Thoughts of an American Muslim September-October

the war a debtor nation and it emerged a creditor nation, with all the allies owing it millions upon millions of dollars. The war effort had also helped to enrich the country. With affluence came an increase in the two other factors that helped sunder human relationships, the automobile and the telephone. The automobile gave individuals a power they did not otherwise possess, a power that enabled them to do a number of things unabated. It enabled them to disappear from the scene where they had done wrong. If a person didn’t like a neighbour, he or she moved, to another part of town, to another town, to another part of the country almost a continent away. The ensuing mobility became a habit, most often in its worst aspect. More and more Americans moved away from their parents and, equally significant, away from their roots. This has become so much of an accepted part of American life that no one nowadays asks whether ‘street people,’ those so povertystricken that they have to live in the streets, have any relatives. The telephone further exacerbated what was rapidly becoming an American way of life, fragmentation. Personal visits became a thing of the past. 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