A look in the mirror by @BloggersRUs

A look in the mirror

by Tom Sullivan

Left: Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) chokes up reading news of immigrant toddlers imprisoned in federal ‘tender age’ shelters in Texas, 06/19/18.
Right: Walter Cronkite (CBS) chokes up announcing death of JFK in Dallas, 11/22/63. (h/t Chuck Clark)

It is significant that the sitting president invokes a home-grown violent gang of Central American immigrants as the bogeyman for whipping his xenophobic base into a froth. Because what underlies anti-immigrant fervor is a battle over turf.

So many of the political disputes in this country and in this world come down to that. We dress up turf battles as ideological and policy disputes, but in the end what they come down to is control. Turf.

For example, the "Christian nation" argument one hears among conservative Christians. This is a Christian country, they assert. Founded of, by, and for Christians. The argument is not about the founders. Nor about our founding documents. Nor about American history, and certainly not about Jesus. It is about turf. About whose God is the Big G in the United States of America. About which faith will, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, dominate all the "lesser" faiths. We tolerate them so long as they know their places and don't breed too rapidly.

So it is now with the growth of white nationalism embodied by our sitting president and his political base, 27 percent or so of the electorate. The group feels threatened by demographic changes that threaten its status both as an ethnic majority and dominant political plurality in the country. All that happy talk about melting pots and e pluribus unum and land of the free is the thinnest veneer covering darker, baser instincts: tribal and clan loyalties. Patriotism backed by bluster has always been a mile wide and an inch deep. And values? Please. They elected Donald J. Trump.

The sitting president yesterday deployed eliminationist rhetoric against immigrants and asylum seekers on the southern border, describing them as an infestation. New Yorker's Jane Mayer cautioned, "before the Rwandan genocide, the perpetrators used mass media to define the future victims as 'cockroaches.'" Author David Neiwert reminded Twitter users, "Eliminationism is the belief that one's political opponents, or the object of their political ire are a cancer on the body politic that must be excised, either by separation from the public at large, through expulsion or outright extermination, to protect the nation's purity."

Yesterday on "Here & Now," American Family Radio's Sandy Rios argued that the problem is not toddlers separated from their mothers. The problem is a flood of bad mothers from Central America who fled violence in their countries and unconscionably sent or brought their children with them on a dangerous journey to break our laws (illegal entry is a misdemeanor; entry to request asylum is not a crime).

Grab 'em by the babies

So now one nation under Trump is, essentially, detaining toddlers in warehouses and incarcerating parents with no criminal backgrounds over the federal equivalent of a parking ticket, and with no plan for reuniting them. Many of the children may never see their parents again. The Trump administration is bringing back jobs ... manufacturing orphans.

"The prosecutions for illegal entry while preventing people from coming legally appear to be part of a pincer movement intentionally designed to choke off asylees attempting to come into the country," Chris Hayes reported from McAllen, Texas. Turn away asylum seekers at ports of entry, then arrest them if they enter illegally.

It's not Gandhi at the Dharasana salt works. Not yet.

In no particular order, a sampling of how the rest of the world sees us.

Israel
No clear plan yet on how to reunite parents with children separated at US border
MEXICO CALLS MIGRANT CHILDREN SEPARATION 'INHUMANE,' 'RACIST'

Ireland
Government to convey ‘grave concern’ to US ambassador about migrant separation

Australia
'Don't leave me, Mum': Detainee tells of separation from son
Rachel Maddow breaks down on air over Trump immigration policy

Japan
Opposition to family separation grows; Trump defends actions

"When you become a mother you become a sister to all of those mothers. Those children are ours and unless Ivanka is going to stand up and do something, she no longer deserves the right to say she stands with us."

— @SRuhle pic.twitter.com/MiAmWPuDIM

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 20, 2018

29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) June 20, 2018

Japanese American internment camp near Jerome, Arkansas, today 1944: #NARA pic.twitter.com/M5m7sfCGP3

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) June 18, 2018