Quotes by Alex Kudera

Id attended a selective liberal arts college, trained at respectable research institutions, and even completed a dissertation for a doctoral degree. In our shared office, Id tell new hires I was ABD, so they wouldnt feel their own situation was so bleak. If they saw a ten-year veteran adjunct with a PhD, they might lose hope of securing a permanent job. It was the least I could do, as a good American, to remind the young we were an innocent and optimistic country where everyone was entitled to a fulfilling career. To make sure they understood that PhD stood not for piled higher and deeper or Pop has dough, but in fact the degree meant professional happiness desired, and at the altruistic colleges of democratic America only the angry or sad ones need not apply.

I was once driven north along Central Park, all the way from Chinatown. We hailed the cab in front of a building where Orthodox Jews still lived, so they shut down an elevator on Saturdays. In the taxi, I was with my mother. We were visiting her aunt, my great aunt, who was 93. She had no memory of the old country, Lithuania, but shed been born there. Her parents escaped the pogroms so she could survived a century here. Her American prosperity was half a century of subsistence wages and thirty years of Medicare in an elevator building. The old country for the cab driver was Bangladesh, and he was a talker. Hed just graduated from college, and his prospects were good. Hed majored in a practical field, network engineering or something like that. Young and optimistic, he spoke fluent English. His big idea was to keep his countrymen out of the United States. America was great, but if he got overrun with foreigners, his kind in particular, it would be ruined. Bangladesh is hot and crowded. Why would want to make America like that. He said this in all sincerity.

From where would failed Americans leap if all of our towering buildings were razed to the ground? He envisions inflated airfares to Niagara Falls; renewed interest in the nations dams and gorges; long lines at the Grand Canyon, potential suicides being asked to take a numbered ticket, to wait their turn. Couldnt Al Qaeda see that we are killing our own well enough? Competitive society creates deep-rooted feelings of failure. On our own we succeed at self-termination; America needs no foreign aid from these murderers.

A Jew aint only a religion, and it aint a race. It isnt an ethnicity, and you arent disqualified if youre good at spreading mayonnaise on white bread or bad at money or good at sports or bad at guilt. It aint about whether your mother is Jewish or your father converted or both parents fasted on Yom Kippur. It dont matter if you were bar or bat mitzvahed, or if your grandmas recipe for chicken soup kicked Campbells ass, or any of that. It aint about a toe in Israel, or an opinion on Palestine, or an uncle who died of a heart attack in Brooklyn or Queens, or a family story from Ellis Island, or an aunt who was murdered by nazis or Russian pogromchiks, or whether or not three-fifths of your person is scared shitless of Auggies schvartzes, or at least the young bucks you see walking with guns out and half their pants down.

From there, a more difficult period began. Even the villains, the worlds worst people, the one percent, what have you, imagine themselves to be the heroes of their own stories, and I saw myself this way. I, too, could be a hero or protagonist, and not some mere bystander in the greater drama of someone elses life. It was awkward to see a murderer as a hero, so I had to constantly remind myself of how Auggies stepfather had been selfish and evil.

Save for the fit of bizarre laughter at the end, the man seems so calm, sensible, rational. Duffy wishes he met more like him. A bit paranoid about this terrorism business, but frankly, he might be right. You never know who is around the bend to blow you up, destroy your symbols, set your embassy on fire, shit on your toilet seat, or send anthrax swimming into the subway air and into everyones lungs.