Sight Unseen

At a recent security conference in Munich, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told assembled leaders that America would help with what he called European “revitalization” if the continent put an end to “civilizational erosion,” which he tied to “managed migration.” Europe, he all but said, should follow the lead of U.S. policy, rooted in detention and deportation. Migrants, like Jews of another era, are now perceived as money-hungry interlopers. In every sense, migrant has been made into this century’s dirtiest word, one mostly assigned to Muslims, Hispanics, and, more generally, those of darker skin, who occupy a space outside compassion’s embrace. No one should feel the slightest guilt in treating them as vermin, never mind that their flight to Europe is largely a trek born of hope. America First cares not at all and instead builds camps while Italy lets rickety boats founder in the Mediterranean. These ongoing events put me in mind of David Lynch’s remarkable 1980 film, “The Elephant Man,” in which a monstrously deformed British youth — he has spent most of his life as a circus freak — finds himself so tormented by gawkers that at a certain point he cries aloud, “I am a human being!” His name was Joseph Merrick, and he suffered through an entirely alienated existence in Victorian England, rescued only by a London surgeon able and willing to see beyond his first-person civilizational decline. Today’s migrants have few such benefactors. On the contrary, ciphers in the stream, they face a rising tide of wrath from people, police, and politicians who, unable to release their rage into a cathartic world war, turn to imagined elephant men.

Since the end of World War II, a fair number of Americans have lined up to take their place in the private pews of a new faith governed by the Church of the Conspiracy Theory. Its high priests — and this president is among them — dispute all science while suggesting “leftist” media exists to disseminate falsehoods. This belief system has expanded a thousandfold since the dawn of the online world and social media. When the president struck down what he called a “green scam,” he was doing no more than preaching to his choir. That ardent choir tends to believe that a plot was behind the murder of JFK, that the moon landing was faked and the Earth is flat, that COVID was manufactured, and that all vaccines and medical breakthroughs are mind-control schemes and a public menace. Racism is a fiction to disrupt White America, and the first Black president, no evidence needed, is not who he says he is. Perhaps even the surgeon general may have lied about the risks of smoking to snuff out the tobacco industry, just as the Black president (and Joe Biden after him) may have lied about climate change to undermine the lagging American auto industry. Again, facts are irrelevant because the passion of the true conspiracy theorist operates on a truer and higher plane. What John Kerry has called “Orwellian governance” is gospel truth to this latest flock. All of which makes this America a theocracy of a sort, a western kind of techno-Taliban minus the beards. So it is that years of enlightened conclusions have become contaminated by conspiratorial thinking — an industry in its own right — in much the same way Joe McCarthy (and Richard Nixon) imagined a contaminated America filled with communists. It’s an old dog with a new collar, and it snarls.

Europe and its imperfect union now know what it feels like to be Humpty Dumpty. For decades it sat benignly on a wall, safe in the assumption that America had its back. Now, in the space of little more than a year it has been pushed from its perch and feels both fractured and stunned. Stunned because the delinquent doing the dirty deed is the nation that was central to gluing it back together after World War II. French President Emmanuel Macron has gone so far as to refer to an “openly hostile U.S. administration” while encouraging Europe to reform itself into a nation-state, a Europe newly armored as an America, a Russia, a China — the new actors in an old, great Power-Passion play. With the United Nations all but dead and the American president interested only in divide-and-conquer ties with individual states, what other choice does it have? Even before the us invaded Iraq in 2003, there were tensions between France and the U.S. Many were the disagreements over the years, but they were always patched up diplomatically. Both America and Europe realized their Cold War–era bonds were too valuable to jeopardize. Were not Americans the ancestral sons and daughters of Europeans? But for the sitting president, who revels in neo-isolationism, it’s time to toss out the baby with the bathwater. His America First has no qualms about betrayal and counts support among the generation born after 1990, few of whom care much about Europe unless as a tourist destination. The damage done is now severe enough to think Humpty Dumpty cannot and will not ever again be mended. Maybe all this will eventually lead to a new and dynamically united Europe, as Macron has also suggested. But no messy divorce is easily forgotten and if the American troops who landed on Normandy Beach were still alive to witness this wrecking-crew administration, they would first wince, then weep.

