here's a statement I've heard practically my whole life, the entire time of which I've never known there to be no Israel: "I'm not against the Jewish people, I'm against Zionism."

It is said that today, anti-Zionism is the denial of Israel's right to exist, an idea which plenty of groups advocate, and many more like Hamas are trying make a reality. That is precisely the implication of the catch phrase "from the river to the sea" which U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Talib was rightfully excoriated for using recently. But beyond the obvious antisemitic tone of that sentiment, when you think of it, isn't denying Israel like denying the United States' right to exist, or for that matter all the nations in the Americas, and many scattered throughout the world, whose "founders" conquered the land causing displacement, great suffering, and even death to the indigenous people of those places, much like the founding of Israel?

If there ever was a quixotic enterprise, denying an established, sovereign nation it's right to exist is surely high on the list. Israel is here to stay, like it or not.

The first person I heard make the comment above about Zionism was my father. I'm not sure he even knew what Zionism actually was, as I never heard him mention his opposition to the state of Israel. To my old man, Zionism was a nefarious movement that involved a conspiracy at the hands of the Jewish elite who had control of the world's banks, the press, popular culture and many other institutions that had a great influence on people's lives. The end goal of course was world domination. 

Politically as a child I was much more under the influence of my mother, so I always thought my dad's ideas were unique to him or at best, shared only by a few other kookie folks, until I learned they are commonly held, especially among my father's fellow Europeans. Not even the horrors of World War II could diminish them. Sure, others may not have been as blatant in public as my father was at home with his family, but there were always the telltale signs bringing up a certain group of people not mentioned by name, (but "you know who they are"), and conspiracies. Silly me but I didn't realize until fairly recently how prevalent those ideas were stateside until all the fuss about George Soros and his supposed Zionist plot to disrupt the American political system by changing its demographics, otherwise known as the great replacement conspiracy.

This shit never grows old apparently.

Let's face it, making the point of saying you're anti-Zionist but not antisemitic, is really just putting lipstick on a pig. If you feel the need to point out that you're not antisemitic, or any other kind of racist for that matter, you probably are. And you're in good company because none of us are truly immune from the blight of racism.

So yes, in that sense, anti-Zionism and antisemitism go hand-in-hand. 

What about pro-Zionism today? To many, with the stated goals of Zionism already accomplished, the term refers not simply to the preservation and security of the State of Israel, but to the expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestinian territory, the continuation of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and the treatment of the Palestinian people in Israel as second-class citizens, all of which has been condemned by much of the world as well as the United Nations.

Is this condemnation antisemitic? 

What if a person thinks as I do that the ideal, perfect world solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a one state solution, where Jews and Palestinians would live together in a State of Israel, all with the same rights and opportunities, as a true democratic republic? This would mean technically the end of Israel as an exclusively Jewish State, but not the end of it as a Jewish homeland. It would instead be a shared homeland. Does that make me an antisemite?

Admittedly this one state solution is little more than a pipedream, one that has about as much chance of happening as pigs flying on the twelfth day of never.  It would require a constitution (which Israel currently lacks), which while maintaining majority rule, unequivocally guarantees minority rights, in other words something like what we have in the United States. Even more important, it would require a population that's all on board with it.

 

Aye, there's the rub.

As we've seen lately in the United States, our democratic republic and Constitution, two of our most cherished institutions, are under attack in a country whose divisions are a mere speck compared to what they are in the Middle East. If democracy has a chance of collapsing here, think of its chances over there.

I stated in an earlier post that I am neither on the side of the Israelis nor the Palestinians in this conflict but rather on the side of peace. Does that make me Islamophobic (an essential but misleading word as I'll point out in a subsequent post) as well as antisemitic?

If it is, so be it.

As we've seen, both Zionism and its antithesis anti-Zionism are highly charged and ambiguous terms, speaking to the past but having little practical relevance today. Just as the State of Israel is no longer an aspiration and is here to stay, so too are the Palestinian people. Maybe it's time to retire those terms and at the very least, keep our accusations of racism on both sides to a minimum. 

They are not helpful.

