Home Free: What are we entitled to hope for?
Last week I published an article in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn addressing the retired cricket star Imran Khan’s recent surge in popularity as an alternative to Pakistan’s discredited established politicians. The article elicited many more online comments than anything else I’ve written, which is a tribute not to me but to the urgency many Pakistanis feel about the topic, which is not really Imran Khan himself but the yawning chasm of national hopelessness that he aims to fill.
Nearly as striking to me was how many commenters scolded me for having compared Imran to Obama. I hadn’t even mentioned Obama by name. What I had written was: “Relying on a single charismatic leader to change everything for the better is a setup for embittered disappointment and disillusion. Pakistanis and Americans are very similar, not least in being idealistic; and I’m sorry to have to remind you and myself of how much hope we Americans put in a charismatic figure who promised definitive change here, four long years ago.” As far as I can tell, the readers who scolded me had no real reasons to offer for why Imran and Obama have nothing in common, only wishful assertions. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
There might well be real differences in the personal character and mettle of the two men. I think there are, in fact, and those favor Imran. He has been toughing it out in the political wilderness for more than fifteen years, through many changes of circumstance and regime, when he really didn’t have to. He has earned his credibility the hard way, above all through his tireless and successful work building and funding the justly famous Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore. Obama had accomplished nothing comparable to that before becoming President of the United States, and he still hasn’t.
But what the commenters failed – willfully, I would venture, if understandably – to appreciate is that I wasn’t comparing the men, but the phenomena. The questions both raise are: Why do desperate societies feel a need to invest their hopes in a single charismatic would-be leader? What is the best result we can hope for, when that happens? What are the dangers? If (more likely when) the leader disappoints us, is that his or her failure, or our own? Above all, what are we entitled to hope for?
I write these days under two rubrics: twice monthly on Fridays in Dawn on topics directly to do with Pakistan, and every Monday on my own website (excerpted in Dawn) in a series called Home Free, which will also be the title of the book I’m working toward, reporting from the grassroots and commenting on the current and coming crisis here in the USA. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the line where one ends and the other begins, and indeed one of my standing aspirations is that anything I write should, ideally, speak in some way to anyone who reads English, anywhere in the world. This installment is a case in point.
So these musings are prompted in part by what I see as the dangerous over-investment of hope many Pakistanis are placing in Imran Khan. Expecting too much from him is not fair to him or good for the Pakistani nation and society. At the same time, what’s been on my mind is how the Republican presidential primaries have been dominating mainstream news coverage in the U.S. for far too long now. What that shows is not only the infamously interminable quality of American elections in general, or even Obama’s all too real failure either to be the leader we elected him to be or to assert himself politically. Beyond proximate contexts and personalities, what I’m sensing is a greater than usual disconnect between the ostensible and the actual, as American society atavistically clings to the vestiges of its formerly functional institutions.
A litany of these reads like a roll call of the institutions that defined the America I grew up in, from once-prestigious book publishers and record companies to General Motors to the nightly news to Hollywood to Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. The truth we’re disinclined to face in our national politics is that not only have the Republican and Democratic parties become similarly vestigial and pointless, but maybe so has the presidency itself. What’s been lost along with all of the above is something intangible but that, now that it’s gone, we know to have been crucial. Call it community or share purpose, or at least a tacit agreement that we’re all on the same page. Also lost is a sense that we’re all in the same boat, traveling together to a destination that we believe to be worth the journey.
The veteran political writer Elizabeth Drew begins a new entry on the New York Review of Books blog, ominously titled “Can We Have a Democratic Election?”, thus:
Beneath the turbulent political spectacle that has captured so much of the nation’s attention lies a more important question than who will get the Republican nomination, or even who will win in November: Will we have a democratic election this year? Will the presidential election reflect the will of the people? Will it be seen as doing so—and if not, what happens? The combination of broadscale, coordinated efforts underway to manipulate the election and the previously banned unlimited amounts of unaccountable money from private or corporate interests involved in those efforts threatens the democratic process for picking a president. The assumptions underlying that process—that there is a right to vote, that the system for nominating and electing a president is essentially fair—are at serious risk.
Drew’s questions are bracingly candid, but even she feels compelled to couch them in fairly conventional language, at a moment in history when the conventions we’ve lived by either have fallen or are fast falling away from beneath our feet. The answer to her main question clearly is no. We’ll have an election, and it will have a result, but – whether that result is a second term for Obama or one of the Republican buffoons who are mediocre and silly enough to want the job – it will solve no real problems and will leave at least tens of millions of Americans feeling disaffected, unrepresented and un-led. Just like in Pakistan. The question then will become: Now what?
So, to answer my original question: We’re entitled to hope for what we ourselves, individually and in collaboration with each other, and with clear vision and hard work, possess the capacity and willingness to accomplish. Whatever that is, we’re not entitled to ask either Obama or Imran Khan to accomplish it for us.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: What are we doing to ourselves?
Happy New Year. There’s a lot to catch up on since I paused this column over the holidays in order to finish writing and otherwise finalizing my book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, which is now at the printer and will be published March 1. You can read an excerpt and/or pre-purchase Bearing the Bruise here.
The latest thing we’re all being forced to try to make sense of and/or pick up the pieces from is the video of four U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Last Friday I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling an itch in my brain, so I got out of bed and wrote “Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?” If you want to know what I think about the incident itself, please read that article. This article is about some of the comments posted on that one, which brought home that some things that seem glaringly obvious to me are quite a bit less so to many of my fellow Americans.
“To call for these four guys’ heads over something so minor is ridiculous,” asserted one reader.
In response to my remark that I’ll remember the urination incident the next time I witness passengers in a U.S. airport breaking out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” another wrote: “You are free to think that, you are free to write this column … thanks to men and women in uniform. Your statement shows your ignorance of the service and sacrifice of people like myself who give of ourselves and willingly put ourselves in harm’s way to ensure our loved ones and people like yourself can be free. This also shows blatant prejudice of an entire group based on the actions of a few. May you continue to enjoy the freedoms earned by men and women that volunteered to ensure you never lose them.”
