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The America I look forward to living in is a nation where having “Hussein” as part of one’s name, regardless of whether you are the guy living next door or the guy in contention to be the next President of the United States, becomes a non-issue. No, let me rephrase that. “Non-issue” implies a lack of active engagement or understanding with matters that might fall outside our localized experiences, so how about I say instead, “I look forward to the day when we as Americans are able to look at ourselves, in all our cultural pluralism, with a true sense of enlightened context.”

I say this in response to the disappointing and, frankly, offensive tirade that has gotten a lot of press coverage recently by conservative radio talk show host Bill Cunningham (I’m sure to the secret glee of Mr. Cunningham whose bread and butter, so typical of vocally radical media pundits, comes from the manipulation of hyperbole), who had opened for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain at a Cincinnati rally. You can see a clip of his rhetoric in the clip below.

What’s so objectionable to me is not Mr. Cunningham’s political attacks questioning his record (an almost inevitable facet to most heated election campaigns)–I’ll let Senator Obama’s campaign managers and the media sort out the relative mendacity or veracity of his allegations–but the subtext applied to his rhetoric that essentially channels his inner-bigot.

And yes, Senator Obama’s full name is indeed Barack Hussein Obama. But faulting him for his name would be like like faulting by association anybody who happened to share the name “John” with John Wilkes Booth, the man who had assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. And like “John,” “Hussein” is not that uncommon a name, just not in our neck of the woods. We only happen to be familiar with the name due to the unfortunate infamy of an erstwhile Iraqi dictator.

Mr. Cunningham has made a most disingenuous protestation in a subsequent interview on the Fox network’s program “Hannity and Colmes” that he sees no problem in using Senator Obama’s middle name, going so far as to suggest he is honoring him with the gravitas that a full name affords such noted Presidents as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John Fitzerald Kennedy.

Were it true, it would be quite the magnanimous but perhaps bipolar gesture from an individual–at a Republican rally mind you–who in the same breath called Democratic presidential candidate Senator Obama “a hack Chicago, Daley-style politician who is picturing himself as change.” Honestly, whose intelligence does he think he’s trying to insult?

Mr. Cunningham’s form of incipient racism is the kind that can be the most frustrating to contemplate for any minority. In America, at least a minority knows where he or she can stand in relation to the more overt expressions of racism, such as spray-painted swastikas or hanging nooses. Such clearly manifest forms of ethnic hatred are easy to identify and, being criminal acts, allow minorities to find, along with perfectly righteous indignation, appropriate legal recourse.

But in a way, the most difficult form of racism to deal with is the kind that is dealt by subterfuge and suggestion. A victim of these more subtle forms of racism can make accusations, but a perpetrator can hide behind false intentions to the point of making the victim appear to be overreacting, or even worse, to appear to be race-baiting.

This is precisely the form of insidious racism that Mr. Cunningham is using. He has made the argument that people who take issue with use of the name “Hussein” are the ones that are actually the bigots. The sad truth of the matter is, there is some validity to his statement…but I’ll speak to that later on. The matter at hand is Mr. Cunningham’s particular brand of racism.

Regardless of the reasoning behind why some object to hearing Senator Obama’s middle name used, it still doesn’t make him any less complicit in his own unacknowledged bigotry. A closet bigot’s classic technique is borrowed straight from the magician’s handbook regarding the art of misdirection, i.e. drawing the audience’s attention to one action while the real action is going on elsewhere.

Let’s look at how Mr. Cunningham accomplishes this:

1. He, being a media person, would be savvy to the marketing power of names in the public arena; and knowing that names do not occur in a vacuum, he would know how appeal to the xenophobia of the less enlightened members of his audience regarding Senator Obama’s full name.
2. He would know that the name “Hussein,” besides having a negative association with the former Iraqi dictator Sadam Hussein, is of Arabic origin and thus also carries unfortunate negative connotations across America due to the myopic coverage by mainstream media of radical Islam.
3. He would know there are certain political realities, for better or for worse, needed to become an elected official in the United States, e.g., U.S. politicians have predominantly Christian affiliations; so the more he can ramp up apocryphal allegations of Muslim ties to Senator Obama’s campaign, the better to galvanize Obama’s opponents. For the record, Senator Obama is Christian.
4. He would know that emphasizing his middle name (even going so far as to engage in further hyperbole by having called him “Barack Mohammed Hussein Obama” on his own radio show, even though Mohammed is not part of his name) and coyly placing such references as “the great prophet” to falsely create a Muslim subtext.
5. He would also know that since “Hussein” is Senator Obama’s legal middle name, he would gain an inoculation against most accusations of bigotry. Thus he would be free to conduct a campaign of what amounts to guerrilla racism.

