The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Even among the unwanted there were unwanted, and at that some of us could only laugh.

That was the nature of our conversation, the discourse refreshing after the reeducation camp’s brute propaganda and the nuts-and-bolts pseudo-realism of the somewhat rusted American Dream. Americans loathed symbols, except for patriotic, sentimental ones like guns, flags, Mom, and apple pie, all of which the average American proclaimed he would defend to the death. One had to love such a practical, pragmatic people, impatient with interpretation, eager just to get the facts, ma’am. If one tried to interpret a movie’s deeper significance with Americans, they would reflexively claim that it was just a story.

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity.

The state wants to monopolize violence, the monopoly of violence is named the law, and the law legitimates itself. The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law.

a shock trooper of American exceptionalism, which is how Americans delicately refer to “American imperialism,” a phrase that one must never say to Americans, who sincerely believe, as all imperialists do, that they have taken over the world for its own good, as if imperialism were a kind of penicillin (for the natives), with power, profit, and pleasure merely being surprising side effects (for the doctors).

I went to your schools, which are my schools. I learned your language, which is my language. I don’t feel Arab at all, except when people call me an Arab. And that’s not enough? Now I have to change my name, which my parents gave me?