My response to such pro-military bullies and blowhards is: No, I’m not free because of the sacrifices of “our men and women in uniform.” I’m free because I’m free. You can’t give me my freedom, nor can you withhold it. It’s mine by right. That’s what America is all about – right?
I’m prepared to insist on that point because, even though freedom is mine by right, I can keep it only by exercising it. So I’m going to continue exercising it, because it’s not possible to be both completely free and completely secure, and I prefer freedom. Fetishizing “our men and women in uniform” leads to justifying, excusing, or explaining away whatever they might do in the heat of battle. But should they even be in battle in the first place? And, despite their bravery and training, “our men and women in uniform” seem somehow to have failed or neglected to protect me from the National Defense Authorization Act, which since December 31 provides for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. It’s fair to ask whether the Taliban are truly more dangerous to Americans’ freedom than the United States Congress or Supreme Court.
A commenter on Sebastian Junger’s fine Washington Post article “We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy” wrote: “It’s tribal. It’s not a police action. While these acts are deplorable, they are also understandable. In a warrior’s mind, they already dehumanized the enemy.” I can’t disagree with this; as Junger pointed out, “A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s [allegedly] okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.” We can’t deplore (such a milquetoast word) enlisted Marines urinating on people we’ve defined as our enemy without acknowledging that (another lame phrase) “our political leaders” – which is to say all of us, especially if we still believe in democracy – are guilty well prior to the Marines themselves. What could the Taliban do to us that’s worse than the things we’re already doing to ourselves and each other? And is allowing ourselves to commit atrocities preferable to leaving ourselves vulnerable?
How you see this incident depends on whether you’re willing to acknowledge that the corpses urinated on were those of human beings. One all too typical commenter on the version of my article published in the Huffington Post trotted out familiar tropes:
Radical Islamic men use their own children as suicide bombers, stone women to death because they have been raped and want to kill and destroy anyone or any society on this earth that does not agree with their violent way of living life under their extreme religious beliefs. So why should I have an issue with some Marines pissing on the dead bodies of those same men who would kill me simply because I exist? Well, I don’t have a problem with it. You truly reap what you sew [sic] in this world and when you want to destroy all others, you can’t afford to be offended by a little urine.
Wow. Does this writer know anything about the daily lives, culture, and history of Afghan people, or is he or she just guessing?
I’ll give the last word, for now, to Jafar Siddiqui, my fellow American whose “PenJihad” blog I quoted in my previous article. “Good article Ethan, but I disagree with your title,” he wrote.
How do you, or anyone else, know the dead men were “Taliban” or “insurgents” or even armed and posing a threat to the soldiers who killed them? … The dead men could very well have been the good guys and our guys were simply looking for a kill. Far too many of the people our guys kill “out there” … are not proven as hostiles but simply as “suspected insurgents.” Innocents, in my book.
I foresee the need to continue this conversation, and I’ll be doing just that as I drive around America this autumn.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?
I haven’t fully digested the disgusting news that U.S. Marines have been caught on video urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, so this post is not offered as a coherent think-piece. But what is there to think about, anyway? What is there to say, really, except that there’s absolutely no excuse? No excuse for the policy makers and officers, but neither is there one for the brutalized young perpetrators. Their lowly enlisted status doesn’t excuse them; we should offer them compassion, but not absolution, for the guilt they carry. The next time I’m in a U.S. airport and the passengers break out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” I’ll remember this incident.
In keeping with its maddening, self-regarding role as the American Pravda, the New York Times worries in a hand-wringing “analysis” that “the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment in the decade-old Afghan war.” Well, how could they not have that effect? And why shouldn’t they?
Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American acquaintance of mine who lives near Seattle, where I live, writes a reliably candid blog called “PenJihad.” In his latest installment, aptly titled “Marines Urinating on Dead Muslims,” Jeff offers this challenge to his fellow American Muslims: “There is no action against the anti-Muslim hate-mongering climate in this country because we Muslims do not do anything to make ourselves politically significant so, why should anyone care about us?” This echoes my own 2010 article “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?” The question mark is important, because I’m not a Muslim, and I won’t presume to tell people who are more vulnerable in American society than I am what they should do. But I am an American, and I still believe, as I wrote in that article, that “Muslims have a historic opportunity to play an important leadership role in American society today” – not only for their own sake, but for the sake of our politically rudderless and morally feckless society as a whole.
I happen just this week to have submitted to the “Books & Authors” section of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn my long-overdue review of a powerful book, a collection of writings from Indian periodicals and websites compiled and edited by Sanjay Kak, titled Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Congratulations to Penguin India for publishing such a book. In one piece, “Kashmir’s Abu Ghraib?”, contributor Shuddhabrata Sengupta describes an appalling YouTube video tagged “brothers watch, sisters please do not watch” and popularly known as the “Kashmir Naked Parade Video,” apparently shot by an offending Indian soldier himself with a cell phone. There’s no need for me to describe the video; you get the picture. “At least in the pitched street battles, we see adversaries, albeit unequal adversaries, policemen, paramilitaries, soldiers one side, and the angry tide of stone-pelters on the other,” writes Sengupta.
Here, there are no adversaries. Prisoners are not in a position to be adversarial when surrounded by heavily armed men in uniform. What we see instead are unarmed captives, people who are in no position to threaten or endanger the security forces. That such people should be made to undergo a humiliation such as this is proof of the extent to which the forces of the Indian state in Kashmir have become brutalized by the experience of serving in Kashmir.
Ultimately it’s not – and shouldn’t be seen as – being about what Americans or Indians do to Muslims, but what any of us are willing to do, and be seen doing, to each other, and – framed more constructively – what we might still do to reclaim our humanity. I have some thoughts on that, which will need to wait for another time (soon). For now, here are some of the extremely hard questions that Sengupta raises:
While the making of atrocity images such as these have for long been a part of the apparatus of violence, the ubiquity of mobile phones as recording devices, and of internet-based social networking sites as vectors of circulation has taken the phenomenon to a new level. We have no clear understanding of what motivates the making of these images. Are they meant as evidence of a “job well done” – to be shown to superiors who actually sanction torture and humiliation but have no way of assessing their effectiveness or actual operation because of the legal difficulty involved in maintaining official records of “unofficial” secrets? Or, are they simply testosterone-fuelled perversities, operating in the same sphere as MMS messages of pornographic sadism?
