By Matt Hartman

It’s become trite, but nonetheless true, to cite the emptiness captured by ‘America.’ To be an American today is merely to take part in a nationalism that has mires itself in wars, ideological battles, and a post-Cold War history that prizes rhetoric over value. Many look back at the daily pledge of allegiance with a kind of knowing smirk, their pride overshadowed by propaganda. However, this does not mean that there is no truly American bond. It exists in what is missed by patriotic thought: In the place where national unity is broken into true community.

I spent last winter traveling this country–13,000 miles in total–stopping in as many towns and cities as I could find places to stay. If nothing else, I saw the way communities–real communities–exist in this nation. I missed many things, but the murky swamps of Louisiana and the pristine mountain roads of the Pacific Coast Highway all told the same tale: a tale of communities where bonds stem not from images, but from true personal interaction. These are places where social interactions have nothing to do with clichéd identities or a common brand loyalty or imagined culture, but concrete experiences and solidarity. In other words, these are not artificial cultures.

This tale (my new American thesis) came first in a shock while standing on an empty New Orleans block. The Lower Ninth Ward, pockmarked by Katrina’s indifference to a historic city’s past, limped into its sunny, spring-in-winter existence, sagging skeletal homes still labeled with warnings of gas leaks or structural instability. And yet here, in this most forgotten of places, neighbors called out greetings and jokes from homes still broken and those being rebuilt. This neighborhood, ignored as it drowned, stood out as the most removed, isolated place within a city unrivalled in America. And here I found community that grew from the cracks unaided by cultural fads.

Perhaps some parts of New Orleans attract new residents because of an aura they are supposed to have. Perhaps some imagine New Orleans in a particular light that suits them, the images of the French Quarter or the Garden District having been played out on the Real World or in movies. The effect of mass media is the dissemination of manufactured images that create self-fulfilling cultures: the culture put across in media attracts those seeking that culture, and a city is built from artificial images or what were once half-true stereotypes.

The Lower Ninth Ward, on the other hand, does not attract new residents. If anything, its supposed image keeps it from fostering this artificiality. Left out of ‘America’, the neighborhood has been left to grow on its own, shared experiences pushing neighbors together, bringing them closer, cementing and crystallizing the bonds between them.

And there is our truth–only in these circumstances does community exist. Only in being not-American can one find what is American. The forgotten of New Orleans–as well as the mocked in the Tennessee hills or the Utah deserts–find their homes in being separated, cast-off from the rest. Community, in ‘America’, finds the soil to grow only in the spaces declared different from the whole, where the content isn’t filled in beforehand with a cookie-cutter culture. Raised on symbolic flags and soaring eagles, American unity fragments itself into something that is much stronger: community.

Perhaps this is a necessary thing. Perhaps it can only ever be through negation of another that a people can define its borders, its customs, and itself. The birth of a community may only ever come from this trauma. But then the question arises: what does our bankrupted American ideal serve? Our communities exist only on the obverse of the American identity. But then is this identity necessary for the obverse to exist? In other words, must we posit the American whole in order to make community possible?

That is a question that can only be answered with a thorough theoretical investigation. But as a question it serves to mark out an important point. Our American way, unity without community, serves at most to prepare the way for the true bonds to grow behind this totalizing ideal. Mythical America cannot be: we can never exist simply as Americans. We need our hidden communities.

Unveiled may be a one-woman show, but it is bursting with the personality of five distinct women– each affected in a personal way by racism, ignorance and hate in a post-9/11 world.

At times humorous and at times heartbreaking, Unveiled brings to life the stories of five Muslim women through the voice and body of one – Rohina Malik. A Chicago-based playwright and performer, Malik is a Muslim-American who immigrated to the United States from London when she was fifteen. She takes fierce pride in her South-Asian heritage and explores Muslim culture through her art.

Dressed in a dark dress and black hijab and armed with a powerful voice, Malik brought her performance of Unveiled to the University of Chicago on Wednesday, January 26.

In Unveiled, Malik inhabits five women and relates their encounters with racism, ignorance and hate in a post-9/11 world. Each woman brims with a distinct personality and a distinct story. She talks directly to the audience, breaking the barrier between speaker and audience, and offers them tea as an invitation into her story. The stories originate from both Malik’s personal experience and the experiences of other women.

In the first story, Malik is Maryam, a Pakistani woman who immigrates to Chicago and finds her love of art nearly destroyed by the racist jeer of one man. Fear and disbelief paints her face as he screams, “Take that shit off your head!”

“Silence is sometimes a crime… Your words, they have power.”

Throughout the play, the hijab plays a central role. As Shabana, a young rapper living in London, and Layla, a thirty-some-year-old woman personally affected by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Malik fiercely defends each woman’s right to wear the hijab. Though a target of anger and hate, the hijab is each woman’s identity – a symbol of her devotion to her faith and culture – and to abandon it under the pressure of a paranoid world is to abandon her God. It is an act of weakness.
Indeed, Malik argues that it is also un-American.

