Utopia

Inauguration Week: the horror, the horror.

For the past few weeks, unable to sleep amidst the fractious natives’ loud cries of ‘Hail The Chief’ and ‘Hail The Thief’, I have become increasingly sensitive to the ubiquitous presence of national flags across the length and breadth of Jesustan. Like portraits of the Beloved Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the emblems of the Third Reich, Jesustan’s official logo cannot be avoided. It flies from every third building, it is emblazoned on shop displays, plastered on the bumpers of cars, and scrawled on anti-war banners.

For someone from Hindustan, where a certain irreverence pervades public consciousness, these displays are, well, somewhat embarrassing. When Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Praise Be Upon Him, put up patriotic slogans on the streets of New Delhi, it became a cause for merriment. One, a very curvaceous representation of the warrior queen of the city of Jhansi proclaiming ‘mein apni Jhansi nahi doongi’ – “I will not surrender my Jhansi” – was reinvented, at least among those of us who were in high school at the time, as a lament for our unhappy treatment at the hands of girlfriends who refused to unlock their chastity belts.

Few in Jesustan, however, mock their national symbols. Patriotism, my native guide tells me by way of explanation, admixed in equal part with religious fundamentalism. But what religion? It is most certainly not Christianity; of that much I am sure. Jesustan is too divided on this score. On the road from Baltimore to central Pennsylvania, for example, billboards proclaiming “Jesus Saves” and “XXX Adult Emporium” occur with roughly equal frequency. A little time with those who put them makes clear the sponsors of both believe they represent what the natives call “the Jesustani way”.

In a recent book, The Bullet’s Song, William Pfaff points to what he sees as a shared characteristic of fascism and communism, their belief in an earthly heaven – one, of course, based on exclusionism; the other on universalism. He is honest enough, unlike most intellectuals in Jesustan, to see the similarities between this and the vision of the neo-conservatives who now rule this land. Pfaff, like Isiah Berlin, seems to believe that all efforts to find collective solutions to the human condition are fated to end in tragedy.

Perhaps Pfaff is right; perhaps not. What I am certain of is that he does not go nearly far enough. Neo-conservatives are not the only ones in Jesustan who see it as a laboratory in which paradise is being manufactured; radicals and liberals, greens and black activists, anarchists and sitters-on-the-fence all share the same perception. To go to war in Iraq, an appeal must be made to the idea of Jesustan; to oppose it, too, that very idea must be invoked. Abortion is repugnant to the values of Jesustan; the right to an abortion, too, draws on the same values. Ditto the death sentence and democracy; fast food and free trade: to either oppose or support the project, the Jesustani must draw on the idea of Jesustan.

Not, of course, that this is unique to Jesustan. Pakistan is a case in point. Most reasonable people know that the Shariat’s most ardent advocates practice it in a way that would, let us say, raise a few divine eyebrows on judgment day. We have, for example, the luminous example of the famous Maulana Sandwich, whose loud declamations about fighting for the true faith ought to be tempered, in the minds of his audience, by the knowledge that the gentleman’s own preferred field of battle is in his bed, with a Houri on the one side and Adonis on the other (“Across the river sits a boy with buttocks like a peach”, goes the ancient poem, “but, Alas! I cannot swim”. Maulana Sahib, we know, most certainly can). None the less, the armies of the Jihad do verily multiply.

And this points us, I believe, towards a fundamental truth: of all the utopian projects of the twentieth century, Jesustan and the Islamic Jihad are the only two which still survive – the one because happiness can be purchased right now, right here, off the shelf; the other because it offers a gift certificate usable only in the hereafter. There is more to the mortal combat Jesustan and the Jihad are now locked in, methinks, than meets the eye. It is the battle of brother against brother, the most elemental and bitter kind of war there can possibly be.

Jannat ki haqeeqat hum ko bhi maloom hai lekin, Ghalib, dil behlane ke liye khayal acchha hai: I, too, know what the reality of paradise is, Ghalib, but the idea is still useful to while away the time.