Dreams and deception in America

On Sunday September 2, midway through a long weekend, the sun still shone, a crisp wind a sign of coming autumn. The verdant lawns of the park on the Jersey shore of the Hudson River were dotted with picnickers: groups of African-Americans playing ball, Asians, Filipinos and Chinese mainly barbecuing.

Towards the historic sites — where old railway tracks strangely veer off the cobblestone path to disappear under the rolling turf — groups of Indian families, usually visiting parents in saris and striped T-shirts over ill-fitting denims and sneakers, truculent children in tow, were gazing out at the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson, at a white-American newly-wedded couple posing for the cameras, the men in sombre black suits contrasting against green lawns and blue sky.

At the north end of the park, Indian tourists could not have helped notice the grand old building of the Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal, not as grandiloquent as the CST in Mumbai but certainly evocative of this nation’s modern history. Indeed, the name of the park in which it is located, Liberty State Park that has one of the most dramatic backdrops, could be one of the most historic sites on the eastern coast of North America. Almost within spitting distance and setting its dramatic backdrop are Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, “Lady Liberty” herself.

Beyond them, on the far side of the Hudson that meets the Atlantic, is the lower Manhattan skyline fronting the river — its buildings in the summer haze like shimmering bar diagrams on a vast graph.

Metaphors from a park

The entire tableau of the Liberty State Park and its neighbours, Ellis Island and Lady Liberty, evokes a powerful metaphor of promises and personal salvation. It is an American metaphor, its message is luridly secular. For the European immigrant, escaping persecution in Europe or famine in Ireland through the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it was like a voice from heaven.

From the grimy potholes of their ships, Lady Liberty would have appeared an ethereal but welcoming mother, Ellis Island where they would have been shepherded for an arduous port of entry, (captured so memorably in Coppola’s Godfather II ), a stern and hostile apparatus of rejection. Those lucky enough would have then been guided to the railway terminal on the Jersey shore for points into the Wild West or into the magical interstices of Manhattan’s emerging skyline.

But as so many parts of New York city do, the Liberty State Park represents both memory and erasure; it is like Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan, for instance, a palimpsest, where one historical moment is erased to create a more powerful and sometimes anaemic present.

Metaphors’ mixed reception

For older white Americans, if they put their mind to them, the old cobblestoned road, the railway sidings viewed as a seamless tapestry with Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty would echo a distant and perhaps troubled past, of escape and arrival.

For the African-Americans, the triadic symbols mean little. Their ancestors, for the most part, came as slaves, they did not want to escape, they did not seek fortunes and they were spared the cruel irony of Lady Liberty’s flaming torch of freedom — she took her “place” only in 1886. For the descendants of the civil rights era, Liberty State Park and Lady Liberty are places to take your kids on a sunny Sunday.

The third wave

So also for the Asians, the third set of immigrants. They did not escape persecution, by and large, or poverty; they were seduced by a material life unimagined back home.

As the new, post-modernist workforce, they fly in as guests of the American economy for the most part with business visas; some overstay their welcome and hustle the creaky American immigration system and the generosity of America’s enduring myth as the nation of last refuge, to become citizens and amass wealth in the shortest time possible.

Few visit Ellis Island, fewer would climb to the top of Lady Liberty other than to pose for photographs to show envious neighbours back home. For most Indians, America’s most potent symbol is the Newport Mall on Labour Day.

An enduring, fraying myth

Metaphors of worldly salvation do not remain just that; in the process of their constant renewal as uniquely homegrown “products” they manufacture mythologies that, in turn, define the American and largely white immigrant self-image: America as the land of freedom and equality, hard work and reward, rugged individualism and enlightened (read as less) government.

The couplings are working for an increasingly smaller minority of rich white Americans; for the vast majority there is a widening chasm between promise and redemption that has been implicit in all the elements of the American myth. Hence, the anxieties and prejudices about the distribution of equality and rewards to those that are “alien.”

The Aliens are here!

So the myth gets cross-eyed and the distortions show up in the most ugly way at times — Ellis Island is touted as the place where “aliens” landed. President Barack Obama raised a storm last year when he saw no difference between illegal immigrants crossing the Rio Grande and those who came over to Ellis Island: what he said was “we are all connected.”

But some saw it as a slur on those early immigrants. A report in the New York Times on August 11 reported officials of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at some airports complaining of racial profiling of African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities and “Middle Eastern” nationals.

Another coupling in the myth is crumbling: hard work and reward. Most jobs are going to China or to contract labour, usually migrant labour:

Offshoring and outsourcing define American enterprise today. But why should that surprise “Made in America” faddists?

Lady Liberty herself is French in design and manufacture: she was shipped in parts to the US that simply made the pedestal on which the magnificent idealisation of liberty was placed in 1886. Americans skip-toed around that symbol’s intrinsic message.

( >blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )

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