Bowing to Ignorance

I didn’t know there were so many people in America, men and women, who wore veils or oppressively enforced the wearing of veils.

I’m being facetious, but there’s a point I want to make.

As an American who lives in India and has traveled extensively across Asia and Africa, I can tell you there are millions of women who live covered by purdahs and burqas, whose families would feel dishonored and beat them if any of these covered womenfolk dared to make eye contact with or shake the hand of a man who wasn’t their husband, father or brother, even if all they intended to say was ‘hello’ or ‘thank you.’

Even if all these women wanted to do was say, “Thank you for the smokeless stove so I don’t have to breathe in the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes every time I cook a meal.” They dare not say they were just returning a friendly greeting in the manner their kind host. Dare not say it because it’s no defense against being lynched by the guardians of their honor. And these guardians know a lot about honor and how to keep it from getting smirched. What would come of the world if these women got their heads filled with new ideas and (God forbid!) started greeting people in any but the clan’s prescribed way?

The fundamentalists in this part of the world who insist women wear veils and shouldn’t read or write are no different from the fundamentalists in America who believe there is only one way – their way – of being polite, even when they’re in someone else’s country.

The grouse du jour in the United States is that their president greeted the Emperor of Japan, a man 28 years older than him, on Japanese soil, in the manner most polite people would in that country. He bowed to him.

Immediately, this simple gesture was loaded with political color and dissected across the country as further damning evidence of the president’s un-American predilections. How much better if he had had a shoe hurled at him amidst secret congratulation, or had thrown up at a banquet. American leaders don’t bow before anybody in deference to local custom. They genuflect before dictators and prostrate themselves so they can get oil for their country’s gas guzzlers.

And it’s not as though the Japanese crowed that aha, finally they were able to drag the butt of an economically weakened America before their emperor for payback for Hiroshima. Yet many Americans were steamed at the idea that their president belittled his office by bowing.

These people just don’t get it. Everyone bows low to the emperor. It’s just local custom, just as everyone bows or curtseys before Queen Elizabeth without harboring seditious thoughts or plotting the subversion of the U.S. Constitution. It’s just the etiquette the cultures of these countries follow. Had Obama bowed low before the Japanese prime minister, the chief executive of that country, and not been reciprocated -- that would have been an insult.

It would never occur to the same kvetchers that shaking hands or making physical contact with a stranger is culturally offensive in many parts of the world. And yet thousands of people who are culturally programmed to feel disgusted or affronted by a proffered hand generously put aside their reservations because they recognize that no offense is intended by this presumption of familiarity by an earnest if ignorant outsider.

The sad thing about Americans is that they have become such a tired and divided people. A great many of them are so filled with intolerance towards each other, suspicion of their own government, and mistrust of the rest of the world that they snap and bicker at the slightest provocation.

Had Obama had occasion to open the door for Emperor Akihito, a man frailer and considerably older than him, would that gesture reduce him to a doorman? Could he just open a door for a woman out of politeness, without precipitating a national crisis? Will there be a national discussion on the state of the president’s masculinity if we see pictures of him wearing a skirt in Scotland?

Obama’s bow didn’t diminish his status as president of the United States. But the laughable trail of outrage back home has diminished America.