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AN AMERICAN IN PAKISTAN: A new kind of arrogance

Catherine Mayo

Americans are not surprised that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They are not surprised that Saddam Hussein cannot be found. What surprises them is that people are asking questions

As a Vermonter used to six months of snow, two months of mud season, and one month when I can take off my long winter underwear, it is taking me awhile to realise that Pakistani heat is not a one-day event that will go away with a thunderstorm in the morning. The solution I have found is to drink one coke after another — with ice. I’m not sure what a doctor would say about this, but it works.

So I am doing all right with the heat. I can’t blame it for the bad mood I woke up with this morning.

I started reading the paper, but then put it down after glancing at the headlines. It gives me a severe case of nerves when I know what the news is before I have read it. Once America decided that ‘might is right’, everything else became a cliché, too. When dissent is not allowed, all truth becomes predictable.

But that is not the reason for my bad mood, either. What really bothered me, as I drank my coffee and ate my eggs, was that I had to somehow write a column that told the truth in new ways. It is getting harder and harder. What if one morning I wake up and find that it can’t be done anymore?

Feeling sorry for myself, I put on a CD of really old music. Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, Genesis. When they woke up in the morning, they knew that they had a whole day yet to be invented. They could plan on moving to the moon, and make a list of what they would need to bring with them. They could make up a new kind of love, like the time that people did scientific experiments to show that two potted plants sitting next to each other on a windowsill could love one another if they listened to enough Mozart. Even the thought of such a possibility can make a person smile in the morning.

But if I invented a truth today, I know already that by the end of the day I would have to declare myself a failure. Someone would listen to me, and shake his head, and tell me that the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

Feeling even more sorry for myself, I decided to go out to my favourite lake. I sat on a bench near the shore, under a trumpet vine just like the ones at home. Small birds almost like hummingbirds darted in and out of the orange blossoms. Every once in a while a fish jumped up through the surface of the lake. An old man, sitting on another bench, began to play a Pakistani kind of flute. He was very, very good, his music had so many surprises in it.

Americans are not surprised that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They are not surprised that Saddam Hussein cannot be found, and that Chemical Ali is missing instead of dead. They are not surprised that there is no Al Qaeda there. They are a little surprised that Iraq has so much desert, they thought that Baghdad made up most of the country. They are not surprised that Iraq’s only terrorist group has been recruited by US troops to serve as a police force. They are not surprised that Iraq’s nuclear facility has been looted, and Iraqi people are showing clear signs of radiation poisoning.

What surprises them is that people are asking questions. It is all ancient history now, the stock market is up again, the news now is Martha Stewart again, and the Laci Peterson case, and the west nile virus.

The rest of the world should be doing what they are doing: shrug your shoulders, man, what is done is done, it is time to move on. It goes right over the heads of Americans that when a crime has been committed, questions need to be asked.

Americans are true innocents when it comes to this. Since they did it, no crime has been committed, because America cannot do anything wrong. It is the innocence of an arrogance that even other empires in the world do not understand. When the Greek Empire ruled the world, or the British Empire, they understood that defeat at certain times and in certain places was inevitable. They knew that the power of a government did not insure its infallibility. Americans, on the other hand, make a false assumption based on the definition of democracy itself.

America relied on the free voice of its own people to tell the state when it was doing the wrong thing. Good prevails when every voice is heard with equal respect. There was no room in the American system for blind obedience. Each person in the country had the moral responsibility to speak his own truth, and to listen with equal seriousness to the truth of others. Judgments of right and wrong were made among the people themselves, through the humility of majority rule. When dissent is silenced, a person does not know the truth of the man standing next to him.

Cathy Mayo is an American journalist based in Pakistan

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