A cathartic reunion

American writers and thinkers are still searching for ways to explain what sociologists call the hostages 'phenomenon'. For more than a year, while the 52 American hostages remained captive in Iran, their plight as well as that of the US was described as the 'crisis". Now that they are free their homecoming has become a 'phenomenon.'And phenomenal it is. Not since the return of aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and the World War veterans have Americans rejoiced and celebrated with such orgiastic fury. Minutes after their release from Iran, as they soared homeward aboard an Algerian Airliner, there began relentless television and radio coverage more comprehensive than that given to the country's space shots.The welcome accorded to returning astronauts who had made the heroic moon landing was tame in comparison to the reception given to the 52 bureaucrats and foreign service personnel freed from their Iranian captors. New York city erupted with festivity and two million people lined the streets to cheer the hostages as they drove through downtown Manhattan in a traditional tickertape parade.Every town, every parish across the United States exploded with parades, and yellow ribbons, the symbolic greeting for returning soldiers, and buntings and confetti. And television continued to grind out its coverage. 'Honor the hostages', placards were everywhere, as were signs proclaiming an American victory: 'America 52, Iran O'.These were not returning astronauts. They were not soldiers coming home from war. They were no adventurers back from a dangerous expedition. They had not been freed in any daring, heroic military raid but had been unwitting pawns in political negotiations between Iran and their own country.They had performed no singular acts of courage unless endurance can qualify for this badge. And their treatment at the hands of their captors was not nearly as bad as the treatment of American soldiers captured during the Korean War or even the humiliations inflicted recently by Pakistani mobs on American Embassy personnel in Islamabad.Emotional Outpouring: And yet, they are heroes. New York Mayor Ed Koch described the New York parade as a "near religious experience - almost a mystical experience that comes from the love we feel for the hostages and they for us". For nearly a week the air was full of patriotic songs. The star spangled banner, Star and stripes forever, America the beautiful.The groundswell and outpouring of emotions say more about America as a nation than anything that may have befallen the hostages. From the very day that it began the hostages 'crisis' was a television story. The picture images symbolised what reams of written copy could not do.Television brought home live and in vivid colour the symbolic emasculation of American power: Americans being bound and blindfolded and taken captive by a bunch of unkempt revolutionary students in a distant land. And there was nothing the Americans could do. For more than a year they remained impotent spectators sitting passively in front of their television screens.When the hostages were finally released, it seemed that they had by some magical quirk of the electronic age broken through the television screens and spilled live into America's living rooms to be greeted with tears and adulation. Sociologist Philip Slater put it another way: "It's been like a year-long teaser ad: it's coming, it's coming. It's like a long delayed orgasm."Crowds cheer the hostages: An emotional home comingBut the catharsis was more than just an emotional one. It was political as well. Following the hostage taking, a TV channel ran a documentary entitled: 'America held hostage'. It forced America to see itself as a nation no longer at the helm of world affairs but as a helpless giant-Gulliver tied down. The feeling has been vaguely prevalent since the debacle in Vietnam. Iran dramatically reinforced it.Americans seethed about their loss of status in world affairs. But they could not use their losses in Vietnam to justify a new call to arms and world glory. Vietnam was wrong. Vietnam produced villains not heroes. America needed new heroes. People they could feel 'right' about defending without offering apologies. People, who in their eyes had been genuinely 'wronged'.New Patriotism: In the hostages they found a cause that would help them rinse their memories of Vietnam and assert patriotism without guilt. In Reagan they found a man who never apologised for Vietnam and who always felt 'right' about American strength abroad. He was seen as an antidote to what Americans perceived as Jimmy Carter's weaknesses and vacillations.Thinkers like Noan Chomsky have warned, however, that the new hostage-inspired patriotism is dangerous because it plays right into the hands of American ideological forces "who want to overcome the popular resistance to an interventionist foreign policy".This new national sentiment, no matter how effective a tonic for America's post-Vietnam psyche, could well be counter productive and run contrary to the currents and tides of contemporary history. But the sentiment, nonetheless, is important to understand.American reaction to the taking and to the release of the hostages continued to develop over the last 15 months. The following notes and images sketched during the first few months of the hostage crisis that began on Sunday November 4, 1979, may help explain the mood of the country then - and now: "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipresent nor omniscient, that we are only 6 per cent of the world's population - that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 per cent of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."These words, uttered by late President Kennedy in 1961 ring truer now than ever before as the bitter realisation dawns on the Americans that the end of empire cannot be salvaged through kneejerk militarism.This country reacted to the Iranian take-over of its embassy in Teheran in the way that dying people studied by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Ross react to the first news of their impending doom: first total disbelief and violent anger. Then deep despair and depression, followed by a passive, almost rational acceptance of their fate.Reactions: People in different parts of this diverse country are at various stages of