Last week I was standing in front of a U.S. immigration counter — my fifth least favorite thing to do in the world, ranked only slightly below eating pickles.
“Yeah man, the whole world is going ‘glocal’, you know what ah mean?” said the officer, leaning back lavishly and flicking through my passport.
‘Glocal’, a hybrid of the words ‘global’ and ‘local’, is one of those words that academics used twenty years ago to sound international but now mainly refers to the Hummus aisle in organic food marts.
“I do,” I replied earnestly. “I mean, just the other day it occurred to me that...”
“Mah cousin Shonique, she’s down in Memphis,” he continued, “she was talkin’ about how she’s gone and been replaced by a blog written by someone in Bulgaria and...”
How can you be replaced by a blog? What did Shonique do? Perhaps she wrote the literature for medical companies, the kind that tells you your pill cures headaches but at the cost of spontaneous anal leakage (it’s a thing). Maybe she was a market researcher for online shoe stores, a job that was cheaper to hire a Bulgarian for? Did she take pictures of cats for pet stores? Or was Shonique simply a metaphor for all displaced job seekers? But in that case, what’s Bulgaria about? What does it all mean?!
American immigration officials used to revel in their powers like mid-western Cruella De-Villes
This happens often. Single comments send me into a tailspin of anxious thoughts but the process is so much worse in front of immigration officers. I noticed that there was an awkward silence; my interviewer had stopped speaking and was looking at me for my reaction, which I dutifully performed through a series of twitches and eye-bulges that would suggest his cousin’s unemployment was a disaster from which I wouldn’t soon recover.
“Imagine!” I exclaimed “Bloody Bulgaria…”
This worked, and he began to happily chat about blogs and newspapers and social media for the next ten minutes, well after my finger printing had been done.
I didn’t really mind; he was a nice man and I suppose he wanted to break the monotony of the day. During his lengthier musings on how everyone with an opinion thinks themselves worthy of fame (no comment but in my head there is already an HBO movie about me) my mind wandered down Therapy Lane to my previous run-ins with American immigration agents, now neatly classified in the PTSD file of my mind-palace . This tête-à-tête was such a contrast to what I remember immigration interviews being like back during my college years, a time that unhappily coincided with post-9/11 suspicion. The process was designed to be terrifying, especially for brown people. Somehow everyone was totally okay with any Muslim man being told to go to another room because “freedom” was on the march. (It was a nasty, rank little room too.) Sometimes the agents were kind, even apologetic, and at other times they reveled in their newfound powers like mid-western Cruella De-Villes. The entire thing seemed like a microcosm for some much grander scheme to confound the world.
Suspicion of the Other, like hummus, has gone 'glocal'
Even though one was traveling into the country legally, one walked away from those rancid encounters with the idea that you shouldn’t be there, that you were being watched. (Which, if you believe Snowden and Assange, was totes true.) Once you were outside the airport, things were fine. But those interviews always made me feel queasy. This was at the height of the Bush years, of course, and what they called Special Immigration (they should have called it Special Inquisition) has since then been discontinued thankfully. Now we talk about Twitter and Shonique’s employment prospects.
Where did the suspicion go? Did it just vanish, or is it just better concealed? I believe it hasn’t vanished but rather it too has gone glocal. It’s everywhere. That feeling, the look of deep suspicion with flickers of xenophobia, is everywhere in 2015. It’s in the border towns of Europe; it’s in the villages of Pakistan; it’s in Israeli government buildings and Saudi palaces; it’s in the coverage of the “Migrant Crisis”; it was in Canada until they elected their new Prime Minister; and it’s also being sighted with alarming frequency in India.
You’ve seen the coverage, I’m sure. There isn’t a Pakistani I know who isn’t caught up on the bad press that India is getting on the fronts of religious intolerance and general craziness (I wouldn’t be too smug about it, btw. It’s like laughing at someone else’s weight issues when you’re one burger away from a heart attack). There are reports of Muslim actors being told to go back to Pakistan, of Muslim villagers being burnt alive for allegedly keeping beef in the house. A long list of Indian cultural figures is also returning their national awards. That last bit is a bold gesture. Futile, some might say, but bold nevertheless. I wonder if something like this has ever happened in Pakistan. Would it have mattered?
It’s not a surprise that right-wing Hinduvta has risen in India and suggests a deeper issue, just like it’s not a surprise that some Americans get angsty around black people which also suggests a deeper issue. Intolerance, as we all know well, grows everywhere, against anything. But maybe the one advantage of being alive nowadays, of being ‘glocal’ (if we must) is that you can be hyper-aware of the intolerance of others and therefore hopefully do something to change it. So that the reportage of incidents of police brutality in the States or xenophobia in Europe or anti-Muslim sentiments in India or anti-everyone sentiments in Afghanistan are not simply countries pointing fingers at each other, but more like opportunities for everyone to collectively acknowledge these biases for what they are: out-moded and harmful constructs that will not serve an increasingly interconnected and interdependent globe.