Sengupta also asserts that
There is need for further research on questions such as whether or not the makers of these atrocity images are also consciously seeking each other out, both as audiences and as competitors, in a new economy of prestige linked to the capacity to represent and circulate one’s own cruelty. In other words, are the makers of the videos in Kashmir, or in the Jaffna peninsula, aware of, and in some senses seeking to out-do the actions of their peers and predecessors in Abu Ghraib? Also, is there an informal network of know-how, pertaining to techniques for torture and humiliation that lubricates the virtual matrix inhabited by the protagonists of the so-called “global war on terror”, that operates in much the same way as the networks that bring together paedophiles and sex offenders on online platforms in the darker parts of the internet? Finally, how and why do these videos leak out of these networks into the wider public domain? Are there weak, conscience-stricken, anonymous whistle-blowing links at the fringes of even the darkest recesses of power (as is evident from the centre of the WikiLeaks storm) that cannot bear the burden of carrying power’s dirtiest secrets?
But here’s something for Muslims to reflect on: a video of Pakistani soldiers killing captives in the Swat valley was briefly circulated on Facebook as one of Indians killing Kashmiris. Sengupta points out, all too rightly:
The irony of a Pakistani atrocity being briefly misattributed as an Indian one only underscores the fact that when it comes to the everyday operationalization of state terror, the security apparatuses of India and Pakistan aspire to the same low standards, which make it quite possible for those seeking to score a few cheap propaganda points on either side to – deliberately or otherwise – confuse one perpetrator for another.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that the U.S. military and security apparatuses obviously aspire to, or at least achieve, the same low standard.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, will be published in March 2012. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Defining terror: Better late than never? by Ahad Khan
Guest article by Ahad Khan
In his recent article “Home Free: Waging War on Ourselves,” Ethan Casey writes about what I know as “the American dream” or, as he calls it, “the ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs.”
As a person of Pakistani heritage, I didn’t need help to notice the near exact parallel between the history of black people in America on one hand, and the plight of the U.S. government’s ghosts somewhere in “Afpakistan” on the other. I am talking about the victims of America’s drone war in the “Af-Pak” border region, home to the folks who supposedly hate the American way of life (courtesy U.S. presidents of the past decade). If we are to believe their advocates, Predator drones are so advanced that they even have their own conscience. You don’t have to worry about them mistakenly firing on women and children alike.
Our world’s affairs have arrived at a confusing point. Wars between different countries, overt and covert, increasingly appear to be conflicts between civilizations. I should not say that we can’t tell where it may lead us during the course of our own generation. History has clearly taught us time and again that struggles for freedom become inevitable wherever people are forced to live with a feeling of being suppressed. It was just such a struggle that gave birth to an America that dreamt of liberty and justice for all. It was such a struggle that solemnized the rights of the black people of America, through the brilliance of heroes like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
It was that same struggle that led to the creation of Pakistan, by a nation of people that – like black Americans – had grown sick and tired of being denied equal treatment in their own society. It is this freedom that we, as human beings, have shown to hold so dear, that it has served to justify our restless campaigns for the rights we demanded to live in honour and dignity.
It is no less amazing what man would do to defend what he perceives to be his freedom, or any symbol that represents it. While it still holds true that the horrific events of 9/11 raised more questions than answers (technically speaking), who would dare to challenge the notion that the USA was dealt a devastating blow to its core beliefs? To repair America’s presumably unshakeable spirit of justice, someone was going to have to pay. A determined U.S. military thus engaged in a worldwide war on ‘terror’. Over a decade later, we find the same forces holed up in Afghanistan, unwelcome and surrounded from all directions. Their enemies (those that were meant to be paid back) are stronger than they were at any point during the course of the war and easily project effective control over most of the country. The lack of a clearly defined war strategy is just one rampant example out of many to show how American leadership is completely clueless about what it’s doing there. But at least bin Laden’s dead. Mission accomplished, whatever it’s been.
As the world looks at its old ally today – they who slammed the lid on Hitler’s coffin – it’s been curious to know what the USA really aims to achieve. As America’s government continues to pursue ‘the terrorists’, it has made that country itself into the biggest victim of terror. Before anyone jumps me for contradicting other countries’ body counts: terror succeeds where people allow themselves to be terrorized; you can’t terrorize the dead. Thus, in my humble opinion, the primary victims of terror are not those that are now laid to rest in their graves; they’re the people amongst us who are ready to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of the mirage that’s presented as “threats to national security.” Those who refused to come to terms with their defeat once, failing to learn from it, are thereby damned to fail in future.
In my humble opinion the Obama administration does know that it had failed, long before the latest breakdown in relations with Pakistan after Pakistani soldiers were attacked without reason. When was the last time you heard any U.S. government official tell the world that they’re trying to “win the hearts of minds” of people on the other side of the world? They never intended to bomb their hearts and minds out, it depends on the means chosen to aim at the target. The tendencies that champion the death sentence as a means for the sake of internal security, favor the use of drones when it comes to external security.
As much as we’ve suffered as Pakistanis under America’s misleading wars, I can’t help but feel sorry for America. As this great nation’s ideology is its biggest victim of war, the defeat couldn’t be greater. The rampant paranoia at present about hunting “terrorists” does not represent the example America gave to the rest of the world in the course of the previous century. Sadly, most of our generation will remember it by the images of a shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist. Pakistan and the emerging Arab nations will learn what democracy is on their own. They’ll take an example in future of what happened in America when people allowed themselves to be governed by fear instead of by a determined leadership. Justice will be sought and found, even by some of those people that the knights of freedom would describe as terrorists.
