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Observations on film art : The pawns
9-11 minutes

Photo: JERRY LARA / San Antonio Express-News.

David here:

Should there be any doubts that the US is moving toward a fascist coup, events of
the last two weeks should have dispelled them. Trump broke with our European and
North American allies. He reconfirmed his loyalty to Putin and Kim. He launched an
international tariff war. And now he and his Gauleiters Jeff Sessions and Stephen
Miller have created, more or less in the open, concentration camps for children.

(Let’s remember that “concentration camps” were not necessarily conceived as “death
camps.” They were areas in which a rounded-up population were “concentrated” for
further state-imposed processing.)

What has held back the tide of full-blown fascism? The media, elite or grassroots,
have done their duty with surprising vigor. I noted last year that reporters were
starting to spotlight the lies of the Trump administration, and now even the gray
old Times ventures a “falsely” or two. Without the leaks, analyses, and exposés, we
wouldn’t know about the camps, the scandals, the moral vacuity of Congressional
Republicans, the dissolution of regulations on corporations, the palace intrigues
of corrupt advisers, and the depredations of a president™ elected by a margin of
77,000 imbeciles’ votes.

The courts, at least those not yet supervised by Trump appointees, have pushed back
as well. In tandem, the Mueller investigation plows methodically on, bringing to
light a cast of characters whose intellectual endowment makes the wise guys in
Gotti look like particle physicists.

Still, the Base (well-named) is getting a new reality show. Trump campaigned by
winning every day’s news cycle; he provoked coverage and reaction, which allowed
him to holler back, raise the stakes, and keep everything going. The immigration
drama is the new main attraction. Many will glory in watching the stupendous power
of the US being inflicted on toddlers and mothers in blazing heat.

The Base embraced Trump for “telling it like it is”–that is, venting the vileness
that minimal civil courtesy kept in check. But they’re not deep thinkers. One could
tell the Base that there’s a difference between asylum and illegal immigration, and
that crossing the border without permission, legally speaking, is a misdemeanor
comparable to a traffic ticket. One wonders if the Base even recognize the
difference between legal and illegal immigration. In addition, huge sectors of the
economy (agribusiness, construction, meat packing, hoteliery) depend on immigrant
workers, including illegals, willing to perform jobs that the Base prefers to
avoid, at least at the wages offered by cynical employers. But informing the Base
about such nuances would run against the grand plan to homogenize our country–and
expand the Base.

This coup is proceeding fairly quickly. Hopes that November 2018 could turn things
around seem to me overoptimistic. A lot can be wrecked in a few months. And if
Trump and his party can do anything, they can win elections, somehow. The
Democrats, as usual, fumble and flounder and dissipate their energy through
internecine quarrels. Maybe they should devote less energy to asking me for money
and more to explosive, top-of-the-voice outrage on any forum they can seize. Trump
provokes emergencies; his opponents should go ballistic. Call it the Alan Grayson
tactic. (Remember his summary of the Republican health-care plan: “Die quickly.” We
remember it because it hit home, and proved prophetic.)

Trump is the culmination of Republican conservatism from Goldwater to Reagan to

Gingrich, intensified by the Tea Party franchise. The proof lies in Trump’s easy
victory over his rivals and his swift takeover of Congress. Similarly, the
dithering of the Democrats is a direct result of their shift toward defending the
urban meritocracy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. (On this, Thomas Frank’s
Listen Liberal is the essential text.) That bias found its initial focus in the
Clinton regime, and it was continued by Obama. One beguiling sideshow of recent
weeks was the reappearance of Bill, talking about the Lewinsky affair and revealing
himself, once again, as devoid of any scrap of personal honor.

I’d like to be more hopeful. It’s possible that Sessions, Miller, and Trump have
overplayed their hand. Even some Bible thumpers have drawn the line at wailing
children, and the hicks are starting to notice that they need immigrant labor and
that tax cuts don’t offset trade wars. Some voters may realize that Trump and the
Republicans want to take away favored stretches of the Affordable Care Act. Trump
has counterpunched on the immigrant issue, but he may well find a way to back down
while declaring victory. As I type this, Senate Republicans are engaged in damage
control.…at the very moment that they propose cutting Social Security, Medicare,
and Medicaid to pay for the income tax cuts. Perhaps the base will notice.

But don’t bet on it. Overall support for Trump is solid, perhaps swelling, and not
just among his core, the gun fondlers and the white supremacists. CEOs like the
deregulation, the holy rollers favor humans in fetus form, the exurbanites savor
the punishing of the people who were the reason they feared the city, and the
peckerwoods just like to chortle at liberal outrage. Quite a coalition. Indeed, you
could treat the border crisis as a massive get-out-the-vote effort aimed at that
mob. Like what you see? Vote Republican!

Moreover, the increasing authoritarianism of Trump’s demeanor suggests that each

day brings a new power grab. He will likely be boosted by a passive Republican
congress and Democrats who are perpetually concerned, disturbed, and brow-furrowed
but never, somehow, furious. So we can’t assume that he won’t keep trying to expand
on his brutal impulses.

Two last thoughts.

(1) Trump continues to show himself a coward. When he met with Mexico’s president
during the campaign, he didn’t dare to raise the demand for a wall. Meeting
dictators in the Middle East and Asia, he bowed and scraped. Now, flexing his
muscle on kids, he and his minions tell half-a-dozen different stories about the
HHS policy rationale and deploy John Kelly’s puppet Homeland Security Secretary
Kirstjen Nielsen (above) to fend off the press with smirking lies. Trump himself
will not confront his critics, playing only to Fox News toadies and multitudes of
simpletons jammed into rallies.

(2) 2016 was, we now realize, an outsider election. Bernie could have won. But even
if he had lost, wouldn’t it have been worth the risk?

The crematorium is no longer in use. The devices of the Nazis are out of date. Nine
million dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to
warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from
our own? Somewhere among us, there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers, and
unknown informers. There are those who refused to believe this, or believed it only
from time to time. And there are those of us who sincerely look upon the ruins
today, as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and buried beneath them.
Those who pretend to take hope again as the image fades, as though there were a
cure for the plague of these camps. Those of us who pretend to believe that all
this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who
refuse to see, who do not hear the cry to the end of time.

Jean Cayrol’s text for Night and Fog (1955)

P.S. 20 June: Odd that people who decry Big Government would undertake a massive
enterprise like setting up a refugee camp. But the point is to do it badly, like
the Katrina debacle and the tragedy of Puerto Rico. The bureaucratic failures to
track parents and children who are separated are not only predictable but part of
the package, a feature not a bug. Remember the Republican slogan: “Government
doesn’t work. Elect us, and we’ll prove it.”

Some anecdotal confirmation that this round-the-clock spectacle is exactly what the
White House wants comes in this Vanity Fair piece. Predictably, Stephen Miller is
having the most fun of all.

Meanwhile, as the border crisis spirals, the absence of a coordinated policy

process has allowed the most extreme administration voices to fill the vacuum.
White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has all but become the face of the
issue, a development that even supporters of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” position say
is damaging the White House. “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the
border,” an outside White House adviser said. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was
raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-
SS.”

What pimply pre-teen would have imagined that de-pantsing little Stevie on the
playground would have had such consequences?

Newlyweds Donald Trump Sr. and Melania Trump with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill
Clinton at their reception held at The Mar-a-Lago Club in January 22, 2005 in Palm
Beach, Florida. (Photo by Maring Photography/Getty Images/Contour by Getty Images)

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