You know what’s really annoying about what our duly elected president said about Haiti, El Salvador and all those African countries? I’ll tell you what. It’s that the president can use language I am generally not allowed to use in this column. I can’t say what he said. Well, maybe I could just this one time, but I’m not going to push it, because there will be other opportunities. The man hasn’t stopped talking yet.
I noticed last week some newspapers referred to Trump’s description of those countries as a “crude epithet.” I will henceforth refer to that combination of the s-word and the word “hole” as the CE.
By the way, I am actually quite proficient in saying the s-word. One of the many places I lived in during the course of being an army brat was a little neighborhood in a little town in Massachusetts where the children from Hades who were natives of the neighborhood decreed that all newcomers who did not use the s-word at least once in every sentence should be bloodied beyond recognition. After witnessing them doing so to one extreme recalcitrant, I decided I would stoop to learn and adopt their strange practices. For, when in Rome, blah-dee-blah.
In fact I excelled at the usage of the s-word, astonishing all by my ability to use it an average of three times in every sentence rather than just the obligatory once.
Things like that turned me into an amateur practical sociologist. As we moved from place to place the rules changed, and I was always led to wonder why. Why would it be that in one place I get in trouble for using a word, and then in the next place I live I get beat up for not using the same word? The answer, to this amateur practical sociologist, was that the children of the second place were Satanic spawn.
That might sound like I veered off topic but I don’t think so. The thing is, what we all want to get straight is why did Trump apply the CE (the Crude Epithet I will not write) to Haiti, El Salvador and those African countries, and not, say, to Norway or Sweden?
The obvious answer is racism. Haitians, El Salvadorans and Africans are not so often White. Whereas, on the whole, Norwegians and Swedes differ in that respect.
But I think there’s got to be more to it than that. Sure, Donald Trump is a White Supremacist. But he is so much worse than that.
The neighborhood where using the s-word was required consisted of poor working-class people who were hanging on to shabby prefab homes by the skin of their teeth. A train track ran through the neighborhood, and half the houses’ backyards met the tracks. Because the houses were cheap they were badly insulated, and energy bills were too high. The children knew their neighborhood was viewed by the rest of the town as a pit. They responded by slinging the s-word around, aiming it at everyone else and everything else. It was a form of compensation for being held in low regard by the rest of the town.
Trump’s complaint isn’t just that people are coming here from these “no-good” countries, but also that hardly any people are coming here from the “good” countries. The fact that Norwegians aren’t flocking to our shores means we don’t get the respect we deserve from Norwegians, is what I think Trump thinks, and it pains him.
Why don’t people from well-off White countries want to immigrate to the United States? That is beyond a racist complaint. That is a racist lament.
It suddenly becomes clear what the ultimate goal in Trump’s mind of blocking non-White immigration is.
Once enough people from the bad countries can be deported or blocked from entry, the United States will start looking like a haven for the people from the good countries. In Trump’s fantasies we will be like a Mar-a-Lago of nations. All the best people will live here, all the good socialites and celebrities, and the best people in the best countries will finally start wanting to come here.
Trump is so far beyond racist, he thinks Norwegians are racists, too, and the only reason they aren’t rushing to live in the United States is because this country isn’t yet White enough for them.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd.
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