Some Political Rambling

It seems like there are more people remembering 9/11 to-day, the 2001 terrorist attack, than most years. It could be my imagination. It's the 18 year anniversary so maybe people are becoming conscious of the fact that more and more young adults have no real memory of the attack, certainly no real memories of life in the U.S. before the attacks. In the years since, references to how the attacks changed the country and the world in terms of discourse and policy have been plentiful in media. Though for the more profound changes, it's hard to measure without having insight into an alternate dimension when the attacks didn't occur.

I still clearly remember the day. The most immediate effect of hearing about what was happening to the World Trade Centre was the feeling that it could happen anywhere else in the U.S. too, at least for me. I drove to the mall, my favourite refuge for all life's smaller catastrophes, and I read William S. Burroughs' Last Words in the food court before they finally closed the mall, an hour before the stores opened. It does seem strange that there hasn't been another such attack. U.S. retaliation was probably part of it but mainly I suspect the whole experience made it clear how counterproductive it was for al-Qaeda. Not to say that al-Qaeda's ideology is flexible enough to budge on the issue. But I think most people instinctively realise that you can't build on destruction alone, however extreme said destruction is. I'm inclined not to think the Manson Family would've have expanded much after the murders.

Some would say Burroughs was clearly wrong now that we live in the world of strong man populists. Maybe Putin is like that. As far as Trump goes I'm in the camp that thinks he's mainly a façade. I don't think he's secretly brilliant, I think he's basically doing The Howard Stern Show, a kind of method comedy where he deliberately plays up foolishness in himself. A lot of commentators have called Trump a "Postmodern President" and I think that's dead accurate. I've heard it said that Islamic terrorists are often motivated to attack the west because of, essentially, postmodernism, an erosion of sincere belief and meaning. But on the other hand, I wonder if it really seems like there's any point in attacking something without substance. One argument against mounting an attack on terrorism was that you really couldn't identify a target in the way you could when fighting against a country. Is there really a physical target for the problem Trump represents? In any case, I think he perfectly represents what Burroughs was talking about in the above clip.

Twitter Sonnet #1276

A group of four ascend the carded hill.
About the hands, there works a comb of wind.
In creaky words there spoke an ancient mill.
In lingual strata hearts attempt to mend.
An oil placed the road beyond the ball.
A row of softened stones betray the path.
In running piles shades ascend the wall.
A crumpled foil feigns a sunny wrath.
Communities begin in buried eggs.
A peat combined with root and moss and grass.
The hardened mud encased the runner's legs.
The land became a green and fertile mass.
Another night replaced a semblance wrong.
To-morrow's dreams of sleep became the dawn.

How Not to Treat People

Watching the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom while eating breakfast this morning, I found there was a strangely bitter edge to it. Watching all these children being reunited with their parents by this symbol of American heroism rang a little hollow when I knew the news has been filled lately with children at the Texas border being separated from their parents and put in cages. How did we get to this point so far from what is apparently our soul?

I always feel it's important to see the other side of an argument. I consider it a vital point in making any change to a society that does not involve killing people in the opposition. If you're going to live with people, sooner or later you have to negotiate with people who disagree with you, and no-one's going to listen to you if they don't think you understand their point of view. This is an idea that seems to be appreciated less and less in public discourse to our great detriment. So I looked for arguments in support of Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy. It's not easy since Republicans, even the likes of Ted Cruz, are publicly condemning the effects of the policy. Of course, the hypocrisy of Republicans regarding Trump, the distance between what they say about him and what they're actually willing to do about him, has been consistently enormous.

Conservative news and opinion sites are expressing condemnation of the separation of children from parents. At the Spectator, a columnist named Freddy Gray is making the argument that Trump is "vice-signalling", deliberately cashing in on the fatigue that people feel from the constant outrage in media about ultimately trivial things and thinly veiled manipulations of sympathy. I think there's some truth to this and maybe if there hadn't been so much crying wolf lately reaction to this crisis might have been stronger and more appropriate. But that still didn't get me what I was looking for, the articulated justification of this policy.

It was only at Breitbart that I found an article expressing support for the policy. Writer John Nolte spends a of time reiterating a single idea he states clearly enough in one of his bullet points: "Trump Is Only Enforcing the Law." Like when Trump complains about the Justice Department, this guy who'd ran on his strength as a leader and a negotiator bizarrely can only find support in his position under the idea that he's some helpless instrument of the system. In light of the visible horror of this particular issue, "only enforcing the law" sounds a lot like "just following orders."

Nolte implies this is all necessary to catch the drug traffickers and rapists coming over the border but even he doesn't attempt to suggest there are statistics indicating most or even a significant portion of the border crossers have such intent.

Certainly none of the undocumented immigrants I've known fit the picture of criminality Nolte paints. Considering the expense and difficulty involved in entering the country in what Nolte or Trump would consider the proper way, it's only natural that most of the people who cross the border illegally would be simply desperate, not people with real criminal motives.

But this obviously inhumane and cruel policy continues to be implemented without any real justification. If there's a machine to be decried, surely that's it. Because the only reason people seem to be doing it is because they feel they're supposed to. I'd say this kind of mindless devotion to policy could only have horrific consequences except those consequences already seem to be manifested.