Sight Unseen

The need by societies to find all-purpose culprits and bogeymen shifts by generation. A century ago the dastardly were Jews, and Nazis constructed a literal Final Solution. But the hatred also had intellectual roots, with T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and French writer Céline making cases for the menace posed by Jews. In the postwar came paranoia toward communists and communism, with America taking the “Better Dead than Red” lead. Countless politicians joined in, and the sentiments gave Richard Nixon his platform. Now the enemy is migrants, in America largely Hispanics, while in Europe they are African and Middle Eastern Muslims. As always, parties have been formed and tweaked to absorb and spread the loathing. In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has come front and center and may soon be a power broker in British politics. He wants migrants deported or jailed and has shrewdly recruited mainstream “legal” Muslims as spokesmen for his purging wants. In January, three senior members of the usually moderate Tories defected into his ranks. His popularity has grown since the reign of a US president who shares his outlook on the rhetoric of exclusion and who has made deportation a bloodsport. Farage led the successful Brexit movement and is not to be trifled with. Elsewhere, in France, the anti-migrant National Rally is favored in many polls as 2027 presidential elections near. Fueled by unfettered social media, anger and resentment are the emotions of choice across the board. The problem with all such talk is that it suggests the recovery of some pristine past is possible if nations just clean house. Truth is, no such past exists. Rage is a social constant, all the more so in a tribal time, and new bogeymen will always and surely replace the old. Purity is a lie of history. And yet there sit Farage, Marine Le Pen, and an American president, avid as vultures with millions of stirred-up purists in their thrall.

Europeans are also struggling to come to grips with a second fatal shooting of a civilian by Customs and Immigration police in troubled Minneapolis. Partisan finger-pointing aside, it can seem to some that deportation-happy America is, because of a president’s harsh views, at war with its own people. Many no longer recognize the nation they embraced in solidarity after the 9/11 attacks. In Italy, critics of the new mood see parallels to the 1924 Giacomo Matteotti killing, in which Mussolini’s Fascist police murdered an opposition politician and opened the door to more systematic oppression. In any event, the large contingent of would-be tourists to America are beginning to void their plans. They are for the first time in memory afraid of walking into harm’s way. The damage this president is causing to his nation’s global reputation is incalculable, his ICE raping the ghost of Emma Lazarus, RIP. 

Ukraine’s embattled president Volodymyr Zelensky finds himself stuck without recourse between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand is a mean and bullying American president who wants him to sign a peace deal with Russia no matter the cost, in this way garnering credibility for America’s pay-per-view Board of Peace. On the other side are the European Union and NATO, which support Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but have none of America’s military clout. This would once have been an implausible paradox since it was postwar America that engineered NATO and by doing so helped usher in the EU. All that of course is now but a memory as this president — I have dubbed him Strangelove — has time and again expressed his disdain for “horrible” Europe, a continent he sees as contaminated by migrant Muslims and assorted darkies. This ugly collision helps explain Zelensky’s speech at the Davos summit, which despite his White House humiliation of a year ago, saw him talk as if from Strangelove’s lap. Europe was weak and fractured, he growled. It could never become a true world power. It’s no surprise the remarks came soon after a private session with the American don. Saddest in this sad landscape is that postwar Europe was fashioned for two reasons: to confront the then–Soviet Union and to limit European rearmament to guard against a future new Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. So it is that the EU, intended as a federation of economically linked but still sovereign nations, is now mocked for not assuming Nazi-style arrogance. The result, witness the Greenland debacle, is a loss for all involved, a loss that may cost the United Nations its job, just as re-armament and Axis powers fully struck down the League of Nations before it, after which came a detail known as World War II.

A friend advised me recently not to exaggerate the extent of my maladies. I should not “catastrophize,” he said. This word immediately brought to mind how pliant is the English language. One-time verbs become nouns in a heartbeat. A football player who once would have been praised for his toughness is now admired for his physicality. Other somewhat nastier changes are also afoot. Presidents and governors delivering four-letter obscenities in public is now largely accepted, or at the very least tolerated. Unfettered anger is also now commonplace, a subject I will address at another time. Also, America’s love affair with money and profit has made new verbal inroads. To be responsible for something gone amiss is to “own it.” On much of social media, adolescent emotionalism holds the high, or low, ground, with histrionics and hatred often in the scribbled mix. All of which suits an inarticulate president just fine. He can catastrophize at will and delight excited supporters. He’s a straight-talker, and if he wishes to own Greenland (“a very small ask . . . for a piece of ice”) or detain the whole of Minnesota he must be right, and so it is that the New World Order meets new world English. In his social media behavior, the president is astute. He knows how to tap into these raging times, while managing a reality show that never hurts for ratings. His online “Truth” may be anything but, I agree, but oh does he like owning the fiction.

There is little to say about Greenland that has not been said and repeated. It is a sovereign land governed jointly by the people of Greenland and Denmark. But this of course means nothing to the geriatric child who is America’s incumbent president and who I will henceforth refer to only as Strangelove, since he is painfully suited to caricature. He wants porridge and pudding (and the Nobel Peace Prize) served to him in bed. Vex this infantile pettiness, and he will order his ravenous backyard dogs to eat you alive. A child has no pity, only cravings. America brought this spoiled brat upon itself and now the broken world at large must reap the winter whirlwind. As my usually mild-mannered author friend told me recently, “America is done.” First is also last, at least among those postwar Europeans who once deeply embraced the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty.  

A number of Italian friends of South American descent have strenuously admonished me for failing to appreciate and embrace the “heroic” actions of my president in rightly removing a Venezuelan monster, to which I softly reply that without fail I hold to international law and above all to the sanctity of sovereignty. Violating one or both as if they did not exist or could be bent to accommodate one nation’s sense of the right and the righteous is aggression, plain and simple. Did we kidnap Stalin or Mao? Did we raid Havana and abscond with Fidel Castro? Did we make away with Ayatollah Khomeini or even with Saddam, who was easy pickings in 1991? Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was properly remanded to the International Criminal Court, which this president treats as detritus. A number of other decades and dictators come to mind, but no matter. Suffice it to say that our shameless commander in chief stands poised to deliver Venezuela’s ample oil fields into eager American hands. This I say to my excited, shoot-first friends who have had a taste of colonial-era force and love it. To which they shrug in disgust at me and busy themselves with champagne corks, as I wonder to myself how high those same corks will fly when Greenland is annexed and Iran returned to New Washington’s sphere of influence. If ever there was any doubt, the America-first gang is headed by a CEO in love with mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers, who represents rule by the one percent. It’s money that matters, brute militarism its handmaiden, and there is no turning back.

The brazen kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on charges he abetted drug trafficking has brought into evidence a pandemic no one knew existed. It is called sycophantism. Aside from America’s traditional rivals Russia and China, few global nations have chosen to decry the move. This is because they fear the American president, who is the lord of their manor, a president who has placed plutocracy where democracy once was. If they vex him, they face sanctions, trade problems, and even visa restrictions on their citizens, so all bow before him rather than express any form of public criticism.

This pandemic is likely to get worse before it gets better — and there is no vaccine in sight.