While my father shared his European culture's prejudices as we saw above, he was fond of saying something that was a truism yet deeply profound, something in my heart of hearts I think he truly believed. I've mentioned these words time and again in this space, but they too never grow old:

People are people. 

Despite my own prejudices, and there are more than I'd like to admit, I've tried my hardest to live by those words which I'll take to my grave. 

They should serve to guide us all in this difficult, complicated world.

Yo No Sabo

Last July in Los Angeles, El Tri, the Mexican National soccer team, won the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the men's Pan-American Championship. The final game was covered by ESPN Deportes, the Spanish language branch of the cable sports network. After the game, one of their reporters, José del Valle, sought out Mexican fans celebrating their team's victory and came upon a young boy wearing the El Tri jersey. The reporter introduced the child to his audience as "the future of Mexico", but when he began asking questions, it was clear the boy was not a fluent Spanish speaker. To which the reporters in the studio lamented that the boy belongs to a generation that no longer speaks Spanish. 

So much for the future of a Spanish speaking Mexico I guess was the message of the moment.

The video of the incident posted on YouTube went viral with comments shaming the boy, his parents, and Latin American parents in the United States who do not teach their children Spanish.

Since then, the media, social and otherwise have been flooded with articles and reports asking the question: "is Spanish fluency an essential part of being Hispanic?"  

There are two words that can best describe the situation: it's complicated.

I have an opinion which I'll share at the end of this post. As I'm not a member of that community, my opinion is irrelevant. However, as a child of an immigrant whose native language was not English, as a parent, and as a passionate, yet challenged language learner myself, I do have a bit of perspective.

So here's my story:

My father immigrated to this country from Czechoslovakia in 1955. He moved to Chicago and met my mother in the fall of 1957. After a brief romance, they married in January 1958 and later that year, I was born. That's how it was done in those days I guess.

Anyway, my dad had his heart set on teaching his only son his native language, which he began to do. An audio tape of a two year old me once existed where I was speaking perfect two year old Czech. When I heard the tape perhaps ten years later, I asked what had happened, why was my Czech so much better then than it was now? I can't remember what my dad's response was but knowing him, he probably blamed it on me. 

Years later after having children of my own, it makes perfect sense. My dad married a woman who was not Czech so obviously, Czech was not spoken at home between my parents. While my dad valiantly tried to speak to me in Czech from the outset, he, a man of little patience, must have given up at some point when it became obvious that I was more interested speaking the language that was all around me, English, rather than Czech. 

Which is too bad because boy how I wished I could speak Czech, especially when I worked for my father in his paint store and got stares of incredulity from his Czech customers when I had to tell them "Nemluvím česky", "I don't speak Czech."  "What's wrong with that kid?" my mind's ear could hear them say to themselves, in Czech of course.

And boy do I wish I spoke Czech now.

So in a way I can identify with the "no sabo kids", a derogatory term for Hispanic-Americans who speak either broken or no Spanish. "No sabo" incidentally is grammatically incorrect Spanish for "I don't know", making the put down doubly insulting.

I don't blame my father one bit. I have friends who successfully taught their kids to be bi-lingual from the get-go without the help of their spouses, and understand the commitment it took on their part, both parent and child. I especially appreciate it when I think back on all the things I wanted to do for my own children but didn't, simply because life got in the way.

No Pop, it wasn't your or anybody else's fault that I didn't turn out speaking Czech, although I haven't given up hope that one day...

I said I can identify with the no sabos "in a way" because the issue is vastly more complicated for Latin American people than it was for me. 

Here are some thoughts:

With the exception of Anglo Saxons, every racial/ethnic group in the United States has experienced marginalization and discrimination to a degree, some obviously more than others. With some groups, once members became culturally integrated into the population, usually one or two generations after family members first arrived on these shores, successfully assimilated children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants transformed from being the marginalized into being the marginalizers. Assimilation historically involved losing the traits that define the culture from which one's ancestors came, or at least sublimating them to a degree where they don't interfere with the traits that once defined a "typical" American. 

