The Sure Hand of God

 Let me first state for the record that I do not support committing property crimes under any circumstances. But with that said, you can consider me not exactly moved to tears by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's recent loss of $3,000 in cash from a purse that she had left under a lunch table. 

However much I oppose stealing under any circumstances, I won't be getting out the violin for her. Anyone who sports a gold Rolex while touring a foreign gulag, in which they have deliberately confined innocent people without charge or trial—all on the taxpayer's dime—is already tempting fate. 

To be sure, there is no indication that the man who lifted the purse in this case saw himself as acting as any kind of Robin Hood or people's avenger. According to the latest reporting, he didn't even recognize Noem or know who she was, at the time he stole the cash and her credit cards from under the table. 

But sometimes, the Lord's humble instruments do not know the larger purposes they serve. I'm reminded of a poem by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton (particularly relevant here, given Noem's horrifying role in El Salvador right now) in which he reflected on the fate of the country's former military dictator. 

Dalton notes that this dictator—responsible for the death and torture of thousands of people—at last received his comeuppance—but only due to an unrelated domestic dispute. The ultimate avenger, wrote Dalton, had done "out of a thief's pure rage / What many should have done out of necessity." 

Perhaps in this case too, the purse-robber was acting out of a "thief's pure rage"; but he was only doing what many others should have done out of the fatality of justice. Dalton called his poem "The Sure Hand of God"—and who's to say it was not God, fate, the Furies, what-have-you, that acted through this thief? 

After all, up to a point: you do in fact reap as you sow in this world. If you torture and brutalize people, then flaunt your wealth while you revel in their humiliation and boast of your cruelty before the world—you are courting nemesis. You have "put all Heaven in a rage," as Blake once phrased it. 

Which reminds me of Noem's other most noteworthy contribution to humanity so far. Before she was putting people in Salvadoran torture-dungeons without due process, she was best known for having killed a family dog by shooting it in a gravel pit. Which is quite relevant to Blake's next lines: 

A dog starved at his master's gate

Predicts the ruin of the state

I think this tells us something about what's in store for the Trump administration as a whole. They have tempted fate for too long. It is bound eventually to catch up with them. "[T]here is justice here below," as Thomas Carlyle once wrote: "Forget that, [and] thou hast forgotten all."