I had been fingerprinted, and they had taken a fine shot of my right ear (I have been told it is a particularly fine right ear) and I had declared my freedom from sundry sins: I had not benefited from illegal gambling, I had not engaged in communism, polygamy, genocide, commercial sex or other crimes, and I was prepared to fight in defense of the United States. At the last question I had a Groucho Marx moment, wondering whether I wanted to join any club whose standards were low enough to accept me. Do I want the dubious protection of a nation that needs my help defending it?
Then came the fun bit. People who acquire US citizenship by birth can get away with thinking the Bill of Rights is a subversive document or that Montana is actually a Latin American country, but those who come to it late have to jump through hoops. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has a spot quiz, with 20 questions drawn from a standard list of 100. I had fun (but only after I determined that the examining officer had a sense of humor).
Q: Why did the Pilgrim Fathers come to America?
A: Do you want the official version or the real one?
Q: Let’s try both.
A: Officially because they wanted religious freedom. But, in fact, it was because they were a bigoted bunch of religious fundamentalists who wanted to persecute heretics, Catholics, adulterers, Jews and Episcopalians, but weren’t allowed to do so at home.
Q: What was the cause of the Civil War?
A: Do you want the version that most of the Republican Party now seem to believe, or the version they held when Abraham Lincoln was a card-carrying member?
Q: Let’s try both.
A: Well for most of the southern Democrats now turned GOP, the war was about states’ rights, and for the northern Republicans now turned Democrats, it was about slavery.
Q: Which do you think is right?
A: Well, the only reason they wanted states’ rights was to keep slaves. They didn’t believe in them when they passed laws forcing free states to return fugitive slaves.
Q: Who said Give me liberty or give me death?
A: I believe it was a well-known slave owner from Virginia, Patrick Henry.
Patrick Henry is my particular favorite as a role model. He deplored slavery, both in the sense of paying British taxes for fighting off the French threat to the colonies, and in the literal sense. But, he admitted that he actually owned slaves himself. ‘I will not, I cannot justify it,’ he said, perhaps unconsciously echoing the libidinous St Augustine, who prayed to the Lord to make him virtuous, ‘but not yet.’
However, ‘not yet’ is not good enough for the INS. A few months after I had passed the test, which I am pleased to say included certifying my literacy in English, I had to reaffirm that I had maintained virtue. At least to the extent that I had not dabbled in draft-dodging, polygamy, commercial sex, illegal gambling, communism or genocide.
Then I joined some 400 people bellowing in concert (the presiding judge was 94 years-old and hard of hearing), foreswearing all foreign princes and potentates, and in total defiance of the legal separation between church and state, invoked God in the oath. I looked around at the motley crowd of Muslims, Jews, polytheists, atheists and probably some Satanists, and noticed none demurring.
I saw my immigration lawyer afterwards. ‘What was all that about renouncing all foreign identity? I thought you said that dual nationality was allowed,’ I asked. ‘Of course it is,’ he smiled knowingly. ‘Take no notice,’ he said with a wink and a smile. We both chuckled as we contemplated what would happen to politicians if US citizenship were stripped from all the Israelis, Irish, Cubans and similar sundry-voting blocs with hyphenated identities.
It seems that the laws against dual nationality are still on the books, but ‘their interpretation and implementation has changed.’ Not a bad induction into a country run by lawyers, for lawyers and of the lawyers. Ah, Brave New World that hath such attorneys in it!
The Speculator