Being a "typical" American, even as recently as a half century ago, meant fulfilling certain well-defined requirements. It meant having values such as personal liberty, upward mobility, and owning a home. A typical American may or may not have been a church goer, but usually identified him or herself as Protestant Christian of one denomination or other. A typical American spoke Standard American English without a trace of a foreign accent and above all, a typical American was white.  

You can see this for yourself in popular culture by watching movies from an earlier era. Even a film with "progressive" sympathies such as the 1947 classic It's a Wonderful Life, presented its vision of that wonderful life as centering around a small town, (another typical American value) populated by White Anglo Saxon Protestants. The handful of people in the film that did not fit that description were Annie the black housekeeper, Mr. Martini, the Italian bar owner, and the nameless immigrant residents of the housing development on the outskirts of town, made possible by the honorable and humble Building and Loan at the center of the story. 

These "ethnic" characters while treated with a modicum of respect by the filmmakers (unusual for the time), were outsiders looking to land themselves a piece of that wonderful life, the so-called "American Dream." One of the implied messages of the movie is if the people in the projects kept their noses to the grindstone and strove to achieve those requirements and maintained the values mentioned above, they too could one day be welcomed into the town proper as full-fledged members. Martini, with his strong Italian accent may never quite reach that promised land, but his children, whom we assume would have lost the accent, might. 

But what about Annie's offspring? Well, they would still be black and at least in the Bedford Falls we see in the movie, there are no black people other than servants, whom we assume lived in their own section on the outskirts of the town proper. Their skin color meant there would be no assimilation for them, therefore no membership in the promised land.

1947, the year It's a Wonderful Lif e was made, was a watershed year in American history. It was the year the color barrier was broken in "organized baseball", a milestone in the history of race relations in the United States. 1947 was the year things began to change in this country, albeit drop by drop. 

Much has been written about the modern Civil Rights movement coming to life after World War II when black veterans after serving their country with distinction, came home to find they were still treated as second class citizens.

The same was true for Hispanic veterans. 

Discrimination against and the marginalization of Latinos in the United States may have taken different forms, but both have been as pervasive and have existed at least as long as the discrimination and marginalization of black people in this country. The two groups are intrinsically connected by their subjection to racism, exploitation, segregation, rejection, and even by the issue of slavery.

In an article published in August 2019 in the Washington Post titled A History of Anti-Hispanic Bigotry in the United States, responding to the idea that resentment against Hispanics has increased since the rise of vile rhetoric on the part of the ultra-right, the article's author Maria Arana assures us that:

It has not. These are long-held resentments. For centuries they have been fed by ignorance, racism and a stubborn unwillingness to understand a population whose ancestors were here by the millions — long before the first pilgrim set foot on Plymouth Rock.

A pivotal moment for Americans of Mexican descent was the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. The westward expansion of the United States all the way to the Pacific Ocean was considered by many, to be the will of God. This was expressed by the term "Manifest Destiny" which was coined in 1845 by a columnist named John L. O'Sullivan who wrote the following in the New York Morning News:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The chief obstacle to U.S. Manifest Destiny was Mexico which at the time included what is now California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. Texas, once also part of Mexico, declared its independence in 1836. However, Mexico refused to recognize that independence even after Texas U.S. statehood was declared in 1845.  

The high-minded expansion of democracy and liberty from the Atlantic to the Pacific was not all that drove the United States to eventually go to war with Mexico. Southern politicians were eager to gain territory for political reasons, chiefly to expand slavery into potentially future states. Increasing the number of slave states would add like-minded representatives to Congress to strengthen their standing against the free states of the North. 

Efforts to purchase land from Mexico were unfruitful leading the United States to send troops to disputed parts of Texas. When Mexican forces repelled the U.S. forces, Congress declared war against Mexico. 

The war was short lived; in a little over one year of fighting, U.S. forces marched into Mexico City.

The U.S. government was at odds over the terms of settlement, some going so far as to advocate for complete U.S. annexation of Mexico.  

Annexing land that once was Mexico's was met with opposition by South Carolina senator and former vice president John C. Calhoun whose words would be reflected in the attitudes of generations of Americans to follow:

We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race--the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.... We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged ... that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake.

