My beloved and I were in London in 2004 as the Abu Ghraib scandal was breaking in the news. I remember buying a copy of The Guardian at the desk of our little Bloomsbury hotel and reading the first European accounts I saw of abuses there. I also remember two conversations about my country’s Iraq adventure: one with a British woman, somewhat more elderly than I am, at breakfast one morning; and another with a French couple we shared a table with for dinner one evening at an outdoor café. Both conversations made me uneasy.
As I listened to these chance acquaintances explain that they still liked Americans even though they had serious reservations about the American government and its actions, I entertained the possibility, for the first time in my life, of being a stateless person, a person without a country. For a moment I shared something with refugees from totalitarian oppression. I experienced something similar in conversation with a Dutch couple in Berlin just a couple of years ago. They wept as they spoke of Franklin Roosevelt, but about my country’s present affairs they could only shake their heads and look away.
As an American I like to think of myself as a citizen of the whole world. I expect, wherever I travel, to be met as a potential friend and not as an enemy by those whom I encounter. I consider that the cultural, linguistic, and historical differences that cast us as foreigners to one another are embedded in the world that grows up around us, as Hannah Arendt puts it, that forms “in the interspaces between men in all their variety.”
Arendt speaks of refugees and refugee groups — persons who live in a diaspora — as worldless. In the well-known essay on Lessing that opens Men in Dark Times, she argues that among refugee groups social cohesiveness expresses itself in that fraternity so praised by the romantics, a kind of absolute solidarity as little tolerant of difference as its totalitarian oppressors. On the other hand, in the world of politics social cohesivness expresses itself as friendship.
For these, and many other reaons, it’s particularly gratifying to me that my new president is making the sort of entrance upon the world stage that he is making this week. Just as he has revivified public discourse in the United States and freed it from domination by the true believing, so he seems to be engaging the great world as a statesman, as a world leader who seeks the good of all rather than the perpetuation of American hegemony.
–worldless no more; it’s a fine thing.