By blocking its oil imports in the form of global tariff threats, the United States is effectively laying siege to Cuba, hoping energy shortfalls will cause the Communist regime to collapse. Few regional or global actors seem to care. Even fewer have much affection for the Cuban leadership just as they have no love for Iran’s. But the U.S. strategy remains a squalid bit of blackmail. The oil being blocked from Cuba is oil in essence stolen from Venezuela in America’s regime-changing putsch in which 32 Cuban soldiers died. No matter, say some, since the U.S. did Caracas a favor by ousting a dictator — and swinging open the doors to Big Oil. Cuba is headed for a similar endgame that will be labeled liberation. Cuba’s Miami exile community will heap adoring words on the great Anerican übermensch. If only this liberation weren’t also self-serving. Cuba has no oil, but it does have a gorgeous coastline primed and ready for massive real estate development, something a builder of tall towers and casinos knows a fair amount about. If the Gaza resort transformation is out of reach, the Havana scheme is not. It’s shameless but also shamelessly lucrative. As Canadian and Russian tourists are evacuated from the island because of jet fuel shortages, the other side is probably imagining a Major League Baseball franchise (the Havana Trumps?), ready to go by 2032, when the president will enter his fourth term, the minor obstacle of the Constitution overcome.

Toward the end of the Eisenhower presidency in the late 1950s it was widely assumed the Soviet Union would beat the United States to the moon and once there instruct its cosmonauts to patriotically claim the orb in the name of Russia while bombarding Earth with Communist propaganda. Thanks to John Kennedy’s ambitious space program, that’s not how it turned out. America was first to the moon in 1969 and followed its initial landing with five more in three years. Neil Armstrong, the original moonman, had no jingoistic remarks to offer in his first transmission. He spoke instead of a “giant leap for mankind” and was universally embraced, as was the U.S. NASA ended its lunar program in 1972 and began investigating a manned Mars mission as that planet seemed infinitely more promising than the barren moon. That funding never materialized, and NASA was forced instead into the space shuttle program, which by hauling a variety of satellites (many from the military and tech companies) into space seemed more commercially gainful. But in the end, even the shuttle, which suffered two major disasters, faded from sight and mind. Now, a driven president with a Sun King ego has decided to force a new lunar landing mission expected, after trial orbits around the moon, to make landfall later this year. His efforts are motivated at least in part by a Chinese wish to put its own people on the moon by 2029. The American stunt — what else to call it? — has less to do with science and humanity (the moon is after all old hat) than one leader’s wish to place a new feather in his cap. A moon escapade pumped up by social media may well go heavy on chauvinism and flag plantings, though this time a woman or two might do the honors. In a word, the project will be an exercise in White House contrivance. All the while as lonely Mars awaits its Magellan.

Decades ago a one-time Polish actor named Karol Wojtyla sat down in a screening room to watch a new film by Oliver Stone titled “Wall Street.” Wojtyla found most interesting the caricature of a wanton capitalist and corporate raider named Gordon Gecko, who memorably tells a young acolyte that greed is good. While at the time focused on lifting the pall of atheistic communism from his homeland and all nations in the Soviet orbit, the film, he believed illustrated the dangers posed by the opposite extreme — rule by wealth and material excess to the exclusion of all else. He imagined this as a threat to discretion, spirituality, and basic humility, cornerstones of civil society, or so he suggested in countless speeches and tracts. Though a profound conservative, he nonetheless worried that the acquisition of things would become the new opiate of the people, replacing a dependence that the founders of communism ascribed to religion. With Elon Musk dancing atop his boardroom table to celebrate his newfound status as a trillionaire — and there are others like him, including a somewhat-less-wealthy president — the Pole’s most troubling concerns have been realized. Greed is in all shapes good, as is a society mesmerized by consumerism. To paraphrase a leading techno-oligarch, corporations are “kingdoms” that provide the world with a plethora of “beautiful things.” In such a landscape, the standards of restraint and modesty have no meaning. Let greed be greed no matter the eloquent Pole’s warning. He is dead, his last breath drawn in 2005, and if you wish to find his tomb, visit the Vatican crypt and look for the name Pope John Paul II.

I have hit upon my next vocation. Fake outrage, hit me up and I’ll be there for you. Need me to howl in defense of the best president in American history? Gladly. Need me to back you up against those idiots who can’t see the obvious connection between apes and Black politicians? I’m all in. But first tell me where to get my skills. Does the greatest president hold fake outrage classes? Is there an online academy? Like, how do I get the right words, the right voice? I’m already trained in fake news. Will that help? All I’m asking for is a tryout. I already feel outraged that I don’t know what to do. I love hating on people. It comes naturally after listening to the great president. Just help me get to the next level, and I’ll despise you so much you’ll think it’s totally real. Thanking you in advance, I remain hypocritically yours.

