"Gucci Bags"

In Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf—a haunting meditation on the nature of evil, penned by the Nobel Prize–winning Swedish author in the midst of World War II—there occurs a scene late in the novel when a group of refugees from the surrounding countryside flees a marauding mercenary army, seeking sanctuary behind the walls of the prince's capital city. There, they receive a frosty welcome and eventually the outright hostility of the inhabitants.

After the enemy's army lays siege to the capital, Lagerkvist's narrator recounts how the citizenry begin to blame the refugees for everything that has gone wrong with the war effort. They say the refugees have brought vermin with them, that they caused a food shortage, and ultimately that they triggered the plague that starts to beset the capital, due to the unsanitary siege conditions. 

Because they came from the countryside, moreover, many of the refugees brought with them whatever livestock they could afford to carry. Once food supplies start to run out and hunger sets in throughout the city, they slaughter and eat the animals. This leads to anger and jealousy on the part of the other inhabitants. Rumors spread that the refugees are only pretending to be poor and desperate; that really they have extra supplies of meat secreted away. 

I was reminded in reading this passage of a certain politician's recent cynical broadside against asylum-seekers in our own borders. After the Wall Street Journal ran an understated and nuanced piece about how some—not all, but some—people arriving at the U.S. border come from middle class rather than impoverished family backgrounds, right-wing media seized on this reporting and distorted its findings in all-too-predictable ways. 

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina offered what was perhaps the most memorable and outlandish version of this talking point. As he put it: 40,000 Brazilians are descending on the border "wearing designer clothing and Gucci bags."

Plainly, we have not progressed all that far from the people in the medieval Italian city-state that Lagerkvist depicts. In the presence of newcomers and outsiders, and filled with fears of sudden scarcity (often more imagined than real), we still turn to the tried-and-true methods of rumor-mongering and scapegoating. 

Just as the refugees in Lagerkvist's fictional town are accused of bringing plague, so too are coronavirus outbreaks falsely attributed to migrants today, and used to justify the Biden administration's scientifically-unwarranted Title 42 asylum blockade. Just as, in Lagerkvist's town, the refugees were accused of hoarding food and being richer than they looked, the idea of asylum-seekers having "Gucci bags" is today used to fuel nativist resentment and weaken sympathy for their plight. 

The real reason why people would be forced to evacuate their homes around the globe at this moment in history is of course not hard to discern—it is all around us. The global pandemic has wreaked untold economic devastation across vast swathes of the globe, particularly in places that don't have strong central banks and the capacity to engage in a lot of deficit spending to keep the economy afloat. 

Meanwhile, when it comes to people from specific countries, there are a host of even more proximate causes for their flight: war in Cameroon; earthquake, gang violence, and political mayhem in Haiti; two once-in-a-generation storms that struck Central America in a one-week period back in 2020. 

If more people from formerly middle class backgrounds are forced to migrate under these conditions, it tells us not how undeserving of sympathy the newly-arriving asylum-seekers might be, but only how severe the devastation of the pandemic and its interlocking crises has been around the globe. (Nor, by the way, is having middle class people, or any other people, migrate to one's country a bad thing!)

And, as we see from Lagerkvist's novel, what Lindsey Graham presents as his fresh discovery is in fact an age-old slander—one that has existed as long as there have been refugees. Lagerkvist knew that what he was writing, after all, was not purely a tale of a bygone era, but an allegory of what he saw all around him, living in Europe in the midst of the second World War—a time and place where refugees were not uncommon. 

So too, the book has lasted to become a fitting metaphor for our time as well. Lagerkvist depicts the human condition as a constant struggle between two poles—one, the principle of destruction and chaos, the principle of Mars, embodied by his narrator, who is a kind of fascism incarnate. The other, the Venus principle, that of love and the will to life, which the narrator regards as nothing but a loathsome debauchery. 

And Lagerkvist's point is that no age or society can claim to have banished the fascism principle forever from its ranks. It lingers, latent, in all of us, as an ever-present potentiality. And to see the ways it manifests itself here among us, in twenty-first century America, does not require an enormous imaginative effort.