Ahad Khan is a Dutch Pakistani whose parents hail from Karachi. A health management student from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, he’s a dental practice manager in everyday life.
It is indeed about Greg Mortenson, by Mahvesh Khan
Guest article by Mahvesh Khan
When I disagreed with some ideas in Ethan Casey’s recent article “It’s not about Greg Mortenson,” he very kindly responded with certain clarifications and invited me to contribute a guest article. On reading his clarifications, I realized that, had I read the article more carefully, I would have seen that his argument was balanced enough to include my point of view. So this is not an article contradicting Ethan. It is simply a further elucidation of my own views.
I stated two basic points to Ethan. The first is that it is indeed about Greg. Although his story might have inspired Americans to hope for a better future as regards their relationship with Pakistan, the lies he told destroyed his credibility and provided one more reason for cynicism in a turbulent world.
I am Pakistani. I grew up here in Pakistan, I was educated here, I work here. Therefore, I understand and, to an extent, share certain perspectives with my fellow countrymen. These include the idea that all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the Americans are fronts for the CIA. Americans working in the development sector and caught telling lies are automatically used as further evidence for this view. Therefore, whatever Greg might have done for the American public, he has certainly contributed enormously to the negative image of American aid to Pakistan.
This idea might seem absurd from an American perspective, but our lack of trust in our own government – with good reason – provides a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories, and many of these revolve around American intelligence agencies. An example is the February 2010 furore over Blackwater operatives said to be employed by an American NGO in Peshawar. The incident was covered by the Pakistani newspaper The Nation.
From a more pragmatic, less suspicious point of view, if I were to donate to a charity, I would prefer to donate to one I trust. If the founder of a charitable organization has lied about the organization itself, whatever his reasons, I will take my donations elsewhere. This is not an exercise in theory. I live in a badly governed country and am obliged by my religion to give a certain portion of my income in charity every year. This means that, like most Pakistanis I am close to and will consult with, I am always on the lookout for a trustworthy charitable organization. For American donors giving money to a charity halfway around the world, this verification becomes imperative, and therefore the face (and reputation) of the organization is indeed important.
My second point is that a “serious and large-scale engagement” with the American public is not necessary for Pakistan to turn its education system around. The only engagement Pakistan requires is with its own self. This I hold to be true for any Pakistani system, education or otherwise.
Leaders for social change emerge from the struggle within their own societies. They do not visit the society in question from time to time, inject a little money to assist a certain project, then go off home to continue with their other, more comfortable lives. A highly relevant example is Mother Teresa, who settled in India to carry out her work. Martin Luther King is a wonderful, American example. Our homegrown example is Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi, who truly should be celebrated much more than he is. Nelson Mandela is a leader I admire tremendously. Indeed, of all world leaders today, he is the one I respect and honor most.
In fact, I believe that attempting to change aspects of a culture that is not one’s own can only bring grief, both to oneself and to the people one is trying to benefit. The intentions may be noble, but history is littered with noble intentions leading to ignoble results. For example, one reason for taking state custody of the stolen generations of aboriginal Australians was “child protection.” Recently in the U.S., the issue of taking state custody of obese children is being debated.
The point is that when we are obviously unable to decide what is best for ourselves, within our own culture, it is extremely arrogant to assume that we know what is best for others who are operating in a different and completely unknown culture. One question that cropped up on Ethan’s blog was: Where are the Pakistani leaders for social change? In addition to Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi’s work, here are links to a Pakistani charity for the blind, the Layton-Rahmatullah trust fund, and to the Ittefaq Hospital Trust set up by the father of our former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Ethan has included quite a few links related to local charities working for education in his blog. I am inserting these links here simply to demonstrate that we do not lack people seriously attempting to alleviate the issues faced by our country.
A problem Pakistanis face both within and outside the country is our own inability to project ourselves. This means that a lot of good work done here is done so quietly that the media – whether Pakistani or foreign – either does not know it’s being done, or does not project it as an impressive achievement. Therefore, instead of idolizing the true, Pakistani heroes and heroines, we are reduced to applauding the foreigner whose impact on the country is obviously going to be much less than that of local change-makers.
Or maybe we are such a media-saturated society, encouraged to pity the less prosperous and convinced that nothing is worthy unless it occurs on a large scale and becomes famous, that we are unable to recognise the true heroes when we see them. In Lasbella, Balochistan, I met a young government school teacher. She told me that her father was a daily wage labourer (for Pakistani readers, a mazdoor) who had always wanted to educate his daughters. However, while they lived in their local village, her father’s elder brother managed to dissuade him from doing so. It was when they shifted to Lasbella, a semi-urban area, that her father was able to educate his two younger daughters. Her four older sisters were completely illiterate.
I asked her if her father was happy with the result, and she replied, “Of course. Today I receive so much respect!” Sufficient people like this young lady and her father will create the Pakistan we would so dearly like to see.
By the way, while we were having this conversation, we both had our heads covered. It is the culture in Balochistan, which I adopt when I go there.
If Americans actually have an emotional and spiritual need to believe in and support constructive, life-affirming projects, their collaboration with Pakistanis is always welcome. Books and blogs like Ethan’s, or documentaries revealing the positive side of Pakistan – and we must have some positive aspects since, as far as I know, we are of human descent – are undoubtedly useful.
However, if money is being sunk into development projects, I would suggest that the citizens themselves ensure that the project is actually carrying out the work it is supposed to be doing. Physical verification of that work, and an impact analysis, would be good ideas. After all, it’s hard-earned money. Why waste it?
Mahvesh Khan belongs to a family that shifted en masse from Indian Punjab to Pakistan during the Partition of 1947, leaving behind a 400-year-old settlement. Her grandmothers observed purdah in India. In Pakistan they were the first women to inherit property, due to the shariah. Supported by her father, Mahvesh obtained a master’s degree in business from a university in Australia at a time when women from her family were not encouraged to study abroad. She has been a teacher/administrator for a private school system and is currently employed in the development sector.
