Upon the Feast of St. Patrick
Happy St. Paddy’s Day, boy-oh. Of course, it isn’t a particularly happy one, not here in the United States, where a day that celebrates the immigration of one particular nationality is slated to be overwhelmed by the terrible narrative of the times-- a xenophobic president pushing construction of his border wall and targeting specific
other nationalities for exclusion, and doing so in a shockingly-open fashion.
Second-generation Irish-American Andrew O’Hehir has
a very thinkable piece up at Salon addressing his Irish countrymen and countrywomen in the New World. He claims that, "among all but the affluent classes, nearly everyone in Ireland has a friend or family member who has worked illegally in the U.S. or is doing so now.” He expresses embarrassment that the prime minister of the Republic of Ireland has arrived in Washington this week, and rather shamelessly made the tone-deaf, lopsided suggestion-- face-to-face with the U.S. president-- that, despite the current political climate, the roughly 50,000 Irish citizens that are living illegally here now have their status legalized. O’Hehir also laments that so many of the descendants of the U.S.’s once-despised Irish immigrant population are now on the front line of Trump’s war on the hungry, tired, and huddled masses. It’s worth calling them out by their Gaelic surnames: (Steve) Bannon, (Sean) Spicer, (Kellyanne) Conway, (John) Kelly, (Kevin) McCarthy, (Michael) Flynn… and I’ll add (Paul) Ryan. It’s the American way, it seems-- climb the proverbial ladder yourself and saw off every wrung behind you as you go.
I wish how it weren’t the same for my people, today’s
German-Americans, whose rich Central European culture we abandoned, or were forced to abandon, in a virtual instant at the outbreak of World War I. At the time of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in 1914, there were still dozens of German-language newspapers just in the state of Iowa alone. But there he is now, instead: Mr. Drumpf, in the White House, spitting at the brown and black. Are today’s immigrants less educated, less hard-working, more dangerous? Why don’t they just play by the rules, many of you ask, the way
your foremothers and forefathers did?
Well, how
easy did my emigrant ancestors have it compared to the migrants of today? Hardships of a hard land, my ass. Wood fires don’t keep you as warm as a high-velocity heat pump, that much is true, but those resettled Americans then were considered United States citizens, with all of the accompanying privileges, almost the instant they stepped off the boat on South Manhattan’s Castle Garden.
This was the 1860s. There were entrance tests for health, but none for citizenship, nor for language. There was no such thing as
temporary status, no overstaying a visa, no restrictions on work permit or school enrollment. Those endeavors were actually encouraged without qualification. There was no need for detention centers for expulsion, separation of families, no “expedited removals,” no immigration prisons, to say nothing of a detention industry for profit. The length of the line to get in was measured not in years, but in mere hours. There was no such thing as being “illegal,” and no quota systems for national origin, not for the Europeans anyway, but they were coming soon for groups like the Chinese.
And how easy did my ancestors have it economically, relative to 2017? After they landed
as citizens, they were given land. It was called the Homestead Act, signed into law by Abe Lincoln in 1862. What did the land cost? How did they pay for it? Your questions aren't even correct. They paid only a small filing fee-- eighteen dollars. The land itself was free. All that a man 21 years or older had to do to own this allotted land was go live on it for five years, and then it belonged to him. This policy of land grant was in place for a long period of time. The amount of acres allotted by the legislation was increased in 1909 and again in 1916.
The door is no longer open. With the rights of the migrants disappearing, ours disappear as well. Now we have debates about which newcomers are the “good ones,” which ones are the “bad ones.” We make up false narratives that immigrants drive down the wages of the native-born and that there are more crimes committed among the newly-arrived than among our tenured residents. Both major political parties openly admit that we value them more highly if they are skilled than if they are unskilled, even though the nation’s economy has always demanded the contributions of both groups. We wonder why the “illegals” just don’t get in line when there is actually no line to get into.
