No Muslims on the Mayflower and Other Fears for the New Year

by Jim Washburn

As 2011 parts its chilly legs and bids us welcome, another part of the body is concerning researchers at London’s University College. In a study due to be published this month, they announce their discovery that conservatives have, no kidding, a larger “fear center” in their brains than normal people do.

Specifically, the research finds that persons with conservative leanings have a smaller anterior cingulate—the section of the brain associated with courage and optimism—and a larger amygdala, which is regarded as the “primitive brain" where responses like fear reside.

Regrettably, this information just gives conservatives one more thing to worry about. Not only is their enlarged amygdala about the size of a stack of IHOP buttermilk pancakes, but it is just as delicious. For conservatives who already picture themselves as Charlton Heston in The Omega Man—the last true male of the species, beset on all sides by socialists, feminists, Muslims and Mexicans—they now have to worry about brain-eating socialist-feminist-Muslim-Mexicans looking for lunch in all the wrong places.

It seems to me that fear is the bedrock of modern conservatism. Gone are the lofty Bill Buckley/Barry Goldwater days based on philosophy and principles. If big government were their enemy, the federal deficit and the government’s ability to spy on its citizens wouldn’t have made their hugest expansions under Republican administrations.

No, the thing driving conservatism these days is the fear that someone is going to take something away from them: that cranky white-guy tax dollars might underwrite lazy Mexicans’ maternity bills; or that the “nanny state” government will take their bacon-wrapped Snickers away; or that they’ll lose their favorite strip club if a mosque gets built nearby; or that a stranger may eat their brains before they get a chance to themselves. Boysenberry syrup. Yum!

Just this morning, a conservative friend sent me a chain e-mail hatin’ on Muslims, an “American citizen’s response” to President Obama’s olive-branch comment to this Muslim world in his 2009 Cairo speech that “Islam has always been a part of America’s history,” which admittedly was laying it on a bit thick, but a guy’s gotta say something to offset how thick we laid it on with our war in Iraq, in which over 100,000 persons who never harmed America, most of them Muslim, were killed.

“Were those Muslims who celebrated that first Thanksgiving day?” the missive asks. “Can you show me one Muslim signature on the U.S. Constitution?”

“Did Muslims fight for our country’s freedom from England? No Did Muslims fight during the Civil War to free the slaves in America? No, they did not.”

Why, those unpatriotic mosque-makers! Did they hate us for our freedom even before we had any?

     
Which scares you more?

That, or maybe Muslims didn’t fight in our war for independence for the same reason they didn’t ride dinosaurs on the Great Plains: lack of opportunity. Prior to the late 1800s, there just weren’t many Muslims in these parts, and most of those who were here didn’t get to sign documents or bear arms, because they were slaves. Their contributions to our society fell under the “leavening our bread with the sweat from another man’s brow” category, which tend not to be noted in our grand history books, because they make our Christian forebears seem like self-serving hypocrites.

I don’t see any Italian names on the Declaration of Independence, but had Obama made a speech in Milan saying that Italians have always been a part of American history, I can’t see conservatives making a stink about it. The gist of the e-rant is that Muslims suck and there is no Muslim heritage in America, and the authors know that’s true because they didn’t bother to look.

 Had they looked, loyal conservative Americans would be obliged to move from Arizona and New Mexico by the truckload, because the European exploration and settlement of that region was led by Estevanico of Amazor, born a Berber Muslim (though maybe he doesn’t count, since he was converted to Christianity after he’d been enslaved by Spaniards.)

There may be no record of Muslims fighting in the War of Independence, but some did fight in the War of 1812, ironically, to defend their slave owner’s property. At least one fought in the Civil War, and probably more would have had they not craftily arranged to be slaves instead.

The e-mail goes on to claim that no Muslims were involved in the civil rights movement; I assume Malcolm X doesn’t count because he wasn’t as cuddly as MLK. The anonymous authors also skip right over John Coltrane and a few other giants to arrive at the summation that all Muslims ever did is support Hitler (not like those lovable Italians), practice piracy and crash planes into buildings.

I don’t get religion myself, and I have no more use for it than I do the tooth fairy. That said, I know practicing Muslims, Mormons and Catholics who are clearly smarter, kinder and more accomplished than I am, so maybe it’s not a bad idea to take the position our founding fathers did: namely, that a person’s religion is no other person or institution’s fucking business. (Incidentally, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other of the “Christian” FFs so revered by the right specifically argued for the equal treatment and regard of Muslims.)

Unless the sight of Sting in a plastic loincloth drove it from your mind, you might recall this line from Dune: “Fear is the mind killer.” Truer words were never spoke. Fear is like a computer virus that, if not checked, will freeze up every bit of your consciousness. Perhaps, as the British study suggests, this is a problem that particularly burdens our conservative brethren. But it is most certainly not exclusive to them.

Rather, the struggle between love and fear is pretty much the story of the long arc of the human race from the cave to the present, and it also is the daily battle waged by all but the most perfect of us. Do you stand or do you run? Do you trust or do you suspect? Do you give or do you hoard? Do you welcome what the next moment may hold, or do you try to control it? Do you live in that moment or worry about the next one?

Now those are the real issues, and ones we should be thinking about as we face a new year, not whether Obama’s going to enact Sharia law and mess up your Saturday night Lowenbrau blitzkrieg.

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