The Dominance of Claws

 Reading any given newspaper this week would furnish you with plenty of examples of the insane malice of this administration. 

We talked in the previous post about the DOJ trying to reintroduce firing squads to federal death row. 

The Trump administration is also apparently floating plans to deport Afghan refugees from a U.S. military base where they've been living in Qatar to the war-torn state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

These are people who risked their lives to help American troops. They signed up to serve as translators, civil society workers, government employees of the new, democratic Afghanistan that America promised to build. 

Now, that same government proposes to cast them into an abyss—deporting them en masse to a country with which they have no ties, no familiarity, no bearings, no prospects for employment or even basic safety and continuity of life. 

the voice-with-a-smile of democracy

announces night & day

"all poor little peoples that want to be free

just trust in the u s a —as E.E. Cummings once wrote. 

 [...] so rah-rah-rah democracy

let's all be as thankful as hell

and bury the statue of liberty

(because it begins to smell)—he concluded. 

This may have been the most completely obscene example this week of the administration's insane hatred and xenophobia at work—but it was not the only one. 

Trump also reposted a podcast transcript yesterday—with seeming approval and endorsement of its message—in which a right-wing shock jock ranted vilely about Chinese and Indian immigrants—calling their countries "hellholes" and recycling a bunch of tired stereotypes against them. 

This is how the U.S. government rewards its friends—people who trust our country enough to serve with our military or try to contribute to our society as immigrant workers. This is how we repay them. With kidnapping; with contumely. 

I can't get past the evil of our government wanting to send the people who put their lives in danger—to help our troops and our ill-conceived experiment in nation-building—on a plane to a war-torn country or back to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. 

That one really takes the cake. 

It is indeed an "infamous ritual," as Harry Alan Potamkin wrote of the persecution of the Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti long ago: "the toothsome sacrifice of these unwelcome kind / not ours, hence not worthy to the feast."

Potamkin goes on:

[T]hey are the unaccepted brotherhood / who gave us our little beauty and our only charms—/ we have repaid them often with their proper place./ Ours is the dominance of claws and not the grace/ of fingers; ours is not the sweetness of a hand.