USA Today reminded people on its front page that the El Paso massacre occurred one year ago this day. Has the anti-Hispanic racism that the Trump administration fed off of and fed into declined since then? According to the victims and local leaders—or anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, Trump campaign rhetoric, and Fox News—not at all. You still have white supremacists like the Walmart shooter who view Hispanics as a “threat” to white hegemony (there is a “threat,” but not from Hispanics), and you still have Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham using the language of grievance that scapegoats Hispanic immigrants for most of the nation’s ills, and using demonizing and dehumanizing terms that suggest (apart from Trump’s “some are good people”) a broad generality of criminal and violent proclivities. U.S Rep. Veronica Escobar said she had worried that something like the El Paso massacre was bound to happen, given the “really horrific language used by the president to describe immigrants, to the inhumane treatment of them.”
To all of this, Trump campaign spokesperson Samantha Cotten was quoted by Today as claiming that it was “disgusting” that “Democrats” are being “opportunistic” in using the massacre to attack Trump”—ignoring the actual victims who are also of the same mind about the Trump administration and its media supporters. Cotten insulted the dead and the survivors of the massacre by claiming that the day should be one of “reflection” and “healing”; The problem is that no one can accuse the Trump administration and its propaganda organ, Fox News, of being the least bit interested in “reflection” and “healing”; such a bald-faced lie is itself the very essence of hypocrisy in the face of the truth, which some people don’t seem to have much need of.
The Trump administration’s own
immigration policies are proof enough of the attitudes of hate that drive that
policy, and its continued use of anti-immigrant rhetoric is clear enough proof
of who is actually being “opportunistic” politically. What makes this so “ironic” is that one
suspects that the population at large couldn’t care less itself, given both the
“tedium” of stories of yet another mass shooting, and the social and political hierarchies
in this country; one black man being killed by a police officer causes weeks
and months of protest (not always “peaceful”) while most people didn’t seem to
understand or want to acknowledge the link between bigoted and scapegoating
rhetoric against Hispanics and how it motivated the El Paso shooter (who is
supposedly on “suicide watch” after he realized that his “patriotic” act wasn’t
celebrated by everyone). Note too that whenever there are crimes involving Hispanics, the media, local or national, always makes their legal status a part of the story, sometimes the most "important" part of the story.
This is happening in a country that Sean Hannity bemoans will no longer be the “shining city on the hill” if Trump is not reelected. Outside Hannity’s captive audience of his insanity, the claim that the world looks upon this country the Trump administration has wrought in that way is beyond propaganda lunacy. The “city on the hill” was meant in American terms as a “beacon of hope”—but apparently not for immigrants or asylum seekers of the wrong color, who to the likes of Carlson are only “dirty infestations” or “terrorists.” This “new land” was to be a “model of Christian charity” according to John Winthrop, sitting on the hill for all the world to see it if fails or succeeds. Ronald Reagan wildly misinterpreted Winthrop’s words when he used the phrase as a paean to capitalism rather than a moral duty to strive for; Hannity, of course, has no idea what it means. There can be no doubt that under the Trump administration this country has failed to be a “city on the hill” in the most miserable fashion imaginable—and some people in this country know this by experience far better than others.
No comments:
Post a Comment