Happy 4th, Concepcion by Albert Samaha & Heated Debates
In recent polling only 24% of Americans believe the nation is on the right track. Half of America believes a civil war is imminent and many Americans are cheering for such a rupturing of the Union to occur. Many Republicans, perhaps most, believe elections are stolen, when they lose, and are willing to give any conspiracy legitimacy that would validate their claims. Despite the judicial branch of the federal government giving consistent victories to progressives for generations, and fundamentally restructuring society in a way favorable to the left, many Democrats want to add the Supreme Court to their abolition list.
Against this backdrop we celebrate the 4th. If John Adams had his way our Independence Day celebration would be on the 2nd. I came across this fact in a recent book I read and it reminded me of how all holidays begin with the decisions of a few men, perhaps even one, and then are embraced as a quintessential element of culture for countless generations.
In St. Louis, and many other cities, you know Independence Day is coming because people are illegally shooting fireworks in the streets for weeks in advance. This creates the annual spectacle of middle-class and suburban-bred transplants, urbanists, yuppies, and hipsters flooding 911 because they can't sleep and their dogs are panicking due to the loud bangs and giving the play by play on social media . Of course, the joke is, police in St. Louis show up when they feel like it, there is often difficulty even getting them to respond to routine shootings, and there is simply not enough manpower to respond to thousands of calls for illegal fireworks. I’ll admit, sometimes I shoot them off myself, and it’s a lot of fun. When I was a kid we had bottle rockets and sparklers. These days the fireworks that are sold in stands are so big and powerful you have people putting on fireworks shows for their blocks that rival the professionals. If these fireworks aren't powerful enough for you then you also have neighborhood people making them illegally and containing more than the lawful amount of explosive ingredients. One such illegal operation in Black Jack recently caused the death of children as the entire house exploded while the fireworks were being manufactured.
This level of celebration has often baffled those on the left. In St. Louis, and in any gentrifying neighborhood in America, you have places where Black people are moving out and Black Lives Matter signs are moving in, and there exists a small and vocal segment of those on the far left. The kind of people, normally possessing graduate degrees and drawing on trust funds, who are depressed the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, believe eating apple pie is settler colonial violence, and wouldn't be caught dead waving an American flag.
Is patriotism the reason for the celebration? Are people, and in St. Louis City we’re mostly talking about Black Americans, so patriotic they go into a frenzy, spend hundreds, and even thousands of dollars on fireworks, and in the process, often set dumpsters and even buildings on fire? Is this patriotic fervor or just a fun tradition? I don't have an answer.
On the suburban scene, and in downtown St. Louis, you can safely attend organized and safe fireworks celebrations. At these affairs you'll often see American flags and patriotic clothing, mostly worn by white Americans, but you’ll see a lot more Cardinals gear than anything.
Concepcion: An Immigrant Family's Fortunes by Albert Samaha
I’m sharing this review from last year. I think it's timely. Samaha, is a talented writer, and an immigrant to the United States from the Philippines. He’s finding his voice and has clearly been influenced by white progressives and academics who think America sucks, there is nothing of quality or virtue this nation has created, and any history that isn't relentlessly damming, and painting America and the West as uniquely evil, is deficient. Furthermore, in the next stage of assimilation, Samaha, and others, embrace an American tradition of the past few generations- infantilizing one's self and engaging in a relentless, and often harsh, unforgiving, and irrational examination of parents. Samaha is typical of a generation of bright young American children of immigrants who are brought up with traditional values and a positive view towards America instilled by their parents only to go to college, and perhaps the hipster universe afterwards, and be told these attitudes and views are simply unacceptable.
The review
You can really separate this book into three parts.
Part one
The story about Samaha's Filipino family and their triumphs and struggles in the Bay Area and Sacramento. In America they've given up a privileged existence in the Phillipines for a shot at something greater like millions of others from around the globe since the immigration reform of the 1960's. Like many in his generation, and most in the future, this is largely a suburban tale. This part of the book I found very interesting and wish there would've been more of it. I was particularly interested in his Trump-supporting devoutly Catholic mother and his uncle who was a rock star in the Phillipines, but now a seasoned baggage handler in San Francisco. This book was written for the white progressive gaze and if nothing else gives some insight into Filipino history, the struggles of Filipino immigrants, the politics and economy of the Phillipines, and the dilemma of contract workers in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other places (where, along with Indonesians, many Filipinos toil in difficult conditions).
