Push Back Against The Monsters
A mini-rant about the Trump administration's disgraceful Libya deportation plans
Wow! You know you’re not living in the America you grew up in anymore when the effed up, dysfunctional government of Libya (a place I’ve reported from), shows more common sense and human decency than the Trump administration, denying reports that they’re complying with the Trumpsters’ plans to cart deportees (who likely aren’t from anywhere near Libya) to that God-forsaken, war-torn country, which is famous for its human rights abuses in their detention centers, including child rape. (If Libya is lying, at least they still think it’s an embarrassing enough predicament to lie about, whereas, the Trumpsters are now well beyond being shamed.)
Regardless of what the courts say, how is that plan okay? When did it become acceptable for us to have our government put even illegal immigrants into foreign prisons for the crime of trying to come to America? You don’t have to be for illegal immigration (and I’m most definitely not) to find that abhorrent. There was a Lou Reed song long ago called “Dirty Boulevard,” with a lyric that went: Give us your tired/your poor/I’ll piss on them/that’s what the statue of bigotry says/your poor huddled masses/let’s club ‘em to death/and get it over with/and just dump them on the boulevard. While not finding the situation funny, I used to find the lyric darkly so. But now, we could switch out “piss on them” for “imprison them in foreign hellholes with no due process.” As Trump has already done in our name in El Salvador, with his buddy/co-conspirator, the self-proclaimed “World’s Coolest Dictator.” Who Trump will probably now demote to the second coolest, since he usually insists on top billing. My lyrical clarification doesn’t have the same poetic ring as Reed’s, admittedly. And it’s not darkly funny either. Just dark. Darker than Stephen Miller’s heart, or what’s left of it.
But half the country is still for this? Or even 40 percent? Or 30 percent? Plenty of those don’t know, admittedly. Or never will, by choice. Since they will look away while someone tries to inform them, preferring to stay in their comforting pro-Trump information silos. But what’s wrong with us as a people? I don’t pretend that America is perfect, or ever has been. Even if I stubbornly maintain that our country is the greatest freedom experiment in the history of humanity, we have a lot of crimes in our past, and a lot of blood on our hands. (Slavery, segregation, a lot of very iffy wars fought for iffy reasons, which killed plenty of innocent people.) But we mostly try to correct our mistakes, and at least our stated ideals used to be something we aspired to live up to, even while falling short. Sometimes, correcting them long after making them, even if it costs us personally. (See the Civil War. Casualty count: 620,000.)
But do we even have the capacity to recognize horrible mistakes in real time anymore? Things that cut against everything we’ve pretended to stand for? Because increasingly, that’s all we’re doing, is coasting on fumes, still paying lip service to freedom, rule of law, honesty, a moral universe not just bent on advancing our own narrow partisan interests, but a greater good – while our leaders and those who enable them come close to rejecting all of the above on the ground. We’re losing it, and in record time. And this is just one example I could pick from 100 or so in the last 100-plus days. Every day, a fresh assault by this administration on what we used to think of ourselves as standing for. Which seemingly doesn’t want us to think of ourselves in those terms anymore. As aspiring authoritarians often don’t. Their power comes from shattering all former notions of yourself. Rather, they want you to think of yourself as they think of themselves, as a people capable — as they have proven again and again — of much greater cruelty. Willing and even eager to ignore our conscience and our Constitution and our Sermon on the Mount.
Sorry to be a moralistic table-pounder with no ironic leavening. Not my style, typically. But sometimes, you gotta just push back against the monsters, with no confusion and with utmost clarity. I’m not even asking people to be better than they are. Just the same as they were a few years ago. Before this rot set in.
Bonus Track: Lou Reed’s “Dirty Boulevard”