Unveiled portrays both the best and worst of humanity, examining the hatred that cuts deeply into society, the resilience of the human spirit and the unyielding hope in all of us. “Silence is sometimes a crime,” Malik says as the mother of Noor, an Arab-American who is victim to a violent hate crime. “There is no shame in the truth. . . Your words – they have power.”

And that is the central message of Unveiled.

Malik aims to speak openly about the tremendous effects of 9/11 on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, bringing home the fact that we are all human. The only thing separating us is racism. Those who succumb to it are blinded by hate, fear and misunderstanding. But if we peel away those layers of darkness and remove the veils from our hearts, we will discover a new power within ourselves: The power to love, to forgive, and to understand.

Understanding poverty statistics in America
Field Report, by Julie Fry, Jun. 1, 2006

Visiting the Center for American Progress last year, John Edwards told this story: “I met a woman in Kansas City with two kids who had a job that pays $9.50 an hour. She told me about winters where the choice was between lights and gas. She chooses the lights. She says to me, ‘When my kids go to bed, I tell them to wear as many clothes as they can. And when they go to school, I tell them not to tell anyone you don’t have gas because somebody might come and take you away. In America, nobody who works hard should live like that.’ She is absolutely right. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. What that woman endures is evil.”

Let’s take a look at some basic facts about poverty in the US: Last year, the pre-tax-income cutoff for a couple with two children to be considered living in poverty was $19,806. According to data from the US Census Bureau, this means that there were 37 million Americans living in poverty in 2004—nearly one out of every eight people in the United States. In more human terms, 3.6 percent of American households faced food insecurity and hunger in 2004. Between 1999 and 2000, the number of Americans suffering from hunger increased to 2.8 million adults and over one million children.

Perhaps contrary to popular media stereotype, poverty is not just confined to inner-city ghettos: Only 40 percent of poor Americans live in central cities. The percentage of Americans in poverty living in suburbs is only slightly lower at 36 percent, but as a relatively new phenomenon it is growing quickly. Nearly 40 percent of America’s poor over the age of 16 worked either part- or full-time in 2001, yet could not earn enough money to live on.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, ostensibly, ending poverty is relatively easy. The secret? Minor adjustments to the formula that determines who qualifies as living “in poverty.” Crunch a few numbers, raise a few cutoff points, and voila! The number of impoverished Americans has been cut by over a third. Quite the public policy miracle. It’s almost too good to be true. But don’t tell that to folks at the American Enterprise Institute, or the Heritage Foundation.

As I learned from these organizations, despite the seemingly dreary numbers, it turns out that poverty statistics are merely one more way to manipulate the government into giving money to the undeserving. “The poverty rate misleads the public and our representatives, and it thereby degrades the quality of our social policies,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, “It should be discarded for the broken tool that it is.” The Heritage Foundation reminds us: “most of America’s ‘poor’ live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago.” Another report reveals a starker analysis: “There are two main reasons that American children are poor: Their parents don’t work much, and fathers are absent from the home.”

by Dahlia Rizk

Try this as a little experiment: turn on the TV or a major news website. What do you see? Chances are, you are witnessing Kate Gosselin cry on TV, Tiger Woods return to golf, or the latest reality TV show that wants to turn YOU into a star. Usually, you don’t follow such programming (I know I don’t). But now that you’re sitting in front of the TV, you ask yourself, what do all of these things have in common?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the inability of the middle-class American to keep up with their own dreams of financial stability in the midst of skyrocketing inflation, wage stagnation and a new apex of social inequality and wealth distribution. These words aren’t mine—they’re iterated and proved by economists and analysts much more qualified than I. But more poignantly, in the ashes of the mortgage boom, and in today’s weak economy, the American Dream has changed. Arguably, the sublime mediocrity we were seeking in the middle of the last century—the home in the suburbs, the white picket fence, the housewife greeting her working husband with an apron and a tray of frosted cupcakes as he walks in after an hard day’s work—has been glossed and whitewashed over by much shinier ideas. And some of those ideas involve lights, cameras, and action.

For a case in point, I give you the most popular television show on TV for the better part of the decade, American Idol. With ratings easily in the Top 3 since its debut (see Nielson TV ratings for exact quotes), and given how much TV the average American watches (up to 8 hours a day, also according to Nielson), there’s no question that mainstream TV can give us some leads on the pulse of the American psyche. One day, as I myself contributed to this statistic by watching an old episode of auditions online, there was something one (somewhat desperate) contestant said in front of the judges that really grabbed me. He seemed nervous and ill at ease, and when asked why he was so nervous, he said something along the lines of, “Well, look at this. All these lights and people. And here I am in front of you, in the Kodak Theatre. This is the American Dream!” One judge agreed (who happened to be Ellen DeGeneres). “It absolutely is,” she said.

