Sublime

So Commander Ga was an orphan. We shook our heads at the revelation. And it gave us chills the way he told the story, as if it actually was about him and not a character he had learned about, as if he personally had nearly died of cold, hunger, fever, and mine mishaps, as if he himself had licked honey from the Dear Leader’s claws. But such is the

Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed.

did not belong here, he said, You don’t belong in America, either. Perhaps, I said. But I wasn’t born there. I was born here.

consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Nothing Emerson wrote was ever truer of America, but that was not the only reason I underlined his words once, twice, thrice. What had smitten me then, and strikes me now, was that the same thing could be said of our motherland, where we are nothing if not inconsistent.

After 9/11, the United States began operating in Afghanistan, supporting and buying native armies to confront al-Qaeda. But over time these were replaced by U.S. ground forces, and the war expanded to Iraq. What had been a rational war turned into both an unwinnable war and one that would drain and distort American domestic life. Imperial wars exha