JANUARY 27 Thoughts of an American Muslim

People talked with even the closest relatives only over the phone. This, too, became widely accepted. As a result, practically everyone overlooks the irony of a telephone company’s television commercial, which asks people to use their long distance service to ‘reach out and touch someone.’ If there is one person who typifies the direction the United States was heading for as far back as World War One, it is Hemingway. His life and his books parallel the road to amorality. In the beginning of his career he profited from those days when the dollar was king and Europe was the ‘playground’ for Americans. In Hemingway’s early stories and novels, the absence of morality was clear, depicted as a consequence of the brutality of war and concomitantly expressed in brutal terms. But soon, Hemingway’s name became synonymous with the playground and later with hedonism and eventually with amorality. His heroes indulged in sheer pleasure — bullfighting, big game hunting, big game fishing — all of them filled with violence of one kind or another. Hemingway eventually became the most famous writer in the history of the United States and one of a very few who made the front pages of newspapers. He was therefore widely read, thus becoming an exceptional writer in one other respect. He, too, joined the very few authors whose books were avidly read both in the public world and academia. One of the major reasons for his popularity in the university world was that his amorality — characteristic of almost all his later works — appealed to professors and students alike. Here was a world they aspired to, one without any restrictions whatsoever. As a result, without intending to, there was a tacit support for what was already taking place in society. So that when American society achieved its peculiar kind of freedom — an amoral ethos — it did so because the upholders of the most vital part of culture sanctioned it. Without that underpinning, there might have been some hope for this country. Right now there isn’t any hope and the most tragic thing about all of it is that the American people are not aware of it.