Saturday commute clii: "We're sending them the hell back!"

    The character of a week can

    expose how porous the play-

    ful membrane of Saturday's

    conceits can be. The char-

    acter of this week was to

    reveal how little agreement

    we seem to possess, on what

    moral obligation there can

    seem to be toward a child,

    once her birth has been

    secured by statutory com-

    pulsion. Education? Pro-

    tection? Nourishment? Not

    particularly, even if we

    hold title to her for ap-

    portionment in Congress.

    But what an object is the

    child we may disown, to 

    exploit for places there.

    What part of this will stop

    at the border of a Saturday?

President of the United States

Duluth, Minnesota

June 20, 2018

ii  Kálmán Szöllösy

    ca 1935

Suppose it were Friday clvi: Shall we walk upon the waters?

No more than a week precisely,
after declaring North Korea to
be a nuclear threat, no more,
the Prophet proclaimed how he
(who alone can fix things) had
rectified a sociopathic defect
in American immigration tradi-
tions, dating back to the Pres-
idency of the Liberator of Eur-
ope. Not that he had intended
to put all the blame on Dwight
Eisenhower, only to deflect it
all from his obvious innocence.

Now, then, to glue all these
dismembered families back to-
gether again, who all look so
alike. Or, better still: trot
out a model, his human shield,
having applauded his strength.

They are still writing books
on the Nazi seizure of power,
and now we have moved from the
testimony of contemporaries to
the exalted plane of academics.
When we get that far with this
enchanting epoch, there will al-
ways be this press appearance's
gorgeous example, of the genius
of the hero's gift for playing,
surpassingly, an imbecile. And
to think: all anyone ever had to
do, was to have read Huck Finn.

Have we given enough credit to pathology of late?

A sympathetic reader, noting our distraction

this Spring by esoteric matters of policy, 

has sent us this reminder of pathology's as-

cendancy in these matters. Selecting an ava-

tar for this claustrophobic crisis, of being

sandwiched between two inadequately intimid-

ated states, with the insouciant hair of the

prime minister of the one, and the navigation-

al élan of the archetype of the other, he re-

minds us to investigate what is terrifying in

our entrapment in this vise of dreadfulness.

Is it the permeability of the fence, or the

specter of penetration that has captivated

The New Government and its flock: our 300

some odd million citizens are entitled to an

honest examination of their wretchedness, to

be exposed to this proximity of social risk.

In the annals of geopolitical conflagration,

it would be hard to identify two neighbors of

greater hostility to the manifest destiny of

our nation. Look, for example, at how equably

France and Germany have settled their Alsatian

tipping point, compared with Canada's tariff

on dairy production smaller than a sneeze in

Wisconsin, and Mexico's soothing trickle of

underpayable menial labor to, say, Pasadena.

If the European genius for border peace is

too easily explained by a long tradition of

gallant martial haberdashery, then look to

our herdings, hither and yon, of naked nat-

ive Americans, into suitably desolate en-

claves, as proof of what phobic reason can

accomplish. Are we worried that our alien

heathens will seize our condos on the East

Side? We need look no further than to their

protection by Russian oligarchs, to reflect

on resources which haven't failed us yet.

Possibly, then, if our digressions on policy

really can be dismissed as an unintended im-

pertinence to pathology, at least we have

taken care not to claim that higher cons-

ciousness as some congenital trait of our

heterogeneous lineage. That would take an

entire century or two of persistent myth-

making and denial, whilst anyone can see,

we have been busy, like Sterne's Uncle

Toby, reliving the Battle of Namur, rel-

ishing the glory of firing on Fort Sumter.

It is only too unimaginative, however, to

attribute our pathology to the chronically

ingrained and infallibly unanswerable tra-

dition of stark Confederate lying about

the motives for pummeling Fort Sumter, a

degeneracy which would have been swept a-

way by wise policy, barring internal fed-

eral borders, harboring it for endless rot.

But it's a snap to find our well of policy.

Laurence Sterne

The Life and Opinions of
  Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
1759-69
Everyman's Library
J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1912©

Just the neighbors again, and their fumes

Who is it, who can't feel it in

his heart to empathize with the

torments of a pure white knight, 

menaced and mocked at both ends

of a treaty-ruined culture, one

day having to round up the ver-

min to the south, the next, to

live with a contact high, from

the north? Ah, we get ahead of

ourself. This is not the scene

at the Canadian border, from a

future garden party; this is a

parade this month in Gaza, as

his old friends light a smoke.

Which is it to be today: the
scourging fire of Biblical big-
otry, or the swooning farts of
the lactically oppressed? By his
tweets shall we whiff the truth. 

Wreckage, quickly

It has been dazzling to notice the swiftness with which minority authoritarians have seized control of the American Government, and neutered its legislature with no more than a few bold, compacted strokes of blazingly candid betrayal of the country's systems of relationships, domestic and international. It was one thing, to see warnings from students of 20th Century fascism, of resemblances in our government with those seizures of power. It is another, to see our own practitioners reveling in lurid imitation. Mere days after yielding to the dictator of North Korea, the American President rejoiced in the trials of democratic Germany.

River Viiperi

Trump's terminus

Wagering parlors are fattening on
odds that the President indulges
a keen hope that his dismemberment
of families will shortly extort a
glossy border wall for him, while
also driving from his Cabinet his
universally detested Attorney Gen-
eral -- to be succeeded by a sim-
pering sycophant from the pages of
sadism's most cherished dreams.

At the same time, Father's Day week-
end in America saw a former director
of the CIA recalling those glory days
for us all, in the President's medium.
We see the rail terminus at Auschwitz-
Birkenau, in Poland, prototype for our
El Paso -- only one small step, for a
religiously clairvoyant Cabinet priest
to extol as the 'law' of Jesus Christ.

For surely we remember the Prophet on
the Escalator, on migratory sub-humans.
Our Shoah holds to a timely schedule.
What land could designate our children,
what law sort them, for our protection?

Patryk Tereszkiewicz