More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The music tells you things: You’re not imagining this. Better children than you die in the snow for no reason. The music says: What’s hidden beneath this picture of strawberry jam? The music says: This isn’t a Disney movie. Death doesn’t just take the wicked villain. Look at that dirt in the jam jar. It will take you. It will take everyone, and everyone, and everyone. The music says: What you feel is real. Follow me. Run.
“I didn’t go on this goddamned tour to see every goddamned Ruby Tuesday in America,” I huff, stabbing at a stiff shrimp. “Do you want some of my ribs?” Harriet asks. “No, I want to see America,” I say. “This is it,” Kim says.
As you stand on the roof in Cairo with six other young, idealistic Americans on the dawn of a new era, you have no idea that despite hailing from the best Middle Eastern studies programs in the country at Georgetown and Yale and Columbia, despite studying abroad in the Middle East during a time of crisis, despite learning Arabic and analyzing the Quran and spending months assimilating into Arab culture—it will be more difficult to make a living by providing accurate information about the Middle East to an American audience than it will be to make a living by fake-playing the violin.
You think you hate Kim, but what you really hate is the fact that in the middle of two catastrophic wars, it is easier to hold a job fake-fiddling, playing calming music for Americans while Baghdad burns, than it is to get a
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. —Friedrich Nietzsche
So you go to the least-American place you can find in the Mall of America, a restaurant in the middle of Minnesota called California Cafe, and you order the Merlot and the artisan cheese plate. But you’re fooling yourself, for in the very act of biting into your hard cheddar garnished with truffle honey you are only practicing another timeworn American tradition: acting like you are French.