Above all other reasons, we despise them because they are poor. We make a presumption of their guilt, even for refugees. The entire game is rigged against them. It's built on the historical fiction of hardship referenced above, and one that is, in truth,
specifically designed
not to deliver new Americans out of peril, but to keep them in it, ripe for manipulation and exploitation.
Migration is a human right. Without it, our other rights fade to nothing. The lord and savior of a predominantly Christian nation had his parents turned away at his birth. Then he was turned away during his life. He preached for inclusion and never once gave any indication that he would support the garbage that is our bureaucracy today, or even the concept of a national border. Though we looked to these parables for meaning for decades, they are now just lost lessons on a collapsing empire that is, taken as a whole, mean and stupid.
The unhinged
I wish I could laugh at the assertion of Kellyanne Conway that the federal government is capable of eavesdropping on us through our microwave ovens, but this is just more unfocused nonsense-- courtesy of a dim-witted administration-- that needlessly distracts from the very real information release by WikiLeaks last week that the Intelligence State
is listening in on our calls,
is reading our emails, and possesses the capability to cover their tracks when doing either. The defenders of the Surveillance State that control the Democratic and Republican parties are steering you away from the horrific reality of unconscionable Fourth Amendment violation by jumping on this dumb microwave comment or inflating the comical image of President Obama purportedly eavesdropping each night during the summer of 2016 to the goings-on at Trump Tower. The current political debate regarding our inalienable right to privacy perfectly encapsulates this date and time of our collapsing republic-- an executive branch incapable of accurately identifying-- or keeping its focus trained upon-- what are
actual threats to American democracy (that is, our own institutions), and an opposition party more committed to party loyalty and entrenched financial interest than to Constitutional safeguards.
As Senator Rand Paul accurately explained on
Face the Nation Sunday, the NSA is tapping into our international calls, backed by the blanket approval of the FISA court, with the
expressed purpose of surveilling foreigners, but with the
true purpose of listening to Americans. This conspiracy has enjoyed bipartisan cover for some time as both former president Obama and GOP representative Mike Rogers, former House Intelligence Chair, have defended it. (Rogers famously said in 2013, "You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated.) Both of those politicos have publicly called such practice of listening in on Americans “illegal,” which it should be considered, but domestic eavesdropping without a warrant was legalized by them and other lawmakers with the 2008 FISA law (in particular, Section 702) that then-Senator Obama voted for after he had vowed to filibuster against it.
The law states that the target of such surveillance must be the foreigner (which itself is a Constitutionally-dubious initiative, but whatever), yet the government gets “back door” access in this way to Americans as well; and, note, our government doesn’t need to “target” anyone at all in order to collect huge volumes of communications. 250 million internet transactions are captured each year by the NSA, along with an unknown but likely
vast number of phone calls-- and this is done without a warrant being issued or the burden of probable cause. It’s extremely likely that Americans’ conversations account for much of this collected data.
The Democratic Party-- the new preferred political party of the Central Intelligence Agency, has adopted the tack of vilifying WikiLeaks for disclosures such as this CIA hack, ones they feel commit the unpardonable sin of politically aiding the current president. Speaking out against this secret overreach is liable to get one branded a traitor in chat-rooms, that, and/or an agent of Vladimir Putin, the evil genius of Eurasia that masterminded Hillary Clinton's electoral defeat, along with the Democratic Party’s net loss of more than a thousand legislative seats at the federal and state level during the eight years of the Obama presidency.
Thanks to WikiLeaks’ hack, we know that the CIA develops software for targeting Android smartphones and Apple iPhones to gain information about our locations, communications, and contacts. We know now that the CIA can bypass encryption by hacking directly into someone’s phone. Edward Snowden says the big reveal in this release is that the United States is paying the Google, Microsoft, and Apple corporations to retain the encryption vulnerabilities. We have also learned that the CIA is able to spoof Russian IP addresses, which would allow the agency to, theoretically, pin any hacking actions by their agents to Russian provocateurs. The unfocused political strategy from Washington that defends these actions and attacks the WikiLeaks reveal runs the spectrum from “this disclosure puts us in a precarious position with, and provides comfort to, our enemies” to “well, duh, tell us something we didn’t already know.” Which is it, I wonder? A dangerous new geopolitical development or a meaningless one?
