1/14/2024 0 Comments Portland unherdIn “Culture and Conflict in the Middle East,” anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. She would, for example, often warn my father that someone was trying to take advantage of him, purely by the way he frowned. So much so that, apparently, she claimed she could detect the malicious intentions of an individual from a different clan just by the structure of his forehead. In Somalia, where I was born, my mother was blindly loyal to our clan. The deeply divided society we now live in increasingly reminds me of clan or tribal behavior in Africa. Numerous studies support the hypothesis that American life - not just politics, but life in general - has become deeply polarized. Today, 10 years later, this attitude seems to be the prevailing norm. The scene of a truck bomb explosion in the center of Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 15, 2017. Two things in particular stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans), and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred. The more she spoke, the more I recognized her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. “But what about the policies?” I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a mustache. Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently national security adviser to President Donald Trump). I had voted for supporting the American coalition in Iraq when I was a Member of Parliament in the Netherlands - and I started to explain why.īut she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. I remember trying to steer the conversation on to actual policies. “You don’t belong there, Ayaan,” she said. My friend was an enthusiastic liberal.Īfter I had run out of excuses, the day arrived and, predictably, after a few minutes of the usual small talk, my friend launched into a tirade about the Iraq War, which several of my colleagues strongly supported. AEI is a pro-business, conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, DC. I dreaded the meeting because I knew that she was going to try to convince me to leave my job. About a decade ago, when I worked for the American Enterprise Institute, I had to force myself to go to lunch with a friend.
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