»  Opinion Columns: The National Question

 

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As an immigrant myself, married to another immigrant from another place, I think a lot, and so write a lot, about questions of immigration, citizenship, national identity, and national solidarity.

This is uphill work, though I think less so as time goes on. It is not so much that the "national question" is a taboo topic, though it has been considered, among most of our political and cultural elites, as somewhat impolite to raise it. It is more that there is a peculiar and widespread kind of national insouciance about the issue. You just can't get people, elite or otherwise, to engage with it. It slides right off their consciousness. I was very struck by this phenomenon when I first came to live here, as an illegal immigrant, in the 1970s. I described my perplexity in one of my "Straggler" columns.

I have the impression that the national psyche is beginning, in the first years of the 21st century, to turn some sort of corner. It seems to me it is easier to talk about these things than it was ten years ago. (This is being written in 2009.) Perhaps this trend will go into reverse; or perhaps I have imagined it. Time will tell.