The following year Mexico and the United States came to peace terms with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which saw Mexico ceding 55 percent of its territory to the United States, and the establishment of the U.S. /Mexico border which exists to this day.

Along with land, the U.S. inherited the people who lived there. 

Here again is Maria Arana:

...that victory came with hostages: the Mexican American people. That grudging population was not easy to exterminate; not by war, nor by verdict. There were too many to be herded down trails of tears or consigned to faraway exile, and they were useful, if vexatious. They knew the land, worked the land and could be put to work for white overlords.

The people living in the lands ceded by Mexico to the United States were automatically granted U.S. citizenship. But much like the rights (including property rights), granted to former enslaved people after the Civil War by the Reconstruction amendments, the legal status of these new American citizens was largely ignored. 

As Maria Arana suggests, so long as Mexicans proved useful as a reliable source of labor, often doing work other Americans refused, they were tolerated. Once that usefulness faded, Mexican U.S. citizens were shunned, blamed for taking jobs away from "real" Americans, and were often the victims of segregation, forced replacement to Mexico, violence and even lynch mobs. 

Most related to the subject at hand, despite there never having been an official language of the United States, speaking Spanish in public in parts of the country was strongly discouraged and even outlawed. 

And so, the die was cast for the next century and half of Americans of Mexican descent living as foreigners in their own country, much as Martin Luther King said of Black people in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Of course, people with ties to the Spanish speaking nations of the Americas living in the United States are not limited to Mexicans. Hispanic people come from the Caribbean, Central and South America, all with distinct cultures, reasons for being here, and legal status. Latinos are an ethnically and racially diverse group, their ancestry is African, Indigenous American, European, Asian, and all possible combinations of those.   

Chicago alone has two major groups representing nearly 85 percent of the city's Hispanic population, one from Mexico, the other from Puerto Rico, two countries with vastly different cultures. The remaining Hispanic population of the city has representatives from Central and South America and other Caribbean island nations, each with its distinct culture. Many things make up a culture, history, tradition, religion, values, art, music, cuisine, sports, dress and of course language, just to name a few. The one and perhaps only thing all these cultures have in common is the Spanish language.

Several years ago, well before the 2016 presidential election, I got into a conversation with a white guy during a long train ride. We got along well until the subject of language came up. He mentioned that there were people seriously studying Klingon, a pretend language invented for the Star Trek movies. I suggested that perhaps their time would be better spent learning a real language such as Spanish. He reacted almost as if I had made a disparaging remark about his mother. 

Showing his discontent with Hispanic people and his disapproval of the amount of Spanish he was subjected to on a daily basis he said:  "If only these people would learn to assimilate and speak English..." although I don't think he said it quite so politely. 

Fortunately, we had just about reached our destination and soon parted ways.

Unfortunately, many Americans are under the mistaken impression that the majority of Hispanic people in the U.S. do not speak English and have not adequately integrated themselves into American society.

Here's a link from the Pew Research Center that proves otherwise. 

Here's another.

Having said that, I realize the impossible position Latinos find themselves in this country. For generations they have been pilloried for not speaking English well enough, and now the ones that do are shamed for not speaking Spanish well enough. 

I guess you just can't win.

But there is another factor involved, race. To illustrate I'll use another example from popular culture of the past. 

 

Lucille Ball was already a star before the creation of the television show that bore her name: I Love Lucy, perhaps the most successful program in television history. The show was created to be the TV version of the radio program, "My Favorite Husband" where Ball played alongside Richard Denning as her eponymous husband.

For the TV version, Ball insisted that Denning's roll be played by her real-life husband, Cuban American bandleader Desi Arnaz. CBS, the network that was to produce the program, balked at the idea of presenting a show featuring the mixed marriage of an "all American girl", and a "Latin man". Despite the network's objections, Ball and Arnaz were able to convince the sponsors, the tobacco company Phillip Morris, that the idea of pairing two individuals from different backgrounds could fly on broadcast TV.

I Love Lucy was groundbreaking for several reasons, not the least of which was its depiction of a cross-cultural marriage, a subject barely touched upon in popular culture at the time, even though it was becoming more and more a reality in American life, my parents being an example. The show also played a role in popularizing Latin American culture with the general American public. 

