The sullied American connection

AS early as I can remember, I have been influenced by American culture. My educational sojourn there of six years completed my enculturation and made me an Ame­rican loyalist for half a century.

Now, everything seems to be different and I find myself on the precipice of a change from which I may not be able to return.

Recent events have led the world to question the values of one of the most economically and militarily powerful countries in the world.

Where once the United States was a showcase of what freedom and democracy might mean progressively, now there is evidence that that is no longer true.

The Maga – “Make America Great Again” – movement seems to have taken a short cut in show and flash rather than incorporating the highest form of human values.

I was introduced to American culture as early as when I was five years old, I think. That was when my policeman father managed to buy a black and white television set. Before we owned a television we would have to pay 20 sen to watch Malay movies at a Chinese shop. Thus, my world, from when I was five to 17 years old, was filled with American culture from television shows as well as comic books and novels.

I would never fail to watch my favourite cartoons, like Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny and gang, Space Ghosts, He-Man and Jonny Quest.

The series that I adored were mostly science fiction, like Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, The Time Tunnel, The Immortal, Lost In Space, and Twilight Zone.

And I always stayed up late to watch the eerie Night Stalker, which told scary tales of dark creatures in the night. When colour TV came, we were all enthralled by the Solid Gold dancers, and I found new favourites in Disney movies and shorts.

I also began to read some American book series, including the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and young Tom Swift and his scientific inventions.

In my teens, I was introduced to British culture when I began reading books and comics from the United Kingdom. Books by Enid Blyton and Leonard Malcolm Saville (who wrote the Lone Pine series), and comics drawn excitingly and with the words “Action” and “Battle” in their titles were the order of the day. All my pocket money and Hari Raya savings went to comics and secondhand books. There were British classics too, like the Sherlock Holmes tales and all the Charles Dickens books.

I picked up American classics by Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, too. The comic books featuring Archie, Jughead, Reggie, Betty and Veronica numbered in the hundreds in my collection from the secondhand bookstore at Kuala Lumpur’s Central Market once upon a time. That store vanished once the digital world began taking over our lives. Of course, I am never found without the latest Mad Magazine, still relishing in the movie satires and political jokes of the artists and writers.

In 1980, I set out for Green Bay, Wisconsin, for my six-year stint studying in the United States. As a boy from the poor family of a retired policeman I never thought that I would one day be in the same land where the great Walt Disney walked, drew, and created. Unfortunately, I never got to make my dream visit to Disneyland during my time there.

At the writing of this article, I have never set foot back on US soil since I returned from my studies in 1986. A great opportunity came once when I was awarded the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Aga Khan Fellowship to do research on mosques in America but, unfortunately, the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened in 2001 and travel to the United States became difficult for me for a while.

Now, at 64, my wife and I are considering meeting our American “milk family”.

My wife and I were part of the batch of 11 students sponsored by the Public Works Department back then and married when we returned home during one of the term holidays. When our daughter Fatimah was born in 1986, six months before our scholarship ended, a Muslim American woman had had a son, Yazid, a month earlier. When my wife had difficulty nursing Fatimah, she let our American friend nurse her for two weeks; my wife, in turn, nursed Yazid later for two weeks. Under the rules in Islam, my daughter and Yazid are “milk” brother and sister. Now the kids are nearing 40, and both, coincidentally, have PhDs.

During my studies, I read the writings of American greats like Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan for my philosophy of architecture knowledge.

Influential architectural historians like William JR Curtis, Henry-Russel Hitchcock and Peter Blake set me up to become a professor of architectural philosophy and history – now with 53 books on architecture to my name.

It is an understatement to say that my values and cultural heritage were affected by America.

I have always been proud of that connection even in the face of friends, colleagues, and others who view America as the “Great Western Evil” and an enemy of Islam.

For me, America was always a nation to be admired, and had I been given another opportunity to be there when I was mid-career, I might even have emigrated there.

But now, with the new politics under President Donald Trump, America seems a country lost in delusions of grandeur of the worst kind. America has been embedded in my cultural DNA.

But I can no longer defend the nation that helped form my core values from the criticism that I once hated.

Perhaps America has changed forever but my past American connection will always be one of the main beacons in my life.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at the Tan Sri Omar Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.