this death-reaction. A country usually obsessed with Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas shopping at this time of the year is suddenly talking foreign policy and studying maps of the Middle East.Crises usually leave America divided - Korea, Vietnam, Rhodesia, Angola, Cuba. Not this one. The outpouring of concern, expressed in various ways is electrifying. The anti-war hippies who burned and desecrated the American flag in public now wave the same flag with nationalistic ardour outside the Iranian Embassy in Washington.And at this early stage of the new presidential campaign when Americans are groping politically, a Silver Spring, Maryland woman, Junice Kone remarks, "At last - a leader who has united the people of the United States under a single purpose, in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Khomeini for President?"Carter and Khomeini: A boost for patriotismIt's not easy being a darned foreigner - 'derned furriner' as the Americans put it these days. Most sallow or dark-complexioned Asians get mistaken for Iranians - 'eyeranians' as the Americans pronounce the word. A restaurant owner in New York of Iranian descent with 'Persian' food of his menu has just changed it to 'near-eastern' food.Iranian students, said to number about 60,000 are being hounded by immigration agents, and occasionally assaulted by American students. Yet, true to their cause the Iranians in Washington and elsewhere still dare to march through city streets in processions chanting 'death to the Shah", 'death to Carter' and they are protected by American police from the fury of Americans.The ultimate in chutzpah, many Americans say, is the activity of Bahram Nahidian a wealthy Persian rug dealer who operates from Washington's fashionable Georgetown district. Said to be Khomeini's point man in Washington, Nahidian who has risen, so to speak, from rugs to riches but still performs namaz five times a day, peddles both rugs and revolution openly.He finances most of the Iranian student protest activity here. "That bastard", says ex-marine, Larry Carney, "that sonofabitch, someone ought to throw a couple of bricks through his showroom window."Lost Image: Paul Harvey the rabidly right-wing radio commentator whose "news and comment" is heard by millions of Americans each morning at 9 a.m. is having a field day whipping up ethno-centrism and xenophobia. America has been too kind to foreigners and immigrants, he tells this nation of immigrants. He uses the Iranian situation to attack this country's hospitality to Vietnamese refugees whom he describes as 'dog eaters' with offensive habits unacceptable to civilised Americans.And the intellectual conservative commentators who, in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr represent the 'we-wont-stand-for-it' school of foreign policy, attack 'decadent Wilsonianism for America's woes. William F. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Joseph Kraft, and even the staid and scholarly George Will blame President Wilson's idealistic League of Nations internationalism for the 'loss' of American rough-rider muscle in Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, South Yemen, and now Iran. "This view surrenders the world to Moscow with almost masochistic relish notwithstanding China, Romania and Yugoslavia," Schlesinger responds in criticism. "A couple of years back," he says, "these hardliners saw Iraq as the total Soviet satellite state. In recent months the Iraqi Government has been spending a lot of its time beheading its pro-Soviet leaders."On Islam: 'Moslem' is used by most Americans interchangeably, synonymously, with 'Eyeranian". A television report: 'Moslem demonstrators in Teheran today attacked.' 'Moslem demonstrators marched down Pennsylvania avenue in Washington.' But simultaneously, a few newspapers are trying to give their readers a crash course in Islam.On a day when the papers should be full of news about the army-navy football game and the Sugar Ray Leonard boxing title fight in Las Vegas, the Washington Post devotes a whole page to explaining Muharram, the difference between Shias and Sunnis, the story of the slaying of Imam Hussein, the prophet's grandson, 13 centuries ago.Carter and Khomeini. One a born again, devoutly religious baptist. The other a fire-eating, martyrdom-oriented Shia fundamentalist. "Religious seers have long predicted Armageddon, and many of them feel its crucible will be the Middle East," says an observer. "God forbid, but it could have started at the US Embassy in Teheran.The bitter seeds of hatred were sown almost 700 years ago when Saladin defeated Richard I of England in the third crusade. Saladin claimed he was ordered by Allah to smite the infidel. Though Khomeini has as yet made no such claim about divinely inspired whacks to be delivered on the body politic of Uncle Sam, perhaps behind that long white beard burns the same fervour that inspired Saladin to trounce English and French knighthood."Persian words that have been compiled by American lexicographers now include "Muztazafeen', the dispossessed street followers of the Ayatullah, and "Taghoutis' - the devils opposed to his theology. Petty shopkeepers, secular democrats, educated women Kurds and Arabs, the left - no matter that they participated in the anti-Shah revolution are all considered Taghoutis by the Ayatullah, leaving him with no secular allies. In Khomeini's vision, since Islam is the perfect religion "100 per cent revolutionary," there can be no conflicts among honest Iranian Muslims. All dissent is a betrayal of Iran and Islam. Khomeini's top aides recently told Barry Rubin, a Middle East specialist with Georgetown University, that the difference between the pro-Moscow communist party and new left groups like the Fedayeen-i-Khalq is that the former is controlled by the British and the latter is an American front. Temporarily, though Khomeini, in order to cover up his dismal failure on the economic front, has managed to unite Iran's Taghoutis against Taghouti number one: America.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 25, 2013 13:43 IST--- ENDS ---

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A cathartic reunion

American writers and thinkers are still searching for ways to explain what sociologists call the hostages 'phenomenon'.

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