Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought.

Isn’t this what Father saw in Donald Trump? A vision of himself impossibly enhanced, improbably enlarged, released from the pull of debt or truth or history, a man delivered from consequence itself into pure self-absorption, incorporated entirely into the individualist afflatus of American eternity?

A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”

To me, the notion that bin Laden had been living there for six years without the direct support of the Pakistani military was utterly implausible.

Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’

The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst.

“We are more obsessed with what they think of us than what we think of ourselves. We spend way too much time trying to correct the impression the West has of who we are. We’ve turned this defensiveness into a way of life.

being American is not about what they tell you—freedom and opportunity and all that horseshit. Not really. There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong. Because that’s when you start to represent the best of what they think they are, to come back to your quote.”

“So tell me. Why’d we fall behind?” “The corporation. Plain and simple.” “The corporation?” “The Romans created the corporation. It enabled them to protect assets from being redistributed after an owner’s death. Which meant money could have the time to really grow, take on its own center of gravity. We had no way to do that. Muslim inheritance laws are very clear. After death, the estate has to be divided among the wives and heirs. Because there was no loophole to get around it, businesses didn’t outlive their founders. Everyone wrote short-term contracts with each other, because you were always afraid parties in a deal would die, and you’d have to go to the wives and kids to be made whole. One-off deals were the rule, as there was no good way to shelter long-term ventures. Which meant no path to long-term material investments.” “We didn’t have any correlate for the corporation? I didn’t know that.” He shook his head: “Complete liquidation of assets in every generation until the late eighteen hundreds. Do you have any idea what that meant for private enterprise? And it only changed once we finally took a page from the Europeans and built a corporate concept of our own. But at that point, their money’d been growing for six hundred years! That’s banks and industries with a half millennium of accrued capital. That’s why we’re behind. Because Muslim laws were trying to take care of wives and children! We’re behind because we cared more about what happened to people than money!

She didn’t hold it against her parents that, as she put it, they couldn’t make their peace with the consequences of having had children in a culture that wasn’t their own.

Father never got her love of this music, but I thought I did. It was fun, simple, orderly; it pointed back to an Old World, not her own but old and native all the same, a homespun Wisconsin reminder she was not the only one who’d come here from somewhere else, not the only one still working to keep alive the memory of another place.

A sudden, simple question loomed: In expecting what she couldn’t give me, hadn’t I rejected what she could?

I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise.

Is that all we were as Americans? Consumers? Certainly we were also laborers and owners and perhaps even citizens as well. Was there really no need to protect these aspects of our social being, too? Did the nation’s welfare truly amount to little more than saving money at the cash register?

no way to turn back the tide of what had begun in the ’80s. Our ideas had changed. Yes, money had always been central to notions of American vitality, but now it reigned as our supreme defining value. It was no longer just the purpose of our toil but also our sport and our pastime. We discussed a movie’s weekend gross before its plotline, an outfielder’s signing bonus before his batting average. The market had seeped into our language; we sought upside and minimized our exposure and worried about the best investment of our sweat equity. Even suffrage was monetized, true political power lying not in the ballot box but in one’s capacity to write a check.

But that means we gotta be keeping our money. We can’t give it to them. And we have to use it, because it all boils down to the spend. How much you are willing to spend to make what you want happen out there in the world…

property has its own interests, and those interests will always be served above others. And he was saying: justice is the will of the strong borne by the weak—and those who own are the strong.

an author, David Rhodes, who has written what I consider some of the finest fiction about rural American life since Sherwood Anderson;

“They call it a melting pot, but it’s not. In chemistry, they have what they call a buffer solution—which keeps things together but always separated. That’s what this country is. A buffer solution.”