Our ever-repulsive Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has time and again sought to join her colleagues in the administration in a race to the bottom to see who can post the cruelest and most morally ugly meme on social media.
Time and again, high-level figures in the government—plus the official social media accounts of U.S. executive departments—have attempted to make light of the human suffering caused by their own policies—rendering images of crying immigrants in handcuffs into the style of "Studio Ghibli" anime; crafting "jokey" names for immigration detention camps; bragging about locking people up in torturous conditions while riffing on Sabrina Carpenter lyrics, etc.
(I've quoted it before, but I'll repeat it again: Hugh MacDiarmid's words are ever-relevant to describe this administration: "Vast mobilised armies of maddened adolescents / And criminal leaders mouthing the foulest perfidies / Amid roars of loutish laughter and animal applause.")
Noem plumbed a new moral low this week, however—when she brought Christmas into the mix. A couple days ago, she reportedly posted an AI-generated visual of ICE agents, wearing black ski-masks, carrying riot shields and automatic weapons—while capped with Santa hats and surrounded by "festive" Christmas lights. Under the image, Noem reportedly wrote: "You're going ho ho home." Adorable, right?
Mocking your own victims—people this administration has torn from their families and confined in dungeon-like detention camps, where they have been fed on rotten food, crammed 20-people-to-a-cell, and denied medical treatment—is pretty disgusting under any circumstances. But it's especially foul—as several religious leaders have since pointed out—to bring the Christmas holiday into the mix.
After all, the whole nativity story is about a family of refugees seeking shelter at an inn.
This has prompted houses of worship throughout the country to counter this administration by making a point about the nativity story. One Catholic church in Massachusetts, in their annual nativity display, included a missing baby Jesus in the manger, with a sign added reading "ICE was here." A banner over the scene asked the humble question: "Peace on Earth?"
A Protestant church in Chicago, meanwhile, showed a nativity scene in which the infant savior is bound in zip ties, and the Virgin Mary is shown wearing a gas mask while surrounded by Roman guards.
Why the gas mask on Mary? Presumably because the leadership of this Chicago church (one of whom I went to Divinity School with) has been active for weeks in protests in front of the Broadview detention center, where federal agents have routinely fired tear gas on people gathered to express their dissent. Indeed, Trump's self-declared "war" on Chicago since September has unloaded untold gallons on tear gas on demonstrators throughout the season.
All of which—banner, sign, zip-ties, gas-mask on Mary—can only bring to mind Thomas Hardy's sardonic epigram about the Christmas of 1924—as he reflected back on decades of war and atrocities that had wracked the European continent:
'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.
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