The paranoia of liberals and their allied news organizations in respect to Trump’s Russia drama has been incredibly self-defeating. It is discrediting the news sources, destroying reputations, and lowering the discourse to the level of the president's strength. It’s not hard to understand their impulse, however. The Clinton wing of the Democratic party is, according to close study, incapable of self-reflection, unsuited to direct its focus to serious and documentable problems, and powerless to reform itself. It stood to reason that we would arrive here. The corporatists on the Democratic side that have been unexpectedly cast as outsiders to real power have no resonant message for the American people, as proven during a thorough election cycle that stretched more than 18 months, and they obviously believe that this “ends justify the means” political hatcheting strategy
won't eventually bring down our democratic institutions, so we are saddled with an opposition campaign to a xenophobic conspiracy theorist president, that is, itself, a xenophobic conspiracy theory. I mean, do they really think Trump is an agent of Putin and the Russian state? Meanwhile, six Democratic Senators voted to confirm Ben Carson as HUD secretary, and ten supported Rick Perry’s bid for energy chief, the destruction of both departments part of the current Washington agenda.
The Democratic Party has spent the better part of the last three decades
mainstreaming the Republicans’ greed- and fear-based policies, and this latest trend to buck logic continues the trend in a new way. Several years ago, Hillary Clinton, eternally attracted to slime as she is, latched herself onto David Brock, the political strategist first famous for smearing Anita Hill on behalf of the Republicans in the late 1980s and a walking, breathing indictment of the accusation that there’s a hair’s difference between the two major American political parties. Now we’re seeing Brock's methodology at work in support of the Democrats, the spewing of Russian-based murder conspiracies, for example, that hearken back to the greatest hits of Rush Limbaugh. This hysteria has been bubbling over ever since the Great Lakes states turned red on our televisions on November 8th. Trump’s surprise victory was an existential defeat for the Clinton Democrats that was a parallel to the metaphysical blow the United States endured when the 9-11 hijackers attacked us and then committed suicide, depriving us of our identify-defining chance at revenge. It reveals a deep, damaging insecurity in these people that nearly mirrors that of the current resident of the Oval Office, and it’s ultimately a political loser because it's an attack on reason.
Letterman on Trump
The retired king of late night in the current New York Magazine, discussing the art of satire and President Trump...
"Comedy's one of the ways that we can protect ourselves. Alec Baldwin deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Sadly, he's not going to get it from this president... The man [Trump] has such thin skin that if you keep pressure on him-- I remember there was a
baseball game in Cleveland, and a swarm of flies came on the field and the batters were doing this [mimes swatting at flies] while the pitcher was throwing 100 miles an hour. Well, that’s Alec Baldwin and Saturday Night Live. It’s distracting the batter. Eventually Trump’s going to take a fastball off the sternum and have to leave the game."
Essential church doctrine
This is a very warming feature from the LA Times about the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, and the churches that he oversees in the City of Angels. According to Gomez, President Trump should come and "get to know these people," his congregants that attend a series of churches in which Mass is presented in 42 different languages.
I encourage you to read Gomez' words in the link. It's an extraordinary tribute to the Roman Catholic church that their leaders have been so outspoken, and for so long even before the rise of Trump, about the importance of welcoming immigrants to the United States. This is
not an issue that the Catholics are wishy-washy about. It's inspiring. I wish I could say the same thing about the heads of the many of the Protestant churches. It's hard to imagine a social issue that has more direct connection to the Biblical teachings of Christ, or that provides our churches with more of an opportunity to make a positive,
direct impact on people's lives than this one, and one certainly cannot argue with ease that churches are prospering today in their efforts to connect with people.
If a church calls itself Christian but is not getting itself involved in this effort to help keep families together and to make this country and this world a better place, it's not worthy of its name.
