Great moments in opera include memorable entrances, such as the villain Scarpia’s in Puccini’s Tosca. The late Tito Gobbi did it unforgettably. Interviewing the Italian baritone in Rome near the end of his life, I asked how he could make such an impact before singing the first note. What did he do?
“Ah!” Gobbi replied, perhaps a little smugly “I tell you. Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. I let the music play.”
I was reminded of Gobbi when someone raised the question of how we should integrate immigrants into Canadian society. The answer (if you ask me) is we shouldn’t. We should let immigrants integrate themselves. Should we offer incentives for integration? No, integration is its own reward. Should we penalize failure to integrate? Whatever for? The penalty is failure itself. Let the music play.
Three years ago I was looking at web postings by young Muslim women married to young Muslims allegedly flirting with terrorism. (Dubbed the “Toronto 18,” charges were dropped against some, one pleaded guilty and others are yet to be tried.)What struck me wasn’t the women’s hatred for the West and its ways, but that it was expressed almost entirely in the idiom of the culture that was its target. The odious sisterhood chatted on the Internet almost exclusively in English --pretty idiomatic English, actually. In their web postings, the young women revealed themselves, quite unconsciously, as typical products of the Canadian society that was the object of their venom.
I don’t mean their feelings and opinions, but the words used to express them. Their feelings were appropriate for wives of men accused of planning to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange (or fantasizing about it). Such women may be expected to admire the Taliban and hate Jews. The remarkable thing was seeing their admiration and hatred posted, not in a foreign language, not in misspelled, broken English, but in the colloquial idiom of soccer moms in Toronto’s bedroom community of Mississauga.
Take, for instance, Ms. N (an order by Ontario Superior Court Justice Bruce Durno bans naming names while sentencing procedures are being put on hold until August): Ms. N is married to one of the alleged ringleaders among al-Qaeda’s Canadian acolytes. “Look at these pathetic people,” she wrote about a group of Muslim homosexuals. “They should all be sent to Saudi, where these sickos are executed or crushed by a wall, in public.”
Pathetic? Sicko? By offering the views of Wahhabist Islam on homosexuals in words she borrowed directly from our culture, Ms. N was demonstrating that acculturation, a much-touted remedy for the risk of fragmentation in immigrant societies, isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The fact the web postings of Ms. N, or her sister R, or Ms. M or Ms. C, contain only isolated words or phrases of Urdu or Arabic underlines that a person need not retain Urdu or Arabic language skills to retain Urdu or Arabic sentiments. This isn’t because culture is less important than “blood” -- there’s no comfort here for believers in racist nonsense--but because the roots of culture go deeper than our generation suspected.
Our great-grandfathers assessed matters more accurately. They had taken it for granted that integration is a process of considerable complexity that occurs over historic time. It isn’t achieved by a quick immersion in another culture, even when the immersion is, as in the case of Ms. N & Co., superficially complete. Our generation not only overestimated the effects of such cultural silver-plating, but tried reducing it even further by the imposition of multiculturalism.
Cultural silver-plating may not achieve much beyond teaching al-Qaeda idiomatic English anyway, but multiculturalism makes it stick even less and wear off even quicker. Cultural silver-plating may produce amusing incongruities, like jihadists with pre-nuptial agreements and Wahhabi feminists who retain their maiden names after marriage. But computer-literate fundamentalists take us no closer to a harmonious society. They only illustrate how ultra-liberal policies, slogans and practices confuse and alienate vulnerable youngsters of foreign ancestry and increase the number of our solitudes.
“You don’t know that the Muslims in Canada will never be rounded up and put into internment camps like the Japanese were in WWII!” offered Ms. C in a 2004 posting. Ms. R saw things in even simpler terms: “May Allah curse the Jews,” wrote this 19-year-old product of Canadian inclusiveness and tolerance.
Multicultural Canada is turning from a country of two nations into a country of a dozen xenoliths: Inward looking, hostile fragments, jealously guarding their ethno-religious distinctions as entitlements, while resenting the entitlements of others as privileges. It’s scant consolation that, being culturally silver-plated, such groups are likely to express their sectarian sentiments in idiomatic suburban English, sometimes peppered with current slang, Internet lingo or even mock-liberal concerns.
“By their fruits shall ye know them.” We disdained the American melting pot and embraced multiculturalism instead. We forgot that the opposite of integration is disintegration. Unlike Maestro Gobbi, we weren’t content to let the music play. We insisted on acting, emoting, hamming it up. Now nobody is clapping.