A Man Without a Country Read Online Free Page A

women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want: a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
    What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
    Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
    A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
    But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
    When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it’s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”
    A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit.
    I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.
    They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty or how handsome it was.
    Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?
    I sure wish I could wave a wand, and give every one of you an extended family, make you an Ibo or a Navaho—or a Kennedy.
    Now, you take George and Laura Bush, who imagine themselves as a brave, clean-cut little couple. They are surrounded by an enormous extended family, what we should all have—I mean judges, senators, newspaper editors, lawyers, bankers. They are not alone. That they are members of an extended family is one reason they are so comfortable. And I would really, over the long run, hope America would find some way to provide all of our citizens with extended families—a large group of people they could call on for help.
     
     
     
    I am a German-American , a pure one dating back to when German-Americans were still endogamous, marrying each other. When I asked the Anglo-American Jane Marie Cox to marry me in 1945, one of her uncles asked her if she really “wanted to get mixed up with all those Germans.” Yes, and even today there is a sort of San Andreas fault line running between German-Americans and Anglos, but fainter all the time.
    You might think this was because of the First World War, in which the English and the Americans fought Germany, during which the fault opened as wide and deep as a mouth of hell, although no German-American had performed an act of treason. But the crack first appeared around the time of the Civil War, when all my immigrant ancestors got here and settled in Indianapolis. One ancestor actually lost a leg in battle and went back to Germany, but the rest stayed and prospered like crazy.
    They arrived at a time when the Anglo ruling class, like our polyglot corporate oligarchs of today, wanted the cheapest and tamest workers they could find anywhere in the whole wide world. The specifications for such persons, then as now, were those listed by Emma Lazarus in 1883: “tired,” “poor,” “huddled,” “wretched,” “homeless,” and “tempest-tost.” And people like that had to be imported back then. Jobs couldn’t, as today, be sent to them right where they were so unhappy. Yes, and they were coming here any way they could, by the tens of thousands.
    But in the midst of this tidal wave of misery was what would in retrospect seem to the Anglos a Trojan horse, one filled with