Part of Me (Grew Up in Ohio)
Amma, Anu, and me at Riverpark Apartments in Columbus, Ohio (where I grew up)
The America I love feels like it’s slipping away. I used to look up to America. In a world where people got taken from their homes, tortured and imprisoned – there was America. In a world where nations spit on each other and cast out their own citizens – there was America. For someone international and confused like me, that was a place I could call home. America was a place of sanity and calm in a turbulent world.
Today it is the center of the storm. Now America has Guantanamo and Abu Gharib. Now ‘liberal’ and ‘French’ are insults, and keeping gays out is something to rally around. Like Israel, America has responded to a threat with nationalism and fear of the other. I am international, and I will always be an other. Am I American anymore? This is the slow acidic drip of cynicism, and I think it’s giving me an ulcer.
I started off not really liking General Sarath Fonseka, him being part of the aggressive war effort. I didn’t support the war (largely cause I thought it would fail), and I thought Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and Fonseka were gleefully stomping everything. Fonseka even came out and said “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people,” in 2008 (
General Sarath Fonseka was arrested on a bunch of trumped up charges, but mainly for daring to threaten Mahinda in a Presidential election. Despite his poor health, Fonseka was arrested in February 2010 and sentence to three years. Word on the street now, however, is that he’ll be released soon. Like any day now. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has told 
I’ve been testing a lot of apps. A very interesting one is iPlayboy, from Playboy magazine. It’s bad porn but a good magazine, especially since you can read issues from its cultural heyday – the Mad Men era of the 60s.
I’m going to get back to blogging. I buy a shitload of stuff on my iPad. Not that I like spending money, and the exchange rate terrifies me, but it’s just so easy, and so good. For example, I’ve been reading comics again. Spiderman, and 
Nice site, until I got to this page at least.
To answer your question, no you are not an American. You are a radical chic white-washed asshole.
What I love about America is its freedom and openness, but now people like REM seem to think crushing that is somehow patriotic. It’s not. That attitude is really much closer to the facism, communism, and Islamic totalitarianism that America has fought against. The idea that dissent and free speech make you ‘not an American’.
In the America I love you are free to be a radical chic whatever, unlike Saudi Arabia or North Korea where everyone has to toe the line. That people like REM think they’re doing their country a service is what hurts worst of all. If the fight is for freedom, then REM is aiding and abetting the enemy.