The naming of states in Tuesday night’s Hate of the Union rant continues to nag.
Today, Doc Oz announced million$ in Medicaid to be withheld from Minnesota. Last time states were attacked by an internal force, it was immediately recognized as a Civil War. At the time, states vs. states. This time, the internal force may reach north and west with sizable minorities in the bluest states, and control of several Great Plains and Rust Belt states. But it has a solid geographical base of states once called the Confederacy.
Over a century and a half later, they may not be the same people, but they profess the same ideology that gave us slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, segregation, “separate but equal,” George Wallace, Lester Maddox, fire hoses, ax handles, and “strange fruit.” You can say that a few of those have no comparison to anything in the USA today. But you cannot say that of the black masks that have replaced white hoods while raiding Northern and Western cities to apprehend innocent people they call “illegal aliens,” the updated phrase for “fugitive slaves.” Nor can you say it of Republican bills in numerous states and in the US Congress to purge rolls of registered voters.
We keep saying that many of ICE’s individual actions make no sense. For instance, last night’s seizure of a student at Columbia University with no criminal record. Until we reject the absurd pretense of “law enforcement” and recognize what this actually is, we will continue to be baffled. Consider it in the same context as the Reign of Terror across the South from the end of Reconstruction well into the 1930s, and everything ICE has done–including murder, including taking five-year-olds in bunny hats from their parents, including the jokes about the number of bullet holes one could pump into a day-care teacher–makes perfect, if perverse, sense.
Problem is that we are well past the start of Civil War II, and only one side knows it, understands it, talks like it, acts like, and has the advantage of it. All while the other side clings to the belief that it can’t happen here.
With comparisons to the Gestapo and an MO that recalls America’s infamous Fugitive Slave Act of the 1850s, the US Enforcement Immigration and Customs (ICE) is the cruelest feature of an administration in which cruelty is a top requirement for every job.
Apart from the military, ICE is the deadliest federal agency–although this week’s termination of the ability to restrict carbon emissions by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will in time prove more lethal than two dead in Minnesota.
Here in the northeast corner of Massachusetts, we’ve seen very little of ICE, despite no end of lower-case ice, but this month we have been rocked by two ICE-related news items.
First, word circulated that Todd Lyons, the Acting Director of ICE, lives in West Newbury, a sleepy, leafy little town with no more of a center than a small grocery store and a pizza joint, barely eight miles from the coast where I now write.
Second, just days ago we learned that New Hampshire Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed an agreement with ICE to permit the conversion of a warehouse in Merrimack N.H. into an ICE detention center with the capacity for 500 beds.
Residents of Merrimack and neighboring towns and cities knew that something was cooking and have been gathering by the hundreds at the site to hold vigils. They were shocked to learn that Ayotte had signed the agreement weeks earlier but never announced it. That’s very much in character for her. She campaigns without using the word “Republican,” omitting it from her signs and pamphlets, pretending that it’s not there, and disassociating herself from Trump as much as possible–just as most all New England Republicans do.
If that’s not duplicity enough, Ayotte is already dissing the plan despite the fact that she just signed off on it. According to the Associated Press:
Tensions boiled to the surface after interim ICE Director Todd Lyons testified Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security ‘has worked with Gov. Ayotte’ and provided her with an economic impact summary.
Always playing it both ways, Ayotte seized the chance to create an impression of opposing the move, claiming that Lyon’s claim was “simply not true” and that there was no summary sent until he had already testified. She also claimed that the document boasted of revenues to be gained by state sales and income taxes. New Hampshire has neither tax. Said Ayotte, as quoted by the AP:
Director Lyons’ comments today are another example of the troubling pattern of issues with this process… Officials from the Department of Homeland Security continue to provide zero details of their plans for Merrimack, never mind providing any reports or surveys.
