CSotD: Racism & Hatred Aren’t Funny
Skip to comments
As I’m writing this, the House is in an all-night session, not so much debating Trump’s major bill as seeing which side can hold on longest. By time you read it, we may know the answer.
But what we already know is that there is a cult of personality and an atmosphere of fear governing Congress.
As Deering notes, if they don’t support Dear Leader, he’ll have them primaried, and he’ll also likely see them stripped of committee assignments and other privileges.
However, compare turnout for the No Kings rallies with turnout for Dear Leader’s Glorious Parade, because the other possibility is that, if they vote in favor of a bill that less than a third of voters favor and that more than half oppose, it won’t matter if they get primaried or not.
They’ll be squashed in the midterms.
However the President’s signature legislation turns out, we’re facing an unmasking of bigotry and hatred this country hasn’t seen since the Indian Wars.
The building of concentration camps, and the rounding up and condemnation of non-Aryans without trials, has been compared to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but they weren’t sent to torture facilities, and the government at least tried to justify their persecution because of Japan’s active aggression against the United States.
There is more of Wounded Knee and Sand Creek in what is happening to Latinos.
Molina is right that the term “drain the swamp” seems ironic, but the problem is more than an issue of hypocrisy.
It is an issue of purposeful cruelty and outright bigotry. And while Jim Crow southern governments may have turned a blind eye to lynch mobs in the 20th Century, they were still considered illegal and repeatedly condemned, if not stopped.
There is no such hypocrisy in today’s mob, which is led by an inhuman sociopath who bragged of shooting a puppy and who posed in cheerful cosplay in front of jailed people facing inhuman torture, none of whom had stood trial and the bulk of whom had committed no crime.
Apparently, to paraphrase Nixon and Trump, if the president strings the rope, it’s not a lynching.
But it’s sure as hell not funny, and while Granlund’s intention is to mock DeSantis for proposing his ghastly concentration camp, the risk is that treating it with irony threatens to make it seem frivolous.
The GOP in Florida is not only celebrating their cruelty, but selling merch to both promote and profit from it.
“They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” Dylan wrote of a lynching in Duluth, but he’d have had to add another verse to the song to encompass the Florida’s GOP’s vast selection of perverted souvenirs.
And while lynchings were condemned, our current president is praising the cruelty of his determination to drive brown-skinned immigrants from the country.
Granted, he doesn’t phrase it that way, but few undocumented Europeans are being rounded up, and he has, in the past, spoken about the undesirable nature of people from “shit-hole countries.” He’s even compiled a list of such countries and barred their inhabitants from coming here.
Now, let’s grant that most sane observers consider Laura Loomer to be a delusional psychopath, but we must also acknowledge that she has the president’s ear, to the point where she was even able to engineer the firing of administration staffers who she doesn’t like.
When she rails against Latinos, she’s not just talking about recent immigrants. Nearly a third of our geographic area was gained in the Mexican War, and by 1848, Santa Fe had already been home to Spanish-speaking Europeans for 238 years. Spanish colonists had been in Florida half a century longer.
Loomer and the rest of the MAGA mob apparently feel living here for 460 years doesn’t make you a real American.
Contrary to Varvel’s vision, the Founders were well-aware of the cultural diversity in the 13 colonies. Not only was Pennsylvania strongly German in both culture and language, but the Revolution had been aided by Kosciusko, a Pole, by Lafayette, a Frenchman and by Von Steuben, a Prussian.
In addition, a significant number of Hessian POWs captured at Saratoga and Trenton melted into the countryside, establishing farms before the nation was officially founded.
Varvel may only be weeping over people who show flags of their heritage, but good, patriotic Americans have often honored their cultures in food, in music and in proud celebrations. We have been a multi-ethnic people from the start.
And that start was Spanish, not English.
Kearney offers a correction in spelling, because it’s not “Alligator Alcatraz” unless the inmates are each given a fair trial and a definite sentence, then treated humanely during their confinement.
And it’s not groovy or funny or heroic. It’s nasty, brutal and the sort of thing which, when it’s over and the world asks what happened, will not go away just because, as the character in the margin says, they were only following orders.
That didn’t work for the original masters of Auschwitz and it won’t work for this crew.
Don’t treat us like idiots. We’re not talking about prisons. We’re talking about concentration camps. And we’re talking about police who cover their faces and refuse to show identification.
The Fourth Amendment requires warrants for searches, but there are all sorts of things that are required but don’t apply to masked men with guns. As Tom the Dancing Bug points out, you’re entitled to fight back against an unidentified criminal assailant, but we’ve already seen people indicted for assault after brushing up against an ICE agent.
But most ICE victims aren’t “arrested,” since that requires them to be informed of their Miranda rights, which includes the right to an attorney. They’re also entitled to know what they were arrested for, while, under the Eighth Amendment, they may not face excessive bail or be subjected to cruel and unusual punishments.
Like, y’know, being sent off to be tortured in foreign prisons without having been convicted in a fair trial.
Bottom line is this: If you think “Alligator Alcatraz” is clever, you’re part of the lynch mob.
There’s nothing funny, clever or, god knows, patriotic, about racism and hatred.
Comments 16
Comments are closed.