Home Free: Waging war on ourselves
A couple of years ago, giving a talk at a church in Seattle, I was conveying as best I could the anger Pakistanis feel toward the U.S. about drone attacks, when a woman raised her hand and asked, “What’s a drone attack?” I give her credit for asking, but I was astounded nonetheless. Ever since then I’ve kept that woman in my mind, and often cited her to audiences, as an example of the ignorance of ordinary Americans about things that are happening – I should say things we’re doing to other people – beyond our shores.
My mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit used to say that we’re all ignorant, only about different things. That can be a helpful working assumption when trying to achieve common understanding, but it’s also true that some of us are closer than others to the coal face of hard experience. For example, the novelist John Grisham recently pointed out that support for the death penalty is “still very much the consensus among white people in the South. Black people know better because they have seen so many wrongful convictions and executions.”
The same goes for drones. In Karachi in 2009 I met a teenage refugee from Waziristan, who told me: “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people. … What the U.S. is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person [in Waziristan] now that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these U.S. attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”
Well, America, drones are coming soon to your local police department. But don’t worry, a boosterish Nov. 27 article in the Los Angeles Times assures us, they’re going to be used only for good purposes like spraying pesticides on crops and catching bad guys. The Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to issue new rules for the use of drones in U.S. domestic airspace in January, is concerned about “the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.” But don’t worry, everything will be fine, because “The aerospace industry believes that the good guys – the nation’s law enforcement agencies – are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.”
And oh, by the way, “Officials in Tampa, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year’s Republican National Convention.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where all this is headed. In fact, we’re there already. For years now we’ve been growing accustomed to living our lives under perpetual surveillance, as we do more and more of our communications and transactions online and on the cell phones that we carry with us everywhere we go. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of my fellow Americans either don’t really understand what’s happening, or they don’t object; many members of what Richard Nixon all too accurately called the silent majority hold the attitude that “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
This sort of defiant smugness is not unique to middle America; I encountered it in middle England a decade ago, when I was living there and cameras were appearing (discreetly) on every street corner. The unasked question, of course, is who gets to decide whether I’m doing anything wrong. The answer, according to Them, is that They do. Not that I’m paranoid or anything.
Most Americans apparently prefer security to freedom. You can’t really have both, but even in such conditions, we’re free whether we like it or not: free to live in fear and paranoia, presumed guilty (of what exactly, it’s not always clear), or to live as if we were free. If we live as if we were free, then in a real sense we are free.
We’re all guilty of this, that, or the other. I know I am. As Russell Baker (bless him for sticking around among us so long; the old guy is a national treasure) noted in reviewing Clint Eastwood’s new film about J. Edgar Hoover:
The FBI chief trafficked in fear, which flourishes best when the fog is thickest, the uncertainty deepest, and people who have always thought themselves above suspicion begin to wonder if perhaps there is some long forgotten incident in their distant past that might be dug up, exposing them to public humiliation, Congressional investigation, criminal indictment, destruction. It is a rare life that hasn’t a few deplorable incidents in its chronicle. As Willie Stark observes in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, man is conceived in sin, born in corruption, and “passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud,” and when someone looks deep enough for dirt, “There is always something.”
The ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs is that we don’t mind horrible things being done to people in our name, as long as they’re done to other people. This is the truth Grisham identifies in pointing out that white Southerners still support the death penalty, but black people know better.
Analogously, many Americans apparently don’t mind if the U.S. military is used to arrest U.S. citizens within U.S. borders, so long as those U.S. citizens are Muslims or other brown people. One non-Muslim who does mind is Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL). As he wrote last Thursday in a letter to constituents: “This week, the Senate considered legislation specifically authorizing our military to arrest and detain anyone, including U.S. citizens inside America, who the President suspects may be connected to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. In my view, American citizens inside this country have inalienable Constitutional rights that can only be removed by a civilian jury of your peers.”
In taking such a stand, Senator Kirk is behaving like a patriot, in the true sense of that word. If I lived in Illinois, I might even vote for him. What he understands is that we can’t take away others’ freedom without taking away our own. And, as the dawn of the domestic drones should bring home to us, we can’t wage war on others without also waging it on ourselves.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Muslims and the West: Who is responsible? by Khan Hussan Zia
The following is a guest article by Khan Hussan Zia, author of Muslims and the West: A Muslim Perspective. This article originated in a Facebook group discussion of my September 23 article “Pakistan, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity.” I am writing the next installment of my Dawn column, to be published on Friday, October 7, as a response in turn to Mr. Zia, and I decided that the fairest approach in doing so would be to give readers the opportunity to read his words in full, rather than only quotes selected by me. – Ethan Casey, September 30, 2011
I enjoyed reading the piece by Ethan Casey. He is a good man with a conscience, like the majority of Americans. Sadly, the reality of politics is such that people like him have no control or influence over the policies of their government. They like to believe that these are formulated for the greater good by a democratic setup. The reality is that they live in an oligarchy in which politicians are subservient to specific interest groups. It will take too long to explain how it works. Anyone interested may like to look up the chapter “Essential West” in my book Muslims and the West: A Muslim Perspective.
It may be true that the state and the people are not the same, but it is also true that it is the people who enable the state to do what it does. To that extent the people of America have to accept responsibility for the actions of their government. I wonder how many of them have even given a thought to the more than one million innocent Iraqi men, women, and children that have been killed and four million rendered homeless and forced to live in refugee camps, as a result of just the most recent Gulf War. This is one quarter of the country’s entire population, and quite apart from the horrors perpetrated earlier in the First Gulf War and the UN sanctions that followed. The sheer scale puts to shame what history’s legendary killers Chengez, Hilaku, and Taimur inflicted on the world.
The same holds true for what has been done to the people of Afghanistan in the past ten years, not to speak of the crimes against humanity committed through the drone strikes in FATA that have killed thousands and terrorized the entire population for years on end. It is all very well for Mr. Casey to write [that] “we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.” Try telling this to someone who has just had a drone missile crash through his ceiling that killed his wife and children, and left the rest of his family screaming in pain from burns, bloody wounds, and broken bones. What common ground does he hope to find with this poor man and thousands of others like him who had never done any harm to the United States or its so-called war on terror?
