Bitter Jesting

 Last week, I wrote about recent right-wing efforts to gin up racial hate and inter-communal violence in the United States, by relentlessly publicizing a freak incident of homicide, apparently committed by a mentally ill homeless man (who happened to be Black) against a young white woman on a train in North Carolina. 

The main right-wing move after the case was to draw attention—not only to the race of the suspect (shades of Willie Horton)—but also to the fact of his alleged criminal history (shades of Willie Horton again). If he had still been in prison—the argument runs—then he never would have knifed an innocent stranger on a train (as he is alleged to have done). 

To this, I responded: by this argument, no one who's ever been in prison once should ever be released, no matter how much time has elapsed. Every prison sentence for any crime should be permanent; since it's the only way to ensure that no one who's ever been convicted once will never re-offend (at least against the non-incarcerated civilian population). 

"Indeed,"—I then observed—"if we simply incarcerated disfavored populations from birth—or exterminated them [emphasis added]—then to be sure, ipso facto, none of them would commit further crimes."

My attempt was to use a reductio ad absurdum to refute the conservative position—that is, to show that the logic of their position led to some extremely dark places. 

But as we know—the reductio is always a dangerous argument to use. Because sometimes—people will simply bite the bullet. They will take you up gladly on the absurd conclusion. 

That appeared to happen briefly at the start of this week. In talking about the Decarlos Brown Jr. case—one "Fox & Friends" host reportedly said on air that mentally-ill homeless people who refuse treatment should be murdered en masse by the state. "Exterminated," as I had put it. "Just kill ’em"—the Fox host reportedly suggested. "Involuntary lethal injection, or something." 

The host apparently had the decency to later try to apologize for and retract the comment. 

And Fox apparently had the decency not to fire him based on a single remark. Would that I could say the same for certain liberal outlets—who have let commentators go in recent days for expressing far more anodyne sentiments than that of casually endorsing the wholesale mass murder of a marginalized population. 

Beyond one Fox host's stray comment, though—the logic of the right's current position on homelessness really does appear to amount to mass execution or something close to it. Trump—as we know—has used his takeover of Washington, D.C. to wage war on the city's homeless population. Indeed, this was an express goal of his when he started mobilizing the National Guard in the city. 

It's theoretically possible to say that the goal of removing people from homeless encampments is to get them into shelters or housing. But Trump—at the same time he is driving homeless people out of parks—is simultaneously trying to slash resources for the government's housing first programs, which aim to get people into actual homes. 

So—what exactly does Trump expect to happen to the country's homeless? They apparently aren't allowed to sleep outdoors or under bridges. But they apparently also aren't to be allowed to sleep in homes and apartments either—since Trump is aiming to cut funds for the programs that put them in such places. 

The only conclusion is that Trump would like to see something like what the Fox host briefly suggested: perhaps a mass program of involuntary euthanasia. 

As Thomas Carlyle once mordantly wrote—of the tendency of the Benthamite Poor Law reforms of the nineteenth century—which aimed to put poor people into prison-like workhouses, and in other ways punish them for their misfortune, rather than allow them free aid: 

"[Perhaps, i]n each parish, in some central locality, instead of the Parish Clergyman, there might be established some Parish Exterminator; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the public expense, free to all parishioners; for which Church the rates probably would not be grudged." 

But "Ah," he concluded, "it is bitter jesting on such a subject."

And indeed—if the Fox host who made precisely this same proposal wishes now to tell us it was just a joke—and he wasn't serious—it was "bitter jesting" indeed. 

Especially when our current President of the United States seems bent on putting just such a proposal into practice.