Bored almost to tears as I was covering a charter review workshop intended for community involvement–there was none–I scrolled across a teaser from the Washington Post. The new citizenship test “for aspiring Americans” was out. It was, in the Post’s curiously tumescent phrase, “longer, harder” than its predecessor, as one imagines all thingies maga must be. The test randomizes 20 questions out of a possible 128. You must answer only 12 correctly if you are to win a reprieve from ICE picks. Who doesn’t want D students for new citizens?
The Post offered a 10-question teaser. I bit, and had them answered correctly in 90 seconds. I’m not boasting. At my age, pedantry is second nature to prostatitis. But I’m pointing out how pitiful the test must be if an unreconstructed ex-Lebanese liberal can ace what is supposed to be one of the more challenging measures of earning entry into this once-upon-a-time city upon a hill. Has aspiration fallen so low? (Well, yes. Picture that escalator descent into the Underworld at 721 Fifth Ave.)
The problem with the questionnaire is that it’s not a civics test. It’s certainly not a citizenship test. It’s the sort of questions Jay Scherr baritones between nachos at his weekly trivia night at Tortugas. What does it matter if I know that one of the “important events” of the Revolutionary War (not, as the test has it, the “American Revolution”) was the Battle of Yorktown? Knowing that doesn’t show I understand the significance of the war. Nor does naming five of the original 13 colonies, as opposed to, more insightfully, naming a couple of Confederate states and a couple of Union states to show an understanding of sectionalism. Incidentally I have nothing against Jay Scherr’s trivia nights, let alone Tortugas and its Melvillian windows on the Atlantic. But I suspect even Jay, the current president of civics-obsessed Flagler Tiger Bay Club, would want his citizenship tests a bit more challenging than beer pong.
To wit: “James Madison was famous for many things. Name one.” The required answer: “President during the War of 1812.” Who cares? Madison’s presidency was one of the least consequential, an example of “fumbling and small-minded statecraft,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it. The correct answer should have been: Primary author of the Bill of Rights, a document immensely more important to a citizen’s understanding of American freedoms than that unnecessary war or forgettable presidency.
Asking what Benjamin Franklin (“founder of the first public libraries,” “postmaster” were accepted answers) George Washington (“Father of Our Country,” “President of the Constitutional Convention”) and Eisenhower (“34th president”) were famous for is equally moronic, because none of the accepted answers reveal what it took for them to lead justly as opposed to merely lead and exercise political skills (world history doesn’t lack for politically skilled, cruel leaders). Washington’s “superiority lay in character, not talents,” you once read in a classic textbook, a line so rich in American paradox that could not possibly survive in the era of leadership with neither talents nor character. Why not accept answers about Washington’s hatred of parties or Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex?
You’re also asked to name an example of an American innovation (the lightbulb? Seriously?) and how many senators there are. Again, who cares? I was asked that question at my citizenship test in 1986, though I was also asked to name my two senators. I survived mouthing Pat Moynihan but had to ask for an air-sickness bag at having to mouth the name of Al D’Amato.
The test contains outright factual errors and ideological biases. The Federalist Papers did not influence the U.S. Constitution, as the cheat sheet states. The Constitution was already written when that trio of brilliance wrote all 85 Papers. They influenced the Constitution’s very narrow passage in state legislatures, not its writing, and influenced the subsequent Bill of Rights, a more essential document to the preservation of liberty than the imperious Constitution, which “squints toward monarchy,” in Patrick Henry’s words.
You’ll get nothing in the test on the latent monarchism of the Constitution or how it was as bitterly, wonderfully debated as the nastiest rezoning hearing you’ve ever seen and barely squeaked by opposing votes. “Name one famous founding-era American who opposed the Constitution?” Not on the test, but I’ll accept such heroic revolutionaries as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Mason, Elbridge Gerry–yes, the guy who gave his name to gerrymandering–George Clinton and many more, all opposed.
Dissent in American history is twice as old as the Pledge and endlessly more useful. (Wishful question: “What famous American Socialist wrote the Pledge and preached about ‘Jesus the Socialist’?”). But it seems we now prefer our history as edict and cudgel rather than inquiry and insight, an ironically authoritarian perspective when testing for the world’s oldest democracy (yes yes I know: Republic, which we happen to not be keeping, if Elizabeth Powel were to ask Ben Franklin today).
A question about the cause of the first Gulf War is tendentiously asked as “Why did the United States enter the Persian Gulf War?” If you’d picked “To secure oil in Kuwait,” you’d have been wrong, though it would have been my first choice. I refrained, knowing by then that the test is not merely about trivial facts, but about American infallibility, virtue and supremacy. The accepted answer is “To force the Iraqi military from Kuwait.”
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. The first phase of the war was called Desert Shield, not yet Desert Storm, in explicit recognition of the intent of the original mission: to safeguard Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. The first Bush opted to kick Saddam out of Kuwait only later–not because Kuwait was a model of democracy; it was not, nor was Saudi Arabia–but to reclaim Kuwaiti oil for America’s splurge of gas-guzzling SUVs.
I don’t begrudge the test for not asking how the first Gulf War got Osama dreaming about 9/11, how we lost Iraq in the second, lost Afghanistan in a war twice as long as the siege of Troy, how we lost Lebanon, Iran, Vietnam, whether torture, rendition, Guantanamo are the sort of things Franklin, Washington and Eisenhower would have wanted to be known for. Aspirationally, we should focus on the positive, and there’s been plenty of it, as long as we agree that those other questions, by being asked, by being debated, by being appreciated, are likelier to strengthen what positive values this country offers.
Responsible citizenship is also healthy skepticism and that spirit of liberty “which is not too sure that it is right,” as Judge Learned Hand put it in his great speech at the 1944 “I Am an American Day” before 1.5 million people in Manhattan’s Central Park. 150,000 of them were new citizens and Americans newly of voting age. They lifted their right hand as the judge led them in the Pledge, the one occasion, other than at my naturalization, where I would have happily joined them.
There are a few questions that would point to the aspiring citizen’s understanding of the country’s professed values and mechanics: the separation of powers, term limits, political and religious liberty, and–surprisingly for this era of anti-tax hysteria–the civic duty of taxes.
But most questions prepare you for filling an oval or knowing the difference between A, B and C rather than for citizenship, while the test as a whole is silent on the role of protest and disobedience in American history, on the labor movement, on minority rights (a pair of words you won’t see in the test), on the lost promises of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement, and of course on the right to marry whom you please and live where you please, redlining and HOA tyrannies notwithstanding.
The test defines how a whitewashing nationalist wants history taught: as flag-waving allegiance to Anglo virility. It is the sort of product we can expect from the president’s “patriotic education” commission or the Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix Declaration,” the new edict in Florida education. But it is not citizenship, at least not outside a reeducation camp. And it is right in line with the president’s restoration of Confederate statues, cherry-tree legends, America-first chauvinism, and the future, further desecration of the Black Hills with his mug alongside those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and TR.
Speaking of which, one last question you won’t find on the test: Who was the white supremacist and KKK activist who carved Rushmore?
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
JimboXYZ says
Don’t worry, there either already was, currently is or will be a Democrat operated NGO that is more than willing to be subsidized by taxpayer funding & charge a fee for the crash course & coach the answers. Illegal immigration was big business 2021-2024 ? As I understand it, the cartels did quite well under Biden-Harris ?