It is not right to speak in the same vein about the feelings of the people of America as those of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan. The Americans are not suffering in the same way and cannot even understand, let aside feel, in the same way as the latter. Any attempt to generalise the issue borders on the insensitive and hypocritical. Each case has to be looked at separately, based on individual circumstances and merit. “Search for common humanity” and “common ground” begins with recognition and atonement of the wrongs done and will not amount to much if the entitlements and standards applied to the parties involved are different and discriminatory. With respect, it is not true [that] “we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.” Only some of us are.
Khan Hussan Zia was born in a family with connections to Afghanistan. He was educated in Pakistan and England and later served in the Pakistan Navy. He is an old student of Islamic and Indian history and contributes to newspapers and magazines mostly on geopolitical subjects. His earlier books include The Pathans of Jullunder, the social history of a community in India that was uprooted in the partition of the subcontinent, Soft War on Pakistan, an analysis of the media campaign against that country, and Pakistan: Roots, Perspective and Genesis.
Pakistan, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity
I woke up this morning to the news that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week. The New York Times called it “the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan.”
The geopolitics of such matters are analyzed ad nauseum by Very Intelligent People in think tanks from Washington to Islamabad. The careerist participants in that debate are largely talking past each other, because each of them starts from the tendentious premise that the state that represents his or her society is the one that’s in the right. I don’t intend to contribute to that tedious and largely pointless conversation. I intend to do an end run around it, by reminding myself and anyone who might read this of our shared humanity.
Part of the problem is that both Pakistan and America are hyper-political cultures that, for historical and ideological reasons, both suffer from a damaging tendency to conflate the society with the state. Hence the unexamined terms “the United States” and “Pakistan” – the impoverished vocabulary of conventional journalism – in the quote above from the New York Times. What is “the United States”? What is “Pakistan”? To what version of these notional entities do I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, owe allegiance? Am I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, required or entitled to make excuses for things “the United States” or “Pakistan” do that we know to be wrong? Are we required always to support and excuse “us” against “them,” as though societies were necessarily rivals, like football teams?
This sort of thing has gotten much worse, and the stakes much higher, in recent years, but in truth it’s nothing new. Way back in 1767, Samuel Johnson observed that
In a time of war the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves, and ill of the enemy. At this time the task of news-writers is easy; they have nothing to do but to tell that the battle is expected, and afterwards that a battle has been fought, in which we and our friends, whether conquering or conquered, did all, and our enemies did nothing. Scarcely any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.
In other words, don’t believe what you read in the papers. I began as a political journalist – a writer of news – like any other, but quickly became dissatisfied with the constraints and conventions of that kind of writing. It’s the opposite of poetry, in the sense that it systematically squeezes meaning out of language by resorting habitually to cant and to glib phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” (Haiti), “Himalayan kingdom” (Nepal), “Muslim separatist insurgency” (Kashmir). George Orwell would have – did have – a lot to say about phrases like those, whose purpose is not to enhance understanding but to disable thinking and human sympathy by pushing emotive buttons.
My personal declaration of independence from the treadmill of such intellectually and morally impoverished language was my 2004 book Alive and Well in Pakistan, whose title as well as form – first-person nonfiction narrative, following role models like Graham Greene and Paul Theroux – are acts of intentional resistance. Resistance is anything but futile; it is hard but necessary work that we must do in order to maintain our humanity.
But resistance to the states that presume to represent our societies, and to the propaganda organs that presume to define the terms of our conversation, is only the first step. The long-term task is to maintain our use of language at a level that enhances understanding, in both the intellectual and the empathetic sense. The kindest review of Alive and Well in Pakistan was by Alex Spillius in The Daily Telegraph, who wrote that “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” What “the media” would define for us as “the other” is not other at all; we’re all human beings, all in it together. We may not properly understand or agree with each other, but that only means that we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.
But just as it won’t do simply to blame the putative other side, blaming “the media” is an evasion and a cop-out. The ultimate responsibility lies in each and all of us. If you don’t like or believe what you’re told or what you see on television, do the work of reading and of joining the conversation. We can joke ruefully about how people don’t read books anymore, how we’re all too distracted to take the time to understand or care, but the solution is to make the time. There’s no more urgent task.
Is this post, then, a plug for my own books? Sure it is. I wouldn’t have written them if I didn’t believe that they do some of what needs to be done. And my occasional writings, my “blog” and my columns in Dawn, are a running addendum to my books. But my writings are only a starting point, and only one of many. If you’re an American and you want to understand Pakistan, read the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa or Mohsin Hamid. To understand what the most vulnerable immigrants to the United States endure, read the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant memoir Brother, I’m Dying.
Meanwhile, in New York, Palestine has formally requested membership in the United Nations, and starting today you’re going to be asked to acquiesce in what “the United States” thinks about that. As a very partial antidote, maybe a starting point to thinking about it differently, I ask you to read my article “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics,” which I wrote last May after the deadly attack on the flotilla that was trying to deliver relief supplies to the Gaza Strip.
Don’t excuse yourself. And, to begin with, refuse to accept at face value whatever you read in the New York Times or hear on TV about what “the United States” – the state – accuses “Pakistan” – the state – of doing or abetting. The stakes are too high, and we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) andOvertaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti, will be published in March 2012. He lives in Seattle. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
After Ten Years, Walking Forward Together
I was asked to write the following article for the newsletter of the New York-New Jersey chapter of APPNA, to mark the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. An installment of my weekly Dawn column, “A long 10 years,” also marks the anniversary.
In 2004 I had the privilege of spending several days in Haiti with Dr. Paul Farmer, the celebrated Harvard Medical School professor and co-founder of Partners in Health. He told me then what an illiterate Haitian peasant woman had said to him in his apartment in Boston on September 11, 2001: “Poor [Americans], now you’re going to have to eat your own misery too.”