Of course, Desi Arnaz was white.

Were he black like the great Cuban bandleader and singer Benny Moré, or of mixed heritage, the show would never have gotten off the ground. That kind of pairing in popular culture would have to wait another decade and even to this day, the issue still fraught with unease and difficulty, at least in some circles.

The truth is, it's all about race. 

 

Again from the Pew Research Center: 

A majority (62%) of Hispanic adults say having a darker skin color hurts Hispanics’ ability to get ahead in the United States today at least a little. A similar share (59%) say having a lighter skin color helps Hispanics get ahead. And 57% say skin color shapes their daily life experiences a lot or some, with about half saying discrimination based on race or skin color is a “very big problem” in the U.S. today, according to Pew Research Center’s National Survey of Latinos, a bilingual, national survey of 3,375 Hispanic U.S. adults conducted in March 2021.

Latinos in this country also face discrimination from other Latinos:

 About a quarter of Latino adults say they have personally experienced discrimination or unfair treatment from other Latinos. Having darker skin and being born outside the United States are associated with an increased chance of experiencing this type of discrimination, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2021. At the same time, Latinos say they are as likely to experience discrimination or unfair treatment from non-Latinos as from fellow Latinos, regardless of skin color or their country of birth.

Racial discrimination and the poverty stemming from the lack of opportunities for people of color is not unique to the United States, this from the United Nations Chronicle:

What is rarely mentioned is that most (Latin American) nations still confront deeply seated racial inequality and discrimination that impacts all aspects of economic and social life...

 

Data illustrates that race continues to be one of the most persistent predictors of poverty in the Americas, which is particularly troubling because African descendant populations tend to speak their nation's language as their mother tongues -- whether it is Spanish or Portuguese -- and are in close proximity to urban, coastal, port or mining areas, which tend to be centres for employment and economic growth opportunities. 

A few years ago, I told a Latina friend that I had resumed studying Spanish forty years after I took it in high school. She gave me a sly look and said: "Spanish is the language of the colonizers, what you really should be studying is Quechua", one of the languages of the Inca civilization.

Romantic and wildly impractical to be sure, especially given my lack of language learning acumen, but my friend brings up a good point.

If helping preserve a heritage is your intent, why learn Spanish? Spanish, just like English, Portuguese and French, is merely one of the lingua francas of the Americas, languages of power, authority and subjugation. The majority of people in North and South America can trace their own heritage, (not very far back in some cases like my own), to people who had no connection to any of those languages. 

 

Great cultures existed in this hemisphere before the arrival of the Europeans who did everything in their power to wipe them out. They mostly succeeded.

Fortunately, they couldn't wipe out the people, many of whom in addition to facing discrimination of their own, are struggling today to preserve the remnants of their Pre-Columbian cultures, the most tangible symbol of which is their language. Sadly, thousands of indigenous languages have become extinct and most of those that survive are in danger of the same fate.

On the other hand, the last time I checked, testimony to the tremendous success of, second only to Great Britain's, Spain's rapacious appetite for conquest: 

• Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world. 
• Just behind Spain itself, the United States ranks number five in the world's nations in the number of Spanish speakers. 
• Mexico is number one.
• 75 percent of Latin Americans in the United States claim to be at least somewhat fluent in the Spanish language. 
• The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that the Hispanic population of the United States will reach 111.2 million, nearly double that of the Hispanic population of the last census. 

In other words, Spanish is not an endangered language by a long shot, not in the United States, not in the rest of the world, and especially not in Mexico.

 

So it would appear the appropriate response to the anchors over at ESPN Deportes who were so bothered by the young Mexican fan of El Tri not speaking Spanish well enough is the following:

No se preocupen chicos, ¡siempre tendremos español!

As promised at the top of this post, here is my entirely irrelevant opinion:

Should Latin American parents living in the United States teach their children Spanish? 

Of course they should! 

If they want to that is.

Should no sabo kids learn the language of their ancestors?

Definitely!

If they would like to.

Should Hispanic people be shamed for not speaking Spanish?

Absolutely not. 

Period. 

