All they lacks are railcars
The headline on Masha Gessen’s New Yorker conversation with psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton promises to reveal how one maintains hope in an age of catastrophe. It is a fascinating conversation with a man who has studied human depravity, literal fallout from it, and what differentiates “the helpless victim and the survivor as agent of change.” As for how one maintains hope today, the headline is a tease.
“Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope,” Gessen writes.
Amidst the bickering over the war in Gaza, less tease and more how-to would have been nice. Given the obvious trajectory of the Trump cult, what’s needed is a way both to avoid being a victim and needing to be change agents after the fact of a period of “psychic numbing” and “malignant normality” that leads to unspeakable evil by banal men and women.
Areeba Shah warns at Salon that networks seem desensitized to Donald Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric. After covering years of it, the malignant normality of it is no longer shocking even if it is news:
“If we don’t call out the rhetoric as extreme, we risk making it normal and acceptable,” Libby Hemphill, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and the Institute for Social Research, told Salon.
Too late.
Trump’s recent comments about vowing to implement rigorous ideological screening of immigrants to the U.S., particularly suggesting he would turn away anyone who doesn’t like “our religion,” received little coverage. Broadcast news “totally ignored the comments,” Media Matters pointed out. Meanwhile, cable news devoted just under seven minutes of coverage and CNN and MSNBC each devoted about three minutes, with Fox News devoting less than one minute.
Even so, the Washington Post last week alerted readers to Trump’s (and his enablers’) plans to turn a second term into a festival of revenge and retribution that could make Stalin smile. For all its sins, the New York Times has not totally forsaken raising the alarm about mass deportations and more detention camps. The strategist behind Trump’s second-term war on immigrants is a man who’d look at home in a gray uniform: Stephen Miller.
Mr. Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.
All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
Blitz, indeed. Spectacular crackdown. Like no one’s ever seen. And Trump’s spirit infuses the effort. But, oh, we’ve seen it before.
His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.
As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”
Trump and Miller would ship immigrants they round up in railcars without a second thought about the optics. And perhaps to gleefully drive home the point that they mean business.
I was really looking forward to how to maintain hope in an age of catastrophe.
Lucky for me, I’m not a psychiatrist. I can declare this man, his henchmen, and his NAR true believers fucking lunatics and it’s no violation of professional standards.