Drums along the Ad Hoc

It's a fine Summer weekend, apart from this year's agitations of accelerated climate change, from wildfires on the Coast to torrential ruination of crops in the East, and the appointment of Dow's Dioxin defender to the EPA, in vengeance upon America for betraying Scott Pruitt over a few perks of the job. Even those hanging from trees are mostly Aryans, or at least accept their superiority. But the news is full of conjecture over how hazardously the President's career of lies has approached an indictable standard of obstruction of justice - when, beyond doubt, his instructions to send immigrants to hell have been followed, verbatim. We shift to another font.

Jason DeParle

The American Nightmare

Extract from a review, 

The Far Away Brothers:

  Two Young Migrants and

  the Making of an American

  Life

Lauren Markham, 2018

The New York Review of Books, 2018©

As the outrage mounted, Trump simply lied—he called family separation a Democratic policy. Sessions quoted the Bible. On Fox, Ann Coulter suggested the wailing children were “child actors,” and Laura Ingraham defended juvenile detention centers as “essentially summer camps.”  . . .

The book ends with the election, but the hostility to migrants has only grown since Trump took office. For natives of what Trump called “shithole” countries—nearly 90 percent of immigrants come from the developing world—his presidency is a study in venom. The revocation of DACA made political hostages of several million “Dreamers” brought to the US illegally as kids. (Trump’s move is currently blocked in court.) Trump’s rant about sending Nigerians back to their “huts”—in addition to being unapologetically racist—overlooked the fact that 60 percent have college or graduate degrees.

Even by Trump’s standards, taking children from their parents is extraordinary in its malice. The suffering that families have endured looks less like a byproduct of the policy than the policy itself—cruelty posing as strength. “Womp, womp,” chortled Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, after being told that a ten-year-old girl with Down syndrome had been taken from her mother. The suffering of disabled children has become a punch line. Though for now Trump has backed down on family separation, the episode only helps distract from the more routine insults to immigrants and incursions on their security and rights.

Trump and his supporters warn that the influx of poor immigrants may lead to the rise of an underclass—an estranged and antagonistic ethnic community—but their animosity only helps to create one. Trump asks for immigrants who “love our country.” The Flores brothers feel the hate some Americans have toward them. While the Trump presidency will pass, this wise book alerts us to how deep the damage may be and how long it may endure.