Every reader who watches American films must have no doubt heard a policeman in a police thriller telling a detainee: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you? The legal name for the above is “the Miranda Warning” or “Miranda rights”. It came into force through a Supreme Court decision in the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona lawsuit, in which Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a suspected rapist and kidnapper, complained that his rights mentioned in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution had been violated when the police failed to tell him what they were after his arrest. The Supreme Court supported him in this; During a second trial, he was retried, convicted and sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison. The text of the warning I mentioned in the beginning varies from state to state, but the meaning is one and the same in all cases. Similar warnings are also in place in one form or another in many other countries, not including the Arab ones I think. The Miranda Warning then became the subject of much debate when many of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay complained that their legal rights had been violated during their interrogation. Until a few months ago, the above was everything I knew about the Miranda Warning or rights. Then I started hearing about “the Miranda Complex”. In the beginning, I did not understand how these rights turned into a complex, but I linked this to the Bush Administration's breech of legal procedures in its evasiveness and in the way it dealt with the detainees. However, further research and reading news stories and reports in American and British newspapers (which I read every day), made me comprehend that the rights are a different matter than the complex. I had explained the first. Meanwhile, the second involve the character Miranda in the series (and subsequent films) Sex and the City, in which one of the four women who make up the main characters hides the truth about her actual income as a prominent lawyer, so that her boyfriend the “drifter” would not run away. (Miranda is played by actress Cynthia Nixon, who recently signed a statement along with other artists supporting the boycott of Israeli settlements). Hence, I read that American men have a complex about successful women who earn more than they do. For this reason, American women who occupy senior posts and are high earners, hide their success so as not to alienate men and endanger their chances of getting married. If American men have a complex about women's success, then what is the position of Arab men who do not want their spouses to work even if they are themselves unemployed? Here, I have a story for the reader about a woman who lives in an Arab capital and holds an important post in a foreign bank, while her husband works in a government job and earns less than a quarter of his wife's salary. Yet, they are always quarrelling, because he wants her to stop working and devote herself to “the household”. I once attempted to mediate between them at her request, and heard her say that their kids study in private schools, that she and her husband have to pay high monthly installments on their large apartment, and that her husband's income is barely enough to feed the family. Nevertheless, the mister insisted on his position, because the fact that his wife works means that he is “not adequately providing” for his family. I have many complexes, but the Miranda Complex is not one of them. I would welcome it if my wife would work and use her university degree, which she has never put to use, and would welcome it if her income will be many times my own. I even promise to help her spend it if I have the chance. There are studies showing that the income of American women when they are in their twenties is higher than that of American men in the same age group, but that when they get to their thirties, women's income declines after they get married and put their families before their careers. In other words, all what American men have to do is wait, and then their income will overtake that of their partners or spouses in the future. I used to think that the measure of a man's success is for him to have an income that is higher than what his wife spends, while I thought that the measure of a woman's success is to find such a husband. Now I hear about the Miranda Complex, or the man who does not want his wife to work, although she will start to manipulate her jealous husband in case she has nothing else to do. Personally, I like to have work for me and for every woman, and cannot find a reason to make working something exclusive to men. Working does not deserve its reputation, and I find it occupying a great deal of my time, which I would prefer to spend doing other things, such as playing cards. However, I do not complain. Work is necessary to earn money, and as they say, money talks (although my experience with money tells me that money whispers and is barely audible, let alone visible). But at least, the fear that money will end up owning me instead of the other way around is not applicable in my case. In the end, the Miranda Complex is an inferiority complex. Nonetheless, I prefer this complex over the Miranda rights, which would mean that I would be accused in America these days, in that I, like every Arab and Muslim, would be guilty until proven innocent, and not vice versa. In my book, the successful husband is not someone who makes more money than his wife, or someone who refuses for his wife to work, but is someone whose wife holds a pile of bills that he can pay in full. [email protected]
