America America
I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island and John Silver’s parrot and the balconies of New Orleans. I love Mark Twain. I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco. But I am not American.
Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age? I need neither oil nor America herself, neither the elephant nor the donkey.
Leave me pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this wooden bridge. I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers. I need the village, not New York.
Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to the teeth? Why did you come all this way to distant Basra, where fish used to swim by our doorsteps?
Leave me alone, soldier. Leave me my floating cane hut and my fishing spear. Leave me my migrating birds.Take your roaring iron birds and your Tomahawk missiles. I am not your foe. Leave me to my curse. I do not need your day of doom.
by Saadi Youssef
2007-12-15 09:05:03 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Politics & Government ➔ Politics