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It doesn’t take a mullah to be uncomfortable with events in America

Susanna Rhodell

12/04/03: THEY hate us, the president tells us, because we’re free. They can’t stand freedom. That’s why Islamic countries spawn people willing to blow themselves up to mess with us; that’s why they endure fundamentalist leaders who want to force medieval morality on women and barbaric punishments on minor miscreants. 

Well, Bush may have a point. But let’s be honest: We are not totally enamored of our freedom either. If you look at what the clerics in Tehran and Riyadh say about America, it’s not too far from what some of our homegrown moralists rail against. It doesn’t take a mullah to be uncomfortable with Michael Jackson or Eminem. 

I thought about this during the weekend as news flashed around the country (and therefore around the world) about a woman trampled senseless in Florida by a crowd in hot pursuit of a bargain at Wal-Mart. Once the hordes parted, medics were able to pick her up and find, under her limp body, the trophy she nearly died for: a DVD player.

- advertisement- How do you think that story played in the streets of Kirkuk? 

Here’s an irksome truth: Our critics abroad are not that far away from our critics at home. Bring on Sharia law, they say, if it will gird us against the excesses of the West. Our own social conservatives pose a similar cure: Put the Ten Commandments in every classroom, enforce prayer in schools, ban nasty movies and CDs and video games, stigmatize gay people, build more prisons and speed up the executions. 

Most Americans, I believe, were mortified by the spectacle of a crowd so seized with pre-holiday greed that they were ready to squash a slow shopper to get to the bargains. We know instinctively that this is not supposed to be what the season is about. It doesn’t make us proud. 

We’re kind of like the social worker who goes into the home of a poor family to teach them how to manage their delinquent children while his own son is off at college binge drinking at the frat house. We see our own excesses as embarrassing but excusable because, well, because we’re bigger, and richer, and more successful, maybe?

Here’s the president’s problem: In trying to sell the American way to the Islamic world, he needs to make an argument whose subtlety he doesn’t understand. That’s because he’s actually in the grip of forces that are closer to the mullahs than to real democrats. We have our own homegrown version of the Islamic jihad-mongers here at home, and they’re among Bush’s most ardent supporters. Call them the Christian Taliban, for want of a better label. They’re the guys who want God in government, who rail against “secular humanism” as if it were the work of the devil, instead of the foundation of our democracy.

I’m a Christian, but I no more want these guys in charge of public life in my country than I want an ayatollah for president. 

The argument we need to be making to the rest of the world is something like this: We agree with you, Eminen is icky, and our consumerist excesses are unpleasant and stupid. But democracy, in the name of your freedom and mine, must allow people to make their own choices, as long as they aren’t causing anyone serious harm.

What constitutes serious harm? Interesting question. We’ve been debating that for, oh, 250-odd years now. That’s part of democracy’s charm. We get to argue a lot. Please join us, won’t you?

Of course that’s not an invitation you can easily make out of the barrel of an M-16, which is why those pesky Iraqis just don’t seem to get it. The sad truth is, George Bush doesn’t get it either.

Copyright: Susanna Rhodell