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For the most part, the United States of America is in a good place…geographically speaking. We’re fortunate to have neighbors to the north and south in the way of Canada and Mexico respectively with whom we have modern peacetime borders.

Despite the derision that may lurk in the hearts of some of our less enlightened fellow American citizens regarding the cultural relevance of Canada, our northern neighbor has been our number one trading partner, totaling 561.55 billion dollars in imports/exports for the year 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau list of U.S. top ten trading partners. (That dismissive jingoism, by the by, seems especially misplaced these days when the American dollar, historically valued higher than the Canadian dollar, is now at virtual parity in recent currency exchange rates.)

And despite our current grumblings about illegal immigration regarding our neighbors to the south, Mexico was our number three trading partner totaling 347.34 billion dollars in imports/exports for the year 2007. (China falls into the two spot at 386.75 billion dollars, in case you were wondering, although that may be already changing this year with China passing Canada.)

Despite these significant numbers, it’s still sometimes too easy to take our modern peacetime borders with these two sovereign countries for granted. With the addition of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans buffering our coasts, we’re a relatively snug country from a national security stand point.

The sobering reality of the world is that not every country is so lucky. Take for example the disputed region of Kashmir that is the source of constant diplomatic and military tension between the countries of Pakistan and India–not a comforting prospect for two nuclear powers. Or take Israel, where the country has normalized relations with only two out of the four surrounding Arab states and ongoing military tensions with the other two (not to mention the Palestinian conflict occurring within its own disputed borders). Or consider the DMZ, arguably the most militarized border in the world, that divides South Korea and North Korea, extant since the cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953.

Even the U.S.A. is not without its own history of border troubles by way of the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War (both wars due at least in some part to America’s aggressive policies in territorial expansion). But I digress.

Even though at present we benefit from the circumstance of our geography, there is a downside to our good fortune. Our “snugness” can too easily transform into a parochial “smugness.” We gain a certain degree of comfort at the cost of blunting our awareness of pan-cultural matters. Our geography translates into a mental isolation: out of sight is out of mind. It seems we need more than a little work to overcome our lack of awareness in global affairs.

Last week, an article by Ms. Patricia Cohen in The New York Times entitled “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” addressed this particular problem of the mainstream American consciousness.

The article references a global knowledge gaff made by American Idol’s Kellie Pickler during a celebrity edition of the game show called “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” The title is more than self-explanatory in outlining the show’s basic premise. You can view the relevant segment yourself in the video clip below and then indulge in a moment of schadenfreude.

Now in fairness to the geographically challenged Ms. Pickler (and let’s not even mention the show’s host Jeff Foxworthy dropping an entire syllable when pronouncing “Hungary”), I wonder how many Americans who enjoined in a collective jeering of smug superiority could have effectively answered the same question themselves? To gauge your own geographic literacy, try out this brief geography quiz, derived from the 2006 National Geographic-Roper survey. Click on the “Start Quiz” button once your on the appropriate page.

Just for the record, I managed to make it through all seven questions with a perfect score, but must admit to a bit of sweating when trying to properly locate Afghanistan on the map.

In relation to the Budapest question that Ms. Pickler failed to answer (and thus provide some transient fodder for the viral video community), I did happen to know that Budapest was in Hungary (not to mention that Europe was a continent, not a country). I also happen to know that Hungary’s linguistic lineage falls into the same hypothetical language group of Ural-Altaic languages, which includes in its family tree such seemingly diverse languages as Finnish, Korean, and Turkish.

But cultural acumen is relative. In case I should give the appearance of touting my own innate superiority in all matters Hungarian, in all honesty, if someone were to start pressing me for the country’s historical background regarding the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I’d sadly have to confess my knowledge grossly wanting.