“I thought a lot about what she said,” Farmer told me, “and there are many ways to interpret it. It was obviously sincere sympathy for us, but the point she was making was that this is the way the rest of the world is: always subject to hazard and danger and violence, and your country’s been largely spared that. … I never asked her, ‘Is this what you meant?’ I know that’s what she meant.”
Aung Zaw, an exiled Burmese journalist living in Thailand, had said much the same thing days after the attacks, in an article I reprinted in a book. “If Americans want to feel safe again in their own country,” he wrote,
they must begin to understand the insecurity many feel in theirs. More importantly, they must examine their nation’s policies vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and ask themselves honestly if these policies have contributed in some way to this insecurity. Now that its own worst fears have been realized, America can no longer afford to ignore the fears of others.
The kindest, and also the most helpful, way to understand the anger, bigotry and confusion in post-9/11 America is to say that white Americans are on a steep learning curve about the world and our place in it. I use that line often in my writing and public speaking. Truth be told, all people are on a learning curve – learning to respect and make allowances for each other, learning to lay aside bitterness and a victim mentality, however justified these might be. Sometimes, what’s justified and what’s useful are not the same.
Pakistanis understand the point that Aung Zaw and the Haitian woman were making, because you and your country of origin have lived its truth. And this elucidates something else I’ve been saying for a while: that Pakistanis and other Muslims are in a position to play a valuable leadership role in today’s America. To be sure, APPNA members especially are already leaders within the Pakistani-American community; but what I mean is that your leadership is needed even more urgently in the wider American society. Kindly see my articles “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?”, published last October on my own www.ethancasey.com website, and “Pakistan & America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership,” in the summer 2011 APPNA Journal.
I was asked to write this article to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I prefer to do so by looking more ahead than back. What can we do now, after a decade of damage has been done? This is where you come in, as Pakistanis who are also Americans, and as Pakistani-American community leaders who are also respected professionals responsible for the health of Americans of all backgrounds. It really is true, as a teenager told us at a mosque in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey last October, that the principles of sharia and the principles on which the United States was founded are compatible to the point of being nearly identical. To say this in so many words might frighten Americans who are ignorant and fearful of Islam and Muslims, but there are other ways to say it. And the prescription for what ails America is a heavy dosage of such principles.
Many Pakistani-Americans I know talk about how they feel a need to “give back” to Pakistan out of duty and gratitude, and similarly to “give back” to America as the country that has welcomed them and allowed them to thrive. I would go beyond that and say that America needs you. My friend Dr. Farzana Naqvi of Irvine, California put it well when I asked what had prompted her to lead one of the first groups of volunteer medical professionals (from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds) to Haiti after the earthquake: “I got a call, and I was told they needed a physician, and would I go. So the fact that I was needed was, I think, the reason I went. If somebody needs you to do what you are able to do, I think that’s reason enough to do it!”
I’ll end by reiterating something I said in my APPNA Journal article: that, inshallah, I will continue walking the walk with you. I know it’s helpful to Pakistani-Americans to have outspoken and/or well-positioned gora allies, and this is one way I’m trying to make myself useful. On September 11, I’m scheduled to be in Milwaukee. I’m sure that, very appropriately, there will be a moment of silence at the Brewers-Phillies baseball game I’ll be attending that day with teenagers from the Pakistani community. More interesting to me, though – because it’s forward-looking and constructive – is that I’ll be in Milwaukee at the invitation of the local APPNA chapter, to speak to non-Pakistani Wisconsinites at a bookstore and a high school.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Review: Open, by Andre Agassi
Tennis became important to me in my thirties, when I lived in England and had the privilege of helping raise a boy – who has since become a very fine and promising young man – and the challenge of finding ways to help him develop self-discipline, self-confidence and other traits young people need to acquire. The main vehicle for these things, for this particular boy, turned out to be tennis.
I learned to play myself so I could play with him, and I became a halfway decent weekend player, if I do say so myself. One of my proudest and happiest moments was when he beat me in a set for the first time; I remember the astonishment and joy on his face when he cried “Game … and first set!” He must have been eleven or so at the time and for me, athletically speaking, it’s been downhill ever since.
But tennis has enriched my life immeasurably, above all because it cemented the love and mutual respect between me and my stepson, but not only for that reason. I discovered that there is no more transparent or vivid vehicle for the expression of individual human personalities. When I spent a semester teaching at a university in Pakistan in 2003-04, I seized the opportunity to play doubles on the grass courts at the Lahore Gymkhana, where the full gamut of the foibles and rivalries of the Lahori elite was on daily display. Rather impertinently but, I hope, to good effect, I wrote extensively and (mostly) fondly about the Gymkhana gents in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan.
Another thing tennis became for me was a balm and a refuge from the perpetual fussing and worrying, thinking for that matter, to which writers are prone, and the maddening ambiguity of language. The great early-19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt – one of my heroes – put it well:
I am so sick of this trade of authorship, that I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket-player, than the best prose-writer of the age. The critics look askance at one’s best-meant efforts, but the face of a racket-player is the face of a friend. There is no juggling here. If the stroke is a good one, the hit tells. They do not keep two scores to mark the game, with Whig and Tory notches.
Where we lived in England was only a few stops on a suburban train line from Wimbledon, and we spent quite a bit of time there. This was the era when the irrepressible and endlessly entertaining Croatian lefty Goran Ivanisevic, widely dismissed as washed up, entered the tournament in 2001 as a wild card and declared: “God vant me to vin.” Which turned out, apparently, to be the case, as he defeated the classy Australian Patrick Rafter in an epic five-set final. All the kids in those days were fist-pumping and yelling “Come on!” in imitation of the brash young Lleyton Hewitt. We got to see Martina Navratilova and Justine Henin and the Williams sisters play in person on the outside courts at the All England Club, and lesser names on the storied Centre Court and Number One Court. And we witnessed the late stages of the careers of two of the greatest male players of all time, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.