Merrimack is barely 25 miles north of Lowell, Mass., about a dozen south of Manchester NH, and maybe 45 straight west from the coast. Before long, I’m sure to attend a vigil there, perhaps in a rendezvous with my musician friends in Peterborough NH, another 45 miles to the west.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been invited to join vigils outside of Todd Lyons’ residence in West Newbury. This has become the subject of debate among locals who attend the weekend rallies along main drags in Newburyport, Ipswich, and other towns nearby. Some feel that a protest shouldn’t be brought to anyone’s door, no matter how culpable they may be. What of the family, of neighbors?
Others ask what of the families of innocent people murdered by an agency under his direction? What of neighborhoods that have been living in terror for weeks and counting due to his decisions? Why should an administrator of and apologist for murder and terror have a safe space? Should their families be spared from candles in the night lit to shed light on their crimes?
I’m honestly torn. On the one hand, I cannot bring myself to protest at anyone’s residence. What if I offend some group with a column in the local paper? Plenty of opportunity for them to confront me in the press or in a public meeting. Outside my window? What good does that do?
On the other hand, I do not fault those who do hold signs outside Lyons’ home. Not only do I appreciate their rationale for doing it, but I respect their effort to act. As misdirected as I think it is, to stand outside that home, or the home of any member of Trump’s Reign of Hate–with signs, with chants, with flags, with the willingness to see wrong and try to right it–is preferable to doing nothing.
There’s one place I would go, however. Why, I’d be the first to buy a ticket, paying full price to sit up front. If the flap between Lyons and Ayotte should flare out of control, they might arrange a cage fight. I’d bring a sign:
Earlier today I received an email from the fellow who organizes events in Ipswich, including the No Kings rallies which I often attend on Saturdays. He added an item that struck a chord:
WBZ-CBS is airing commercials for ICE, threatening immigrants. I saw this while watching the news tonight and immediately contacted a friend who had worked at the station.They said to contact the Station Manager, Chris Ruggeri to complain. His email is cpruggeri@cbs.com. Phone 617-746-7140.
I’ve been seeing these for weeks during football games, college and pro, on various stations. I even mused at the idea of joining, grabbing the $50K signing bonus, then quitting to use that bonus to help defeat Republican candidates for the US House and Senate. Turns out, as my friend Woonsocket let me know, those bonuses are to given only after five years of terrorizing service, by which time, the gig will be up, and the masked suckers who joined will go empty-handed.
Then came the double-homicide in Minneapolis, soon followed by a name, a position, and an edress. Within seconds I zapped off this under the subject line, “In the Service of Hate”:
To Station Manager Chris Ruggeri: What is it like to profit from a terror campaign that has just murdered two people in cold blood? Will you show the videos of those murders with the commercials? What’s it like to be in the service of hate? Jack Garvey Plum Island
In just as little if not less time, my inbox had this:
Thank you for taking the time to contact us and share your feedback.
We understand that viewers sometimes have questions or concerns about national CBS News programming. While we value hearing from our audience, our local station does not produce or control the editorial content of CBS News’ national broadcasts.
To ensure your comments are reviewed by the appropriate team, we encourage you to direct any feedback regarding national CBS News programming to the CBS News Ombudsman at the link below:
Thank you again for reaching out and for watching CBS.
Sincerely, Your CBS Boston team
Passing the buck with a form letter! I may have been in triple digits on the Celsius Scale. Oh, I’ll contact the CBS ombudsman, but not without adding my response to the “CBS Boston team”:
Does the name Pontius Pilate ring a bell? Or are you playing Lady Macbeth? Speak now or plead for mercy at Nuremberg… Jack
This drew no response, automated or otherwise. Now that at least four hours have passed, I might even wonder if I’ve been reported to Trump’s heavily-financed-by-taxpayers goon squad as a domestic terrorist?
Surely, my two emails today were more combative and insulting than anything they heard from Renee Good or Alex Pretti. And, look, I have something in my hand that, when I click it, even before I click it, could accurately be called a threat, not just to ICE, but to the Reign of Hate that has unleashed it on us.
