Normally I find debates about America’s greatness to be rather superficial. We’re not perfect, but surely the country is founded on great ideas and has contributed to a more just world. But after sitting through a professional stage reading of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Disgraced,” I found myself realizing how easy it’s always been to take the great American Dream for granted.
Last week Donald Trump finally explained why he thinks America isn’t great anymore. In an exclusive interview with the New York Times, he complained that sometime after the late 1950s we became a “big stupid bully” who was disrespected, mocked and “systematically ripped off” by better negotiators from “China to Japan to South Korea to the Middle East.” And he said “you can’t make America great again unless you make it rich again.”
How will he do that?
The egotistical billionaire thinks it’s simple. “We’re going to be friendly with everybody,” Trump said as he described his America First philosophy, “but we’re not going to be taken advantage of by anybody.” He’s defining the nation’s greatness by being on top of the world in terms of wealth and, if you read the whole NY Times interview, militarily as well.
None of this aligns with the notion that President Barack Obama’s liberal policies undermined America’s greatness. Trump isn’t even attacking liberalism in general. And he doesn’t think that 1984 brought us “morning in America again” either, which is like insulting the legacy of President Ronald Reagan.
After her landslide win in the South Carolina primary, Clinton looked at the question from the inside. “America never stopped being great” she declared. “But we do have to make America whole again.” And she took a swipe at Trump’s immigration stance by adding, “Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers.”
But have we always been great?
“Our ideals were laudable but we began badly,” Tom Keane of WBUR Boston wrote when he tried to determine what Trump’s slogan really means. He points out “that the full benefits of citizenship in the U.S. were for a long time confined to the very few: For the most part, you had to be male, white, straight, propertied, educated, not a recent immigrant” and not Native American. But now “opportunity in America — and opportunity is at the core of the American Dream — is better than it ever was.”
It’s the American Dream that the main characters of “Disgraced” seem to be living. Amir is a successful attorney whose parents immigrated from Pakistan. He was raised in the Islamic faith but became a self-declared apostate who says the Quran is “one very long hate mail letter to humanity.”
Amir is married to Emily, a white American artist experimenting with Islamic imagery. She believes there’s “much beauty and wisdom in the Islamic tradition.” And she respects its resistance to putting the “individual at the center of the universe” and making “a cult out of our personal ego.”
They are living in a plush New York apartment where Amir flaunts his success by wearing $600 Charvet shirts. But it turns out to be part of the façade hiding a prideful bond to his Muslim heritage. And that ultimately contributes to unraveling the dream they’d been living.
The play seems to suggest the harsh divide between modernity and traditional Islam is partly at fault. Amir wasn’t capable of living the American Dream while repressing his Islamic identity. And we’re left to wonder if Emily’s view of Islam was naïve. But both quickly project out to problems with Muslims in general, which opposes the idea it’s wrong to judge an entire people by the actions of a few.
We’re drawn to see something in ourselves from the individual failings. But Akhtar suggests he created an ending “so troubling, so multivalent, that the people in the audience cannot easily answer or release the questions that the piece has raised for them.” So maybe we should also be looking outward at our cultural assumptions about success. If we do, would we resist blaming the seduction of wealth because it’s seen in the play through the prism of Islam?
“I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it,” Pope Francis said at World Economic Forum two years ago. That’s a foundational belief in all the world’s major religions. That’s why Trump’s America First vision won’t make our nation great. But it also means we might have to start questioning the basic premise of the individual American Dream.
