It is a tough job trying to understand the United States of America.
For millions of people around the world, and for generations on end, it has always been a land of opportunity, a country where men and women from diverse regions of the globe have travelled and have made a success of their lives.
Young students from societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have made their way to its reputed and not so reputed educational institutions for higher studies and have stayed back. They were content not to return to their home countries and were happy in coming by green cards and the much sought-after American passport.
Everyone has wanted to travel to America and even today, despite America’s arch-conservatives making things difficult for everyone, people from around the world look to the day when they will land in New York or Washington or Boston or San Francisco and have their lives renewed in America’s vast expanses.
It is all very natural, for nothing can be so tempting for people than a chance for them to have their ideas and personalities expand in a land where a full blossoming of ambitions is a real possibility.
And yet America remains a mystery.
Observe the grief that has overtaken the country in the aftermath of the shooting of 19 children and their two teachers in a school last week. That gunmen can have free rein in a country to shoot down people -- and this is not the first time such a tragedy has been perpetrated by psychologically disturbed individuals -- is astounding for those of us who are not part of America.
The mystery of America deepens when one considers the fact that even as national grief lays the country low, the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) has gone ahead with its conference, with nary a thought to the fraying of the social fabric its policies have been causing for decades. Hardcore conservatives -- and they are all in the Republican Party -- bristle at the idea of gun control.
And now they have a champion in Donald Trump.
So there will be loud voices against any attempt to curb this gun culture. But observe the enthusiasm with which a number of states, again Republican-controlled, have been pressing ahead with legislation banning abortion rights.
Their argument makes little sense: Abortion kills babies as they are conceived in their mothers’ wombs. And yet the guns which go into killing schoolchildren will not be touched. Which reminds us -- guns took the lives of Malcolm X, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr , and Robert Kennedy. To this day, no one knows who killed President Kennedy in November, 1963.
There are all the other incomprehensible realities about America. Think about the appointments made to the US Supreme Court, a patently partisan act if ever there was one. Every president waits for a sitting SC judge to die or retire so that he can recommend his own nominee, Democrat or Republican (depending on which party is in control of the White House) for the position.
In recent years, the tussle for control of the Supreme Court has only gotten nastier. An instance is the refusal of Senate Republicans, in Obama times, to even consider the appointment of Merrick Garland to the court. Garland is today attorney general under President Biden. US Supreme Court judges are fundamentally political in nature. At this point, the conservatives run the show, with the liberals unable to make a dent in legal decisions.
Back in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into legislation that expanded voting rights to African-Americans. That was a defining moment in American history, and yet today, efforts are underway to bring about questionable legislation in some states that would limit voting rights for people considered pro-Democrat.
Black Americans are the target, for their support has traditionally been for Democrats. The feeling cannot be wished away that inherent racism still defines a broad section of American society.
The American mystery goes on deepening.
And it is a reality we come up against every four years when a presidential election takes place. Every candidate for the White House garners popular votes, and the nominee who obtains the largest number of those votes should be declared elected president.
But there lies the obstacle. Something called the electoral college comes in and often makes nonsense of people’s voting patterns.
Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by nearly 3 million votes, but was prevented from becoming president by electoral college arithmetic. And, of course, there is the pretty upsetting story of how the Supreme Court prevented Al Gore from claiming the White House in 2000 by decreeing an end to the vote count in Florida and paving the path for George W Bush to succeed Bill Clinton.
Where changes in government are a simple, swift, and efficient matter of a new administration taking over from an outgoing one, the process of a new president and vice president taking charge in Washington is rather too long and certainly tedious, with thousands of appointments needing to be made prior to the inauguration of the new leadership.
Presidential elections conclude in early November and not until the third week of the following January does the transition from a departing administration to an incoming one take place.
The mystery spreads out to other areas. American politicians have regularly pressed for democratic change in Iran, Venezuela, and other nations for decades. They have condemned human rights violations by governments abroad of individuals, rightly or wrongly, but have drawn the line at any criticism of such violations in Israel and Saudi Arabia and in all countries friendly to Washington.
Diplomacy has all too often been a story of hypocrisy practiced by the US State Department.
The United States does not acknowledge the role of the International Criminal Court. Its links with the United Nations have been tenuous, given its disregard of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions over a range of issues stretching back decades. It has regularly called for the release of political prisoners abroad, but has been manifestly reluctant about shutting down Guantanamo.
Successive US administrations opposed the entry of China into the United Nations for decades, until they could not hold back the tide in 1971. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 remains an embarrassment for its political classes. The role of the CIA in the overthrow or attempted overthrow of governments overseas is part of the historical record.
America has had little time or patience for the good men who have wanted to provide leadership to it. Eugene McCarthy did not win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968; and the well-meaning President Jimmy Carter lost to the communist-baiting Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The mystery of America comes in tune with the dream America yet remains for people around the world. Its contradictions are glaring.
And yet bright remains the idea of America, despite its gun violence, for many around the world.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