After all, south of the Rio Grande and in the nations of the Caribbean, you won't hear people referring to themselves as "Hispanic" or "Latino" or any of its derivatives, as those categories have U.S. origins.

Instead you will hear "mexicano", "boriqua", "guatemalteco", "venezolano", and other Spanish and indigenous words (properly not capitalized here), adjectives describing the people and cultures of Latin America.*

 

What this means is that Hispanic, or if you prefer, Latino culture, is primarily an American** and Canadian culture.

What THAT means is that Latino culture is a mixture of the cultures of ALL of Latin America (including the non-Spanish speaking parts), on top of the already diverse cultures of the U.S. and Canada. Would you call that diversity squared or diversity cubed?

That to me is wonderfully mind-blowing.

Even more exciting is that Hispanic/Latino culture is a work in progress, evolving before our very eyes. 

It may not be to everyone's liking but fortunately, at least for me, the "typical" white bread America of Leave it to Beaver (to use another pop culture reference), doesn't exist anymore, if it ever did. 

We are a diverse lot and that is something to embrace, not to fear. Of all the groups who call our country and Canada home, (hopefully no one objects to me conflating the two), by far the most diverse is el pueblo Latino. 

What diversity means, or should mean, is that everybody gets the chance to be him or herself, ideally without being judged. That kind of liberty is still the great promise of U.S. and Canadian culture. We may still be a long way from there, but despite the recent hiccups, that's the trajectory we've been heading in for quite some time. 

As the most diverse community in an already diverse culture, in my humble opinion, el pueblo latino should and usually does lead the way as far as embracing its heritage(s) ALONG WITH the diversity of its people, including their language(s) of preference whether they be Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, one or more of the plethora of indigenous languages, or any combination therein.

That is indeed something to celebrate. 

¡Feliz Mes de la Herencia Hispana!

CODA

* There are Latin American people in this country who still refer to themselves by their or their ancestors' country of origin, yet the generic terms of "Hispanic" and "Latino" are becoming more common, thanks largely to the U.S. Census Bureau. Answering the call for the government to provide more resources for Americans of Latin American descent, in 1980 the bureau decided to create a new race category on their forms, adding to their previous list which was then limited to "black", "white", and the ever popular, "other".

Thus, the category "Hispanic" was born. As one might guess, the term Hispanic is problematic as the word implies people who speak Spanish, therefore it is not inclusive of all the people from Latin America, which is not exclusively Spanish speaking. Brazil is an example, Haiti another.

Enter the term "Latino" which was adopted by the U.S. government in 1997 to be inclusive of all people with Latin American connections regardless of language spoken, even presumably the hundreds of indigenous languages that have absolutely nothing to do with Latin, the origin of the colonial languages of Latin America.

But Latino has its problems too. Spanish is a highly gender binary language where all nouns including inanimate objects are assigned a gender. So, in traditional Spanish we would refer to men as Latino and women, Latina. Infuriating to modern sensibilities, a mixed group of men and women, even if there are many women and only one man, defaults to the masculine Latino. There are also people who do not wish to be identified by any gender. 

One way to address this issue is the introduction of the non-binary term "Latinx" (pronounced "Latin - ex") which has become accepted in some circles. However, Latinx is a word that would never occur in the Spanish language, consequently it is offensive to the sensibilities of many native Spanish speakers who accuse users of it as culturally appropriating Spanish by anglicizing the word. The more Spanish sounding Latine has been proposed but it hasn't really caught on. Likewise Latin@ (not quite sure how to pronounce that one), which looks like it was taken from standard Martian.

As there is no consensus in the community regarding the best word to describe itself, I decided in this post to use the terms Latin American, Hispanic and Latino(a) interchangeably.

** By "American" here I'm referring to the United States of America, another topic of controversy. People from Latin America understandably object to the adjective "American" specifically pertaining to the United States. After all, they live in America too. Unfortunately, in English we don't have any other adjective describing the U.S. Spanish does, the rather awkward  estadounidense, which translates literally to United Statesian. What do you think?

The argument for keeping American to describe a person living in the United States is that this is the only country in all of the Americas, with the word America in its official name. For that reason, I use it whenever necessary.