YgUDuh

 We have entered the season of general election pandering in earnest now; and so, we are treated to the sight of Democrats falling over themselves to out-Republican the Republicans on crime and the border. We see Harris burnishing her credentials as a prosecutor; Harris reaffirming that she will keep Biden's anti-asylum order in place; Harris claiming—with one eye on Pennsylvania—that she always supported fracking. And we also, for some reason, all have to pay obeisance to the idea that we hate Nippon Steel. 

Now the Democratic governor of must-win swing-state Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, is also weighing in on this subject. The New York Times reports that he is the latest Democratic leader to go public with his opposition to the acquisition of U.S. Steel by a Japanese company. It's easy to see the political calculus behind his stance. What's harder to understand is exactly why the deal is supposed to be bad. No one has yet pointed to any concerns about Nippon Steel's management or its commitment to U.S. workers. 

The only thing that seems to be fueling opposition to the deal, then, is knee-jerk xenophobia—the same kind of anti-Japanese sentiment that flared in the '80s and '90s, during the peak of the latter country's economic success (not to speak of even earlier waves of racism). Then as now, this hostility is especially hard to understand because Japan is a major U.S. ally. Citing "national security" grounds to tank the acquisition, then—as the White House has hinted they might do—sounds like a contradiction in terms. 

And so, to check ourselves from straying into this mindless xenophobia—to reflect before we repeat the country's long, disgraceful history of anti-Japanese racism—I propose a short reading assignment for the week: "YgUDuh." And no, that is not the name of an H.P. Lovecraft monster. It is a phonetic rendering of "You got to"—and the title of a short poem written entirely in this style by E.E. Cummings (a name that I choose to capitalize—by the way—not out of ignorance, but out of dislike of affectation). 

The poem may appear hard to interpret at first (it thereby plainly stumped the AI's attempt to generate a synopsis and interpretation, at least on this website). But if read closely and carefully sounded it, it turns out to be a perfectly phonetic rendering of a drunken diatribe by an anti-Japanese racist. The joke of the poem is that this cave-man-like troglodyte—the one grunting out words like "YgUDuh"—ends his peroration by declaring the U.S.'s historic obligation must be to "SIVILEYEz" countries like Japan. 

Cummings's political takes may not all have aged well; but this one remains ever-relevant. Its author surely deserves credit for being of the few—perhaps the only—white poet of his era to be on record opposing anti-Japanese racism, in an era that would soon see mass internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. That's the history we have to contend with here. So please, let us think twice, before rushing to a knee-jerk xenophobic judgment against Nippon Steel on purely discriminatory grounds. 

Let us ask, that is to say, whether we really want to be like the speaker of Cummings's poem—before we rush to pile on for the sake of cheap political points.