Samaha didn't discuss his largely absentee, but financially supportive, Lebanese father, until he gives us a very superficial account of meeting his half-sisters on a New England road trip. These are the children of a wealthy man who owns American power plants which is a super woke profession and I'm sure he is heavily invested in minimizing the carbon footprint of the family. His sisters, who come from a country dominated by Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Christian and other clan militias, and the foreign influence of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran, are positively mortified to see Trump signs. It must've been triggering to see MAGA hats instead of the giant banners of Hasan Nasrallah, Ayatollah Khamenei, and Bashar al-Asad, that can be found in Beirut.
Part Two
The second part of this book is history and basically read like the Wiki version of a Howard Zinn book. Instead of a sophisticated outlook of the world in which there are numerous bad actors with sinister motivations, the US, unfortunately, just being one of them at times, this is a telling of history of the 20th Century in which all bad emanates from the US. Glossed over, or not mentioned at all, are the Cambodian Genocide of the Khmer Rouge, the massacare of Muslim minorities in communist Vietnam, and the campaign of violence against rural Muslims in Indonesia by communist rebels, and many more things. This is the kind of logic that led much of progressive Twitter to go into mourning after the killing of Qasim Soleimani, despite his direct role in the creation of death squads that have terrorized civilians in Iraq and Syria including Palestinian refugees.
I was happy to see near the end of the book the author traveled to the Phillipines and discovered many miss the dictatorship of Marcos just as many in Indonesia miss the rule of Suharto. In both cases liberal democracy hasn't delivered what people really want- economic stability and mobility, safety, and a rising standard of living. Instead, in both countries, you've seen the rise of a corrupt and rigged economy favoring the few and heavily dependent on foreign loans.
Part three
The third part of this book is political and deals heavily with racial and identity politics. When I read these parts I immediately knew Samaha was living in Brooklyn. Brooklyn- where the children of white millionaires meet in coffee shops to discuss abolitionism while the NYPD is harassing Black males outside, where newer white residents move into buildings Black and Latino residents have been priced out of, and then put a Black Lives Matter sign up in the window. This is where modern popular progressive racial dogma runs deep. With his presence in Brooklyn Samaha performs a needed role. While gentrification is an overwhelmingly white phenomenon they are often self conscious about this so are eager to welcome a sprinkling of non whites who can give these settings an appearance of diversity. To fulfill this role the non-white person must be of the same high educational and economic class as the white majority and share their brand of progressive politics. People such as Samaha are actually ideal political candidates for these urban political groups to get behind.
In Brooklyn, or the Bay, Samaha can be part of a "POC" or "BIPOC" coalition that is presented as monolithic. The daughter of the deposed Afghan president, who strolled out of the country with $145 million in cash, is living in Brooklyn and in her own words is "Brooklyn cliche" pursuing an "artistic bohemian lifestyle" There she is joined by the children of wealthy American Suburbs and other international rich kids who have sent Black residents packing to the suburbs of Atlanta and Charlotte and Latino residents packing to the suburbs of Miami and Orlando. The Afghan bohemian, under this popular narrative, is one with the Central American migrant working for cash and the Colombian sex worker. It's fitting this week a video in Canada went viral of a wealthy Iranian woman going on a racist tirade against Filipina workers. As a guy who grew-up in working-class California neighborhoods, Samaha knows damn well this is a more accurate glimpse of relations between groups than anything some trust fund hipster is yapping about at a craft brewery.
Samaha dedicates an entire chapter to his playing football. I also played football (and wrestled and played baseball) so I was interested in this chapter even though I knew it would probably be awful. It was. Samaha told some familiar football tales before going into a woke diatribe about how football is uniquely American because you fight for and defend territory. I'm not sure what history Samaha studied, but that's pretty much what everyone has been doing since the beginning of recorded history. The real reason for this chapter was an origin story and coming of age. He was saying I once played and enjoyed football like the filthy suburban breeders driving their SUV's and former Black Brooklyn residents, but now I've seen the light, I apologize for my sins, and please baptize me with soy latte and let me eat from thine holy bread oh Brooklyn hipsters (avocado toast).
After reading the football part I said to myself- "this guy is not cool". Samaha redeemed himself in my eyes after acknowledging he was a huge fan of Filipino boxing legend Manny Pacquiao and it was this interest that rekindled his search for roots and a trip back to the homeland. I'm also a huge Pacquiao fan. After further research I discovered that Samaha began his writing career in my hometown of St. Louis writing for a publication I have a couple of bylines in. When I looked up an article he'd written on boxing I was in the background of a photo at a local gym. Small world.