At least I hope it’s a threat. Why else would I spend any time with it?
Well, it’s been a loud week in Minnesota, not far from where I once lived out there on the edge of the prairie.
In a previous life, I would have been snug in my trailer barely a dozen miles from the state’s border on a winter weekend. On an early Saturday evening, I’d have been tuning into Minnesota Public Radio to hear A Prairie Home Companion. Listened to it here in my coastal home for over three decades before it ran its course.
What would today’s “News from Lake Wobegon” sound like?
That question was on my mind when I left a No Kings rally in Ipswich, and I might try to answer it except that Garrison Keillor is about to begin a US tour on Jan. 31.* He can and will speak for himself. Quite a coincidence that the closest the tour comes to me will be on April 16 in Portsmouth N.H.–right across the Piscataqua River from Maine where ICE began its second state invasion just days ago.
Remember all those indignant Republican invocations of the 10th Amendment–a.k.a. “States Rights”–during the Obama years? No doubt a PHC show this week would include a skit on memory loss. Would Guy Noir try to find it?
One detail right up Keillor’s alley is the name that ICE has given its second Confederate attack on yet another state of the Union disdained by its authoritarian master: Operation Catch of the Day. So clever that we shouldn’t be surprised if someone with a sense of humor urges either Noem or Trump to claim the name is a sincere attempt to advertise Maine’s seafood industry.
As a satirist, Keillor might have a hard time trying to make fun of an operation that appears to satirize itself. “Catch,” is here intended as a double-entendre: We catch “aliens” where you catch fish. And when you’re out in your little boat hauling in cod or lobster, you have to preserve them, and so what do you need for all the time it takes to bring them to market? Along Commercial Street in Portland, tubs of it surround you in fish markets as the clerks take fish atop them to weigh on scales, and then throw more fish on the tubs, straight off the docks just steps from their back doors.
ICE! The name must have seemed fitting enough in Minnesota. Don’t know about records in Wobegon or Minneapolis, or even Lake Benton where I went on dates, but I recall hearing a radio report of minus-35 temps in International Falls. Reports tell us that thousands of Minnesotans braved sub-zero wind chills yesterday to protest the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old mother–only to witness the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old nurse whose only crime was taking a video of what he saw.
Included in those numbers were 100 members of the Twin City’s clergy at the Minneapolis Airport as they tried to convince airlines to stop serving ICE. In Ipswich today, signs with the outline of the K-shaped state seemed to replace the Greenland flags of last week. When I mentioned this to a woman who asked what “Mpls” stood for, I added that I long ago met two Methodist ministers in Minneapolis and wondered if they were there. She looked around: “I wonder if any of them are here.”
What would be the sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility if the young Father Wilmer delivered it? And would the semi-retired Father Emil approve? And what would the staid Lutheran Pastor Ingqvist say? Or the lively Pastor Liz? Or Max and Georgiana, lively characters as I recall, who both laughed when I told them, “There’s Methodism to your madness”?
What of the rest of us? Are we perpetually responsible? Are we responsible at all? Would those questions be considered at The Chatterbox Cafe, Cafe Boeuf, or The Sidetrack Tap? What would Harold Star opine in his Herald Star?
If Lake Wobegon was “a little town that time forgot,” time has caught up to it now. Today it is very much a part of a nation that appears determined to be one that “the decades cannot improve.” It’s as if we have forsaken The Enlightenment for the Dark Ages, a repudiation that was actually called for by a candidate for president in the Republican primaries of 2012. Her name was Michele Bachmann, and she was elected to the US House from 2007 to 2015 by the northern suburbs of, ah, um, yes, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
And that’s the news from Lake America, where the land is no longer free, where people at home beg senators and representatives in DC to be brave, and where children are used as bait to bring adults with dark complexions within reach of masked goons eager to fill quotas that are as apparently open to murder as to deportation.