But what I do know about topics beyond these United States I must attribute to an accumulation of learned experiences through reading, traveling, and getting to know people of varied cultural dispositions and disciplines. Without those experiences, I doubt I would have made it through those seven questions with my dignity intact. And even then, I will always have more to learn. It’s a wide, wide world out there with a deep, deep history.

Hence we’re back to the problem of the isolation of Americans, both literally and figuratively, relative to the rest of the rest of the globe. So what’s the solution to end our American navel-gazing? If you can travel to a foreign country, do it. Travel provides an immediacy of experience that confronts your sense and sensibility with customs and perspectives at rich variance from our own. Unfortunately, travel to other countries isn’t always an economically feasible option.

Even without an airplane ticket to overseas destinations, there are plenty of means to bring the world into your local experience. Explore various ethnic cuisines, whether cooking at home or eating out; learn how to salsa or raks sharki (belly dance); listen to some Portuguese fado or Buddhist Theravada chanting; take up a foreign language; socialize with people of various ethnicities or nationalities; and the list goes on.

Of course, there is only so much personally lived experience an individual can cultivate, only so much access to realms beyond the local life he or she lives. That’s where enriching one’s reading repertoire becomes vital. It’s obviously not the immediate experience of traveling abroad or even eating at your local ethnic restaurant, but most of our knowledge necessarily comes through second-hand experiences, and often reading can provide a level of analytical understanding not always possible with direct experiences. Words are access to the world at large. Keep tabs on international news. Read books about other cultures written by authors hailing from different countries. Look at a map for reasons other than directions to meet your friends at the local bar.

Really, what does navel-gazing get us except cramped necks? The poet William Wordsworth famously exhorted that the “world is too much with us,” to which I might counter, “we are too much without the world.” The better state of mind for we Americans to approach the 21st century–in the arts, in business, or in diplomacy–is to nurture our understanding of our fellow global citizens. And if for no other reason, we should do so in the interest of avoiding getting caught out on a nationally televised game show not knowing that Budapest is the capital of Hungary (not “Hungry”).

I thought I’d try to trump the media-labeled primary/caucus event “Super Tuesday” with my own hokey catch-phrase, “Big Chunk Tuesday.” Why not, since such a large number of delegates for both the Republican and Democratic Presidential nominees are at stake? Mmm…stake…makes me hungry for democracy.

If you are one of those voters in one of those states participating in Tuesday’s smorgasbord of Presidential primaries and caucuses (check out the New York Times’s Republican primary calendar and Democratic primary calendar) and are still unsure which way to go, there is a nifty non-partisan, nonprofit site called Glassbooth.org that offers a brief questionnaire-process that will align you with candidates who most closely reflect your own views on issues such as education, health care, foreign policy, immigration, taxes, etc.

The first part of this “quiz” asks you to score according to your personal preference on certain campaign issues through an allotment of twenty points. After you have distributed your twenty points among the issues that matter most to you, you will be taken to a second page that lists specific policy stances based on your issues of interest. On that second page, you can rate on a five-point scale between “Strongly Oppose” and “Strongly Support” on those specific policy stances.

After you have provided your responses, the site will then provide a list of candidates who most closely align with you on your issues, ranking them according to a percentile match-up with your own views. It will even explain why you match up by linking you to a given candidate’s record, which are based on information from the candidate’s political history and quoted statements.

Of course, I’m not proposing this serve as the last-stop resource to determine for whom you should vote; individual voters should certainly follow up with further personal research on the various candidates (although there won’t be much time alas for this week’s primaries and caucuses). For one thing, this site can’t determine whether or not a given candidate will actually follow through on his or her stated positions or that past performances will ensure a similar future path (point me to the genius Web site that could). That will require, just as it does for each and every voting citizen, from average Joe to pontificating pundit, what amounts to a heady concoction of informed-but-ultimately-unscientific divinations and a leap of faith.

What Glassbooth.org does provide is a great starting point if you are unfamiliar with the candidates in the field, and perhaps for those of you who may be wringing your hands right up until your moment in the voting booth, a source of affirmation or vindication for your final choice.

Obviously, this site would also come in handy for the general Presidential election as well. As for the Presidential candidate who most matched up to my own views upon my first run-through, let’s just say that for those readers that have read my last few postings, it seems I’ve found an alignment that wouldn’t come as much of a surprise.