In terms of sheer accomplishment – 14 Grand Slams – and talent, Sampras was indisputably superior. But Agassi, who began as a seemingly arrogant and unlikeable wild child, turned out to be much more interesting, both as a tennis player and as a human being. The two go hand in hand and therein, I think, lies the key to Agassi’s greatness. Professional tennis players grow up in public, and none moreso than Agassi. When he infamously yelled an expletive for all to hear in his 2001 Wimbledon semi-final loss to Rafter – I was in a pub in central London at the time, watching it on the BBC – and then made no excuses in his post-match interview, you knew and felt exactly where he was coming from. And when he bowed out for good at the 2006 U.S. Open after metaphorically leaving his blood and guts all over the court in one last titanic match against Marcos Baghdatis and then losing – because he had nothing left to give – to the unknown Benjamin Becker, we were all there with him.
Life is not a contest in quite the same way that tennis is, but it’s instructive to contrast the autobiographies of Agassi and Sampras. Sampras’s book – and its title, A Champion’s Mind – are like his game: bland, effortless, unrevealing. He grew up, he played a bunch of tennis matches, he married a starlet, he retired. There must be more to Pete Sampras than that, but you wouldn’t know it from reading his book.
Agassi’s book, like his game, is the antithesis of Sampras’s, and its title signals his intention. Agassi’s philosophy is that if you’re going to play, or write, at all, you might as well leave it all on the court or on the page. On the last page, at the end of two pages of fulsome acknowledgements, is perhaps the most moving passage in an extremely moving book:
One day, while I was working on the second draft, Jaden had a playmate over to the house. Manuscripts were piled high along the kitchen counter, and Jaden’s friend asked: What’s all that?
That’s my Daddy’s book, Jaden said in a voice I’d never heard him use for anything but Santa Claus and Guitar Hero.
I hope he and his sister feel the same pride in this book ten years from now, and thirty, and sixty. It was written for them, but also to them. I hope it helps them avoid some of the traps I walked right into. More, I hope it will be one of many books that give them comfort, guidance, pleasure. I was late in discovering the magic of books. Of all my many mistakes that I want my children to avoid, I put that one near the top of the list.
Agassi tells his story conversationally, but anything but casually. He wants to make sure you know, and understand, everything he went through, every choice and decision he made, especially the bad and stupid ones. He’s almost cringe-inducingly frank about his tortured relationship with his father, an Armenian from Iran who poured all his own anger, frustration and ambition into his children, especially Andre. In a hospital room after open-heart surgery, and after Andre has rushed to his side following a loss to Sampras at Indian Wells, the father mumbles incomprehensibly through a breathing tube and makes obscure brushing motions with his hand, until the son figures out what he’s trying to tell him: You should have hit more to Pete’s backhand. “I stand and feel an overpowering urge to forgive,” Agassi tells us,
because I realize that my father can’t help himself, that he never could help himself, any more than he could understand himself. My father is what he is, and always will be, and though he can’t help himself, though he can’t tell the difference between loving me and loving tennis, it’s love all the same. Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing if not consistent.
In this passage we see why so many of the greatest American tennis players, from Connors to McEnroe to Sampras, Agassi and Chang to the Williams sisters, have been the children of recent immigrants and/or of parents from ethnic communities who used their children to make a point or a statement. And what a statement: just listing the names in the preceding sentence brings home how much Americans have not only changed international tennis during the open era but enhanced it. So McEnroe was a brat – so what? Have you watched his magnificent fourth-set tiebreak against Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon final lately?
Agassi’s descriptions and assessments of others, but above all of himself, are unsparing and often hilarious because they ring true. Agassi has purchased the right to be frank about others by being so frank about and demanding of himself. He writes respectfully and fondly of Sampras but calls their relationship a “quasi-friendship” and Pete himself “robotic.” Of Brad Gilbert, the journeyman player who became his longtime coach, he writes: “I can’t shake the idea that Brad looks like Early Man, that he just jumped from a time machine, slightly out of breath from discovering fire.” At the Wimbledon Ball after his 1992 final victory over the heavily favored Ivanisevic, he and his girlfriend Wendi
walk smartly into the ball. We’re instantly set upon by silver-haired British couples. The men have hair in their ears, and the women smell like old liqueur. They seem delighted by my win, but mainly because it means fresh blood in the club. Someone new to talk to at these dreadful, dreadful affairs, someone says. Wendi and I stand with our backs to each other, like scuba divers in a school of sharks. I struggle to decipher some of the thicker British accents. I try to make clear to one older woman who looks like Benny Hill that I’m quite excited about the traditional dance with the women’s champion.
That women’s champion is Steffi Graf, and the dance doesn’t happen (read the book to learn why it doesn’t), but of course he goes on, after Wendi and famously after Brooke Shields, to marry Steffi and make what seems a very happy and fulfilling life with her. She retires and becomes his staunch partner in senses that go far beyond tennis, helping him extend his career to age 36, in part so he can make more money to endow the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy for disadvantaged children in his hometown of Las Vegas.
Ultimately, the story Agassi wants to tell is that tennis might be a metaphor for life, but even the greatest tennis careers end and life goes on, and the ultimate point is not to play well but to live well. Near the end of the book, he shares with us an encounter at Agassi Prep:
Not long ago, while walking through the high school, I was flagged down by a boy. He was fifteen, shy, with soulful eyes and chubby cheeks. He asked if he could speak to me privately.
Of course, I said.
We stepped into an alcove off the main hallway.
He didn’t know where to start. I told him to start at the beginning.
My life changed a year ago, he said. My father died. He was killed. Murdered, you know.
I’m so sorry.
After that, I really lost my way. I didn’t know what I was going to do.
His eyes grew cloudy with tears.
Then I came to this school, he said. And it gave me direction. It gave me hope. It gave me a life. So I’ve been keeping an eye out for you, Mr. Agassi, and when you came by, I had to introduce myself and tell you – you know. Thanks.
I hugged him. I told him that it was I who needed to thank him.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