Samaha closes with his mother upset that she'd thought her American flag had been torn down in California. He tells her that, although she is proud to be an American, now isn't a good time to be hanging a flag because of the political climate and the fact the flag is hateful to many people given its symbolism. I'm not a flag waiver or a fan of flags; but I think we all know, especially after ample video evidence from the summer of 2020, if that flag would've been torn down it wouldn't have been by Black or Latino kids- it would've been the actions of young white hipsters on a mission of performative adventure.
Conclusion
This book is a 3.5. I think this could've been a great book had he stuck to the family story and tales of the Filipino diaspora. Samaha is a very strong and talented writer. In this book he both tried to do too much and when it came to history and politics was cliche and generic not challenging the reader. I often ask myself why are people still coming to America? This appears to be an empire in decline with the best days behind us. The rights for the working-class are minimal and the level of violence in our cities is akin to that of war zones. Then I talk to immigrants, I see their children prosper, and talk to people overseas whose dream it is to come to America. They tell me their problems and I see why they want to come to this very flawed land. In the end Samaha came to the basic conclusion I have- every place pretty much sucks for some reason or another, but for many people, aspiring immigrants included, America may be the place that sucks the least. These new waves of immigrants are eroding old racial lines and creating a complicated, but dynamic and sometimes beautiful new America.
Heated Abortion Debate
Americans are polarized on the issue of abortion and things are getting heated. As an example of just how far Muslims have assimilated into the mainstream of American society we’re now also witnessing some very ugly and heated debates among Muslims over the abortion issue. Yaqeen Institute scholar Justin Parrot, a highly respected Muslim who doesn’t engage in politics at all, released statements seen as favorable to the recent Dobbs decision. Instead of addressing the substance of Justin's arguments, he was attacked by a young woke Twitter mob as a “white supremacist” and numerous disparaging remarks towards white converts. This is another reason I advise white people to not convert to Islam. You can put years of study and your life’s work into a community and you’ll still remain the perpetual outsider. Find home in the hundreds of denominations of Christianity, a synagogue, or join the “nones"; but the numbers don't lie- your Muslim experience will be a shitshow. Older converts, such as my generation, are grandfathered in, akin to a three-packs a day smoker with shot lungs- might as well take this train to the destination even if it's to hell.
My friend Ismail Royer was also attacked. I agree with Ismail that the American-Muslim community has veered too far to the left. I mean, Muslims did Quran readings for Bernie Sanders, can’t muster a strong and organized criticism of the Chinese Communist Party due to the politics of the left and intersectional alliances, and have generally turned the public posture of the Muslim community in America into a secularized, racialized, and politicized community in harmony with the more affluent segments of the progressive left. Any Muslim not in harmony with the views of the left is suspect. The grant money, social media clout, tenure, and political success is almost exclusively owned and controlled by the left.
I’d argue there are many factors at play. Yes, the politics of 9-11 and the Iraq War created the Ikhwani-Left alliance which would eventually lead to a flood of money being invested to create progressive Muslim politics (and theology to a lesser extent). However, you also have to see this in light of demographics. The non-Black section of the American-Muslim community is largely suburban, a big portion is affluent, South Asians in particular seem to be in the late stages of assimilating into whiteness, and Muslims disproportionately hold graduate degrees. All of these things point to a predisposed inclination towards progressive politics.
I don't agree with Ismail on some matters of politics and theology, and I'm not keen on some of his friends and allies, and I never even briefly considered voting for Donald Trump (nor did he. In fact he stated his reelection may result in a civil war) ; but Ismail has dedicated his entire adult life to serving the Muslim community. This includes doing pioneering work for CAIR, also doing stints with the American Muslim Council and the Muslim American Society, volunteering with fighters in Bosnia and Kashmir, doing American-Muslim journalism when no one was doing it, serving 14 years in prison and winning rights for fellow Muslim prisoners, presently working to safeguard religious liberty, and most importantly raising Muslim children. You can disagree with his positions, as a young brother in Dallas did, but to go on a campaign against his character because he doesn't politically align with the left is regrettable. I don't profess to be a good believer, and my politics are only minimally influenced by religious understandings, but one thing that I try to maintain is adab. I’ve been in protests and left because I didn't like what I saw. I don't agree with violating people homes or houses of worship and I think as believers trying to follow a Prophetic example one should refrain from certain things on social media as well. There’s also always the option of discussing things in person or seeking mediation. Escalations can only end in hate, bitterness, and sometimes even violence.
Happy Independence Day. I hope everyone is able to enjoy this day with family and friends.
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