The Weekly Screed (#666)

A natural woman
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Hotlips, who was born in Hiroshima ten years after the Bomb, was among 51 honest-looking people who raised their right hands last week in a Milwaukee courthouse and lied their way into America.

It would be nice to accomplish this remarkable feat — U.S. citizenship — by telling the truth, but the system is designed for mendacity. Since immigration was formalized about a century ago, the process of vetting “applicants” has been run by flagrant bigots, bitter bureaucrats, soulless functionaries and obsessive-compulsive desk-straighteners from the U.S. Dept. of Suspicion and Paranoia.

A swarm of them surrounded us as soon as we set foot in the building. Their security shakedown — metal detectors, x-rays, wands, shoes off, clothes off, patdowns, veiled threats and dirty looks — made it clear that we’re the sort who have something to hide, and they were the bloodhounds who could find it, no matter where and how deeply we had tucked it away.

But, after all that rigmarole, they had to let Hotlips — and all her fellow aliens — into the building. She was invited. She’d won.

Almost.

Hotlips & the Aliens were survivors of a booby-trapped labyrinth that takes years and requires reams of paperwork. The drones and dwarfs of the U.S. Customs & Immigration “Service” serve only in name. Their mission is not really “naturalization.” It is exclusion, and these eagle-eyes find pretext for exclusion in clerical specks as miniscule as a dropped zip code or a misplaced apostrophe. Hotlips’ hopes were almost derailed by faulty fingerprint technology. The government’s machine couldn’t read two of her fingers. She had both fingers; both fingers had prints. But, because the cludgy software couldn’t read all of her delicate whorls and subtle ridges, she was deemed a dubious character who had to be “cleared” by her local police. (Of course, she was.)

After Hotlips & the Aliens cleared security, the functionaries were left with only one shot at exclusion. Before entering the courtroom for the big Oath, each Alien had to fill out a questionnaire. Since your interview a few weeks ago, it asked, have you a) committed a crime, b) joined a conspiracy dedicated to the overthrow of the USA, or c) traveled outside the country.

You see the trick here. The quiz was not only superfluous — because it came after the applicant had already been approved — it cunningly conflated a weekend trip to, say, Toronto, with armed robbery and espionage. The wise solution (to all three questions) was to lie. If Hotlips admitted that she’d gone to Japan for a week to see her mom (which she had), could they deny her citizenship after all?  But how could they know about that trip? Could they know? Probably not. But if somehow they knew, they’d catch her — lying through her teeth to Uncle Sam. And then…

Hotlips, of course, followed her upbringing and told the truth. But she knew that, by doing so, she might have trudged all the way to the courtroom door only to be turned away from the Land of the Free by a cackling bureaucratic drone.

Luckily, Hotlips’ quiz didn’t draw the drone we feared, the fingerprint nazi. It went instead to a less vigilant grader, who shrugged at the trip to Japan. With that, Hotlips grabbed her precious white envelope, snuck past the fingerprint nazi and scurried into the oak-paneled courtroom. She was on her way at last to becoming a “natural” woman. All that remained was to utter the Oath.

Which is the biggest lie of all — the one that gets you over the razor-wire and beyond the guard towers. In its original 91 words, which didn’t exist ‘til 1929, all wannabe citizens promise to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity” to the lands of their birth and coming-of-age, “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.”

Here’s a promise only a psychopath could keep. A normal person could not — without some mental reservation — turn against the place where she grew up, where her forebears lived and died, where she still probably has parents, family and friends, where her memories were formed and took root and cannot be transplanted.

No one with a working conscience can make this sort of wrenching change in cold blood. If you can tear up your entire history without pausing to wonder what might have been, without a healthy pang of reservation, you’re a sorry exception to the human condition. You’re not the sort of citizen America wants. Pledging loyalty to a new nation and a whole new way of life is an occasion not for smug, patriotic certitude, but for a long look backward with mixed feelings.

Read critically, the Oath of Allegiance is the worst oath we’ve ever composed. It’s a clunky hodgepodge, cribbed from a 16th-century British loyalty oath (to the King) and amended (badly) during the 1950’s Red Scare with mandates to “bear arms” and to “perform noncombatant service” and “work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law,” whatever that means.

Yet, despite its empty promises and military-industrial embellishments, the Oath accomplishes a beautiful purpose. It pushes open Emma Lazarus’ “golden door,” and guarantees to everyone who utters it the rare, inviolable right to live in a nation that began as a fairly preposterous but really cool idea.

The judge talked to his new citizens for quite a while, reciting a civics lesson to a group of aspirants who’d been force-feeding themselves civics for months and knew the Bill of Rights better than most native-born Congressmen. The judge left out of his tutorial the part where a small band of bourgeois East Coast idealists, inspired not by kings or conquerors but by philosophers, turned a wilderness — against all odds — into a fiercely secular and usually progressive republic that has survived more than two centuries.

To his credit, the judge suggested that this nation “of the people, by the people, for the people” (his favorite phrase — he said it twice) overcame the inevitable temptations of nativism, racism, regionalism, religion and xenophobia. He dwelt on the fact that his 51 fresh-minted citizens that morning represented 28 countries. He celebrated — as did everyone else after he finally quieted down — that America was the unlikeliest nation ever born, a mulligatawny of mongrel dreamers gleaned from the outcasts and refugees of a hundred wars, a thousand tribes and a million small, faraway tragedies.

Despite my mental reservations, I felt rather stirred by the whole thing.