And now we here in New England are treated to the news of a Babson College freshman at Logan Airport awaiting a flight to Texas to surprise her family on Thanksgiving.
Sounds like a story for the holidays featuring a 19-year-old Lucia Lopez Belloza who was brought to America at the age of seven from her native Honduras. A “Dreamer” as we call children of refugees in the pursuit of happiness, this one with a stellar high school record that gained her admission to the prestigious business school–a step to turning her father’s freelance tailoring into a family enterprise.
But these are holidays that try our souls if we care at all about anyone beyond our own circles of friends and family.
Lopez Belloza was intercepted by ICE agents, detained, and then deported to Honduras. No matter that an immigration lawyer was able to secure a court order to stop the deportation. And even less matter that she was being sent to a place she hasn’t seen since she was seven.
Months ago, a Boston Globe headline declared that “Agents in Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign seem to be reveling in brutality.” By that time, “seem to be” seemed to be an attempt at a very bad joke–or yet another attempt at balance where balance no longer exists.
Of all the Trump Administration’s betrayals of democracy, ICE is the most glaring. The campaign claim was that “criminals” would be round up and deported. But most of the people who have been nabbed in cities and towns all across the country have clean records, have jobs, pay taxes, and are raising families or going to school. That so many neighborhoods, churches, civic groups, sports teams, places of employment, and classmates rally around them testifies to this.
Quite a trick it is that all ICE does is visible, and yet they all wear masks. For everyone except those who still cling to the lobotomy of a belief that “nothing can be compared to the Nazis,” ICE is the American Gestapo. What happens to those they capture and detain may never be the same, but the effect that ICE raids have on people of a targeted race who remain in our cities and towns is that of intimidation auf Deutsch circa 1932 that gradually became terror by the end of that decade.
My last attempt to tip the scales back into balance was, according to my own headline, a “Portrait of a Rodeo Clown,” posted just days ago. That would be Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristy Noem, who has turned brutality and cruelty into America’s new spectator sport. All while “inspecting” her barbed-wire-surrounded and chain-link-cage-filled detention centers in clothes tight enough to give her the name “ICE Barbie.”
The heavily Botoxed and lightly brained MAGA champion was on the front end of the MAGA movement that splashed into America soon after the Golden Calf descended the escalator in his Tower of Babel and began bleating Make America Great Again in June of 2015. To this day, she has been among Trump’s most fawning worshipers, praising him soon after his bombing of civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela with words as lavish as her numbers are preposterous:
You have saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean.
Following my “Rodeo Clown” post, I soon had emails pointing out that I forgot her numerous flights to Mar-a-Lago in 2024 auditioning for selection as Trump’s running mate, and another for cosmetic dental work in Texas. All were at the expense of South Dakota taxpayers while she was still their governor.
Worse, I forgot that each of South Dakota’s tribes banned her from entering all nine reservations in the state. In a previous life, I visited a few of those reservations, including a week-long field trip on Pine Ridge in 1977, and I recall a rich sense of humor, from dry to slapstick to gallows, on each. Native Americans love those who make them laugh.
Therefore, I now apologize to rodeo clowns for the implied comparison I made of them to a woman who in a cabinet meeting just yesterday, addressing a man in an orange wig who appeared to be falling asleep, said this:
Sir, you made it through the hurricane season without a hurricane — you kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that.
Sounds like a backdrop for a holiday story. But holidays are worthy of their diverse names only if the dialogue is honest and those who speak it care about anyone beyond their own circles of friends and family.
As long as Americans allow college students to be dragged out of airports–or construction workers off sites, nurses from hospitals, teachers from schools, waiters and cooks from restaurants, factory workers from their plants and their homes–our holidays are as fraudulent as the crosses Trump’s Barbies often wear around their necks.
Holiday celebration? Can’t speak of other religions, but my Catholic upbringing tells me that our holiday this year will be better observed as a call to action.
Mouth of the River 