And he wasn’t the only one. I can’t tell you how many others auditioning said they were doing this “for their family”, or “to give their children a better life”. One heart-wrenching story, from a father of an autistic child who was auditioning, had the hope that, maybe if he went far on the show, he could finally afford the proper medical care for his son. The point is these weren’t just musicians or thrill-seekerswaiting for their big break. They were pastors and oil-rig workers. They were ordinary Americans, and some of them were out of ideas.

Perhaps there was a time when fame and fortune were sought by those trapped in small towns, or dreadful jobs like Marilyn Monroe at the factory assembly line. But in our age of live fast and die hard, something tells me that time is over.

Call me old-fashioned and naive, but I thought the American Dream was about one thing, first and foremost—work. Just unglamorous, unadulterated work, and the idea that you proved yourself through it.

“I can’t believe this is happening! It’s real!” Idol contestants would say, over and over again. It may be happening, for a short while, but as most of these people are bound to find out, it is far from real. How did we get here? How did the get-rich or die-tryin’ mentality come to represent the American Dream? While there are no easy answers, the TV will always give us some clues. And some of those clues tell us that we’re starting to mortgage too much of what we’ve built for a few minutes under the blinding lights of second-rate stardom. And when those lights do go off, we come to realize that the theatre we stand in—the one where we’ve attempted to pursue our narcissistic desires—has been empty all along. Maybe, I think, it’s time we start on a journey that is about more than just ourselves.

by Dahlia Rizk

Every once in a while, and especially in this great city of Chicago, you’ll hear someone talking about the American Dream—on the subway, in a café, at Saks Fifth Avenue. You’ll hear it manifest in many forms, ones which may not seem very obvious at first, but will all, upon reflection, inevitably touch that tireless optimism that refuses defeat or surrender. Here are some entirely fictional, entirely plausible, scenarios:

(Middle aged family man on L) My daughter got accepted to NYU, and she really wants to go, but it’s obviously much more expensive than a state school. Lets out a sigh. Things are really tight now at work and his wife Sharon is pregnant, but how do you say no to your daughter’s dreams? No, we’re gonna figure this out. Maybe a second mortgage.

(Girl on cell phone at Saks) Ohmigodohmigodohmigod. I want that Chanel bag. No, I need it. I definitely need it, so I’m buying it. Just look at it, it’s so cute. My creditors are going to kill me, but, ugh, screw them. I hate creditors, they’re so lame.

(Iranian immigrant speaking to a friend at neighborhood café) Yes, of course there are challenges to life here. Of course you miss home sometimes, your mothers cooking, all of that. But in America you can be…whatever you want. The idea that you can let go of all your fears and disappear into the crowd. Such a thing could only happen in this country.

Make it work. Don’t say no. You are what you do. There’s something incredibly refreshing about the kind of perseverant let’s-eat-our-cake attitude Americans have, one that I personally haven’t been able to find anywhere else. And yet, there’s something very sinister happening to their dreams, and (at the risk of sounding melodramatic) it’s happening as we speak, rumbling beneath our feet.

Now, I’m not a historian, but by all accounts, all the American history professors I know would agree that at the end of Second World War, things were good for American families. Now, these families are likely white and wearing very starched clothing. I realize that. I say this with full acknowledgement of the many faults of the social order of the time when it came to women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, and the anti-smoking lobby. That said, the 1950s may seem slightly drab, if not incredibly hokey time to live, where the most subversive thing one could find was Elvis gyrating his hips to “Hound Dog”, but consider this: A family could own their own home and live comfortably on only one parent’s full-time salary, send their kids to college when college was still affordable under said one-parent income, and taking care of one’s own arm and leg didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Well, 60 years later, and things have changed profoundly. I’m not an economist, but if you can show me how, over the last 30 years, wages haven’t remained virtually flat, inflation on an unrelenting rise, and health care and college tuition (two of the most significant expenditures for the middle class family) absolutely ballooning, I’m gonna have to – to quote President Obama – take a look at your math. And neither of us would want that because I’m actually not very good at math. Put that with figures of distribution of wealth, and the picture gets a little scarier.

Since the 70s, the wealthy have been getting wealthier, with the result that now, in 2010 income inequality is at an all time high, even trumping the Great Depression (this is a study conducted by an Economics Professor at USC).

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and I think the question that intrigues me most of all is, what now? What do do-or-die, don’t-fuck-with-me Americans who don’t have Van Goghs hanging in their Madison Avenue penthouses have to say now?
Well, as it turns out, they’ve got ideas of their own. Stay tuned, folks.