The Assimilated American

I've read over the weekend and heard on the radio today some considerations of shifting patterns in the recruitment of new Islamic terrorists, focusing on Faisal Shahzad's failed Times Square bombing as an instance of what we're now facing.  Jesse Washington discusses "the assimilated terrorist"; Americans who live well and might least be suspected of violence are being radicalized.  The enemy is no longer "outside", but "inside".  Globalized communication easily allows for foreign influence.  Surprise has also been expressed over the fact that this is occurring in the United States rather than in European countries where cultural assimilation tends not to be so successful and enclaves of belligerence might be more expected.

I wonder, however, what it even means for a United States citizen to be assimilated.  Washington's article begins,

He was an American citizen with a three-bedroom suburban home, a wife and two kids. He shopped at Macy's and ate Oreos. His picture was on Facebook. He had an MBA and a job as a financial analyst. His wife liked to watch "Friends."

 ...but does this sort of  superficial fitting-in really tell us much?  We are surely different than many European countries, and "assimilation" may still be a relatively useful word for the difference.  Multiculturalism may not be a strong force in the American melting pot, that is.  But nor is the melting pot itself a very strong force, if we mean by this a homogeneous society with an identifiable core of shared values and memories.  The United States is a complex hodge-podge of a bewildering amount of normalcies, and its relatively free and open status allows such complexities to thrive and elaborate upon themselves as much as it sheds light on any darker sides that might appear.  It is a mistake, I think, to view the American melting pot or globalism more generally as something that makes for a small world. What we have, and what we've had for some time, is a cosmopolitanism of a different sort.

There is no need for sects and creeds to partition themselves away in order to foster community and discourse; all of this overlaps.  Folks with radically different conceptions of reality are comfortable ignoring one another, arguing with one another, or learning from one another without either reducing the experience to a common American norm or disaffiliating from the looser American identity that is present.  In light of all this, it shouldn't be surprising at all that a facebooking, suburban, educated American citizen would ally himself with a belligerent domestic cause.  We are all tied into such commitments.  Not all violent or extreme, to be sure, but the heterogeneity of the stability that is managed in this country should not be underestimated.

There really is no assimilated American. Americanism itself is what becomes assimilated.