100 Days of Sodom.
Trump's first 100 days of Making America Grate Again.
“E’ son tiranni / che dier nel sangue e ne l’aver di piglio”
These are the tyrants / who plunged their hands in blood and plundering
Inferno. 12.104-5
Hi everybody,
Well, that was something. Tyranny has been on the March (January, February, and April, too) — which triggered some haunting analogies from Pasolini’s exodium on the debauchery of oligarchs, and then in turn spilled over into the consequences spelled out by Dante.
Ack.
We are now 100 Days into a Reality-Show-President creating a Reality-Show-Cabinet made up of howler monkeys with typewriters attempting to rewrite the Federalist Papers using ChatGPT and their own feces. Consider the following: a Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Fox News weekend talk show host with access to the nuclear codes who conducts secret US military operations over an unsecured social media app; a Professional Wrestling Executive put in charge of America’s educational infrastructure; a Marvel Mutant-wannabe Putin fan and Russian sympathizer overseeing the Office of National Intelligence; a worm-brained vaccine-denier put in charge of America’s health care with a scandal prone Dr. Snake Oil side-kick now running Medicare; a goggle-eyed revenge-homunculus put in charge of the FBI; and a chorus of obsequious Daddy-issue sycophantic Orange-nosers, each attempting to out Orange-nose the others while tumbling out of a flaming honey wagon.
Honk honk.
Any one of these could easily stand in for the chaos and banana republic levels of corruption now on display in the Administration of The Mad King, but my favorite is probably Trump’s nomination of Charles Kushner, Jared’s dad — the one Trump pardoned for convictions of tax evasion and witness tampering — to be Ambassador to France. Ivanka and Jared, after a billion dollar Saudi windfall last time, are noticeably absent from this go round. Maybe, if she looks back, Ivanka will turn into a pillar of salt.
Immigrant phobia and hatred, you might remember, injected a lot of the popular venom into his election — and I was suddenly reminded that a simple but violent failure of hospitality was an underlying cause of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Pretty classic stuff. Dante places those doomed souls in the 7th Circle of Hell, the one devoted to those who commit various kinds of violence: violence against other people (murderers condemned to swim in a boiling river of blood) and even violence against the economy and industry (usurers hopping and leaping forever on a plain of burning sand with fire forever tickling their feet). I’ve always liked the idea that usury, as a dimension of implacable Greed, is a kind of violence not only against others, but against oneself.
Anyway, damnation, when it’s the real thing, is always poetic.
We’re seeing this same kind of howler monkey logic displayed in the deportation of all those student-visa PhD candidates. Here’s why.
Back in the 80’s, when I was in graduate school, two of my favorite roommates were from China. They were PhD students in Engineering. Tiananmen Square happened during those years and, surprise surprise, they decided not to go back to China but to become US citizens instead. The US opened its arms and welcomed them in. Now, if you think about it, that’s an immigration policy even the most angry and entitled xenophobe could get behind — bring the smartest people from all over the world to your country and then keep them there. Wow.
— but not the maga-maniacal Brown Shirts running ICE these days. Nope.
The current round of deportations displays the same kind of violence against hospitality — and against ourselves — normalized under The Madness of King Orange. Our punishment will be equally poetic. The very people America needs most for a secure and happy future are being arrested in the street by armed masked men, thrown in a van, and chucked out of the county in a fit of howler monkey rage.
But what could go wrong? Look how hard Trump’s administration is working.
And here we are.
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