In the mid-1970s, a college classmate wrote a novel set in the near future in which everyone suffered from what he dubbed information sickness. Burdened with too many choices and too much data, they would slip into paralytic depression. His book came to mind as I considered the fate of three teen sisters in India who jumped to their deaths from a ninth-floor apartment, suffocated by an addiction to video games. They had all but stopped attending school. Stories such as these are no longer rare as dependence on AI, games, smartphones, and social media deepens. Tech giants are fully aware of this slavery but prefer to steer clear because to warn of it might undermine profits. All know full well that if the web crashed, human identity would be compromised. Even the American president often forgoes speaking in favor of the scrolling language of posts. To me, this is information sickness become reality. Faced with a new world I can neither fathom nor understand, I choose instead to savor memories of boyhood in Washington, D.C., in which I would often secretly climb to the roof of my home and behold the world around me. I was Kid Charlemagne, and all I needed was my imagination and perhaps a "Road Runner" cartoon or two. Those days are gone forever, alas, and any souls poised on rooftops today may be there for an entirely different reason.

Product Defect is the term assigned to consumer goods thought to be either flawed or harmful. Usually, they are swiftly removed from circulation. The designation comes strangely to mind in the wake of a sharp federal court ruling that a five-year-old boy and his father be freed from immigration police custody and allowed to return home to Minnesota. ICE had erred and erred badly. But the judge went far further. Basic human decency had been violated, he said, and the man to blame was a leader who knew only to lust for unbridled power. This is where human product defect comes into play. The leader in question is incapable of understanding the concept of decency. The flaw is at the core of who he is and always has been. It cannot even be called malice because it is intrinsic. He lacks morality and conscience because his self-involved being never absorbed what should be an essential part of character. He should be removed from shelves not in response to his reactionary policies but because he poisons the commonweal. A five-year-old would know to behave more generously toward friends and enemies alike. But not this flawed adult, and the broken beat goes on.

The release of millions of heavily censored documents, photos, and videos regarding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein makes me reflect on the murky nature of voyeurism and moral accountability. Do the many victims of Epstein’s lurid schemes deserve some measure of redress for their suffering at the hands of rich and powerful men? In a word, yes, though the U.S. Department of Justice is unlikely to comply with their pleas. But what then to make of still images of well-known figures cavorting in Epstein’s high-roller orbit? Should men like Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Noam Chomsky, and then–Prince Andrew be detached from their accomplishments and tossed wholesale to the dogs? Are these indictments of their own accord because they captivate the imagination? Good questions, all. I remember being tossed from an 8th-grade class for rebutting the teacher’s characterization of Hitler as the greatest of monsters. I had insisted he should be labeled an evil genius instead. I thought likewise of Stalin. That three Kennedy brothers and a preacher named King had their way with women mattered less to me than their legacies. The Epstein story is graver and more appalling, and yet it too is tarred by boundless voyeurism. Is there a way around so much primordial lust among the wealthy and the potent, almost all of them ambitious men? The answer, I am sorry to say, is no. Call it the human stain.

The late U.S. senator and foreign policy expert J. William Fulbright once stated that no matter how repugnant a regime might be, America should not interfere in its internal affairs or seek to expunge it unless its leadership was blatantly trying to impose its values or system of government elsewhere. That was then, in the Cold War era, and this is a very different now, in which the newly minted chairman of a self-styled Board of Peace seeks to overthrow the Iranian regime, this doing a Venezuelan war dance in the Near East. It is worth remembering, however, that the peace mogul already has Iranian blood on his hands, if only by omission. Inexcusably, he recently urged anti-government protesters to intensify their uprising. If the Iranian Revolutionary Guard shot to kill, he said, his America would jump in to help them. He also encouraged the son of the late Shah of Iran, a longtime Washington, D.C., exile, to cheerlead the protests, and he did. He would soon come home to Make Iran Great again, a hardly original invocation. Emboldened by these pledges, dissenters openly confronted the Revolutionary Guard and were slaughtered by the thousands. Knowing what to say and what not to say is key in dealing with volatile situations. But Mr. Peace simply says and writes what pleases him. Consequences are immaterial. If nothing else, he is good for the morgue industry, and that of Iran will likely be replenished in the days ahead.

The late Italian populist Silvio Berlusconi, a real estate and media tycoon, derived most of his substantial support from the country’s southlands. Its denizens adored his brio. They rallied around his portrayal of Rome as a political capital that stole from the people, they applauded his baiting of all enemies as communists, and, thanks to them, he lorded over Italy for more than two decades and counted Vladimir Putin among his buddies. Those men who could operate outside the law he clutched to his bosom, but even he knew to stop short of renaming concert halls and gulfs. He understood at least the crassness and vulgarity of such actions. Donald Trump, admired by some Italians in the Berlusconi vein, does not. And the existing ‘last laugh’ now belongs to him.