Lite Supremacy

 

Protestors outside Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images, via The New York Times.

The Times used the above photo twice this week, once yesterday in news coverage of the big scandal of the Los Angeles City Council, and once in a blown-up splash under the headline for today's David Brooks column ("This Is What Happens When Race Is Everything"), without any explanation of what it is actually a picture of, or in the Brooks piece even a passing reference, which isn't what you'd easily think of if you were following the story anywhere other than the L.A. Times (I heard about it on NPR but noticed I was hearing it only because it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately).

Namely, these people are protesting something quite different from the thing Brooks wrote about, or thought he was writing about:

Council President Nury Martinez — who has since resigned from the Council — along with two colleagues and a labor ally talked about a range of subjects, including redistricting, but two assumptions undergirded much of what they said. Their first assumption was that America is divided into monolithic racial blocs. The world they take for granted is not a world of persons; it’s a world of rigid racial categories.

Concentration

Cuba, 1896-97, via latinamericanstudies.

In 1896 General Valeriano Weyler, leading Spanish imperial forces against a Cuban guerilla insurgency, decided like many imperial commanders from Napoleon to Westmoreland that it's a problem when your enemy consists of irregular forces blended into the general population, and came up with a novel method of separating them out: he'd take the non-militant members of communities off their land and "reconcentrate" them in central locations where he could stop them from helping the guerillas with food and shelter and keep them out of harm's way, in what he called, with a military bureaucrat's gift for dulling a concept with neuter phrasing, campos de concentración. The policy was, effectively, race-based, as was the war:

'"...del millón seicientos mil habitantes que aproximadamente había en Cuba cuando empezó esta guerra, unos doscientas mil eran españoles, quinientos mil negros o mulatos, unos ochocientos mil blancos cubanos o criollos y un número no determinado de chinos, jamaicanos, haitianos y otros. Los españoles, con alguna notable excepción en especial dentro del clero, se mantenían fieles a España y en contra de la revolución de los cubanos. Los negros, salvo conductas puntuales, estaban entusiásticamente unidos para apoyar a los rebeldes bajo promesa de abolición de la esclavitud, y por que intuían que al final triunfaría la rebelión contra España...Esperaban que bajo el nuevo régimen tendrían condiciones muy similares a las de la vecina república de Haití... soñaban con una Cuba libre ..." 

[Out of the approximately 1.6 million inhabitants of Cuba about 200,000 were Spanish, 500,000 Negroes and mulattos, 800,000 white Cubans and Creoles, and an undetermined number of Chinese, Jamaicans, Haitians, and others. The Spaniards, with some notable exceptions in particular among the Catholic clergy, remained faithful to Spain and opposed to the Cuban revolution. The Negroes, except for particular cases, were enthusiastically united in support of the rebels under a promise that slavery would be abolished, and because they had an intuitive sense that the rebellion would win... They hoped that under the new regime conditions like those in the nearby republic of Haiti could be created, and dreamed of a free Cuba...]

Don Tzu's Art of War

Drawing of the late 16th-century Azuchi Castle near Kyoto, from the collection of the Osaka Castle Museum, via Wikipedia.

Don Tzu said, It is better not to go to war. But if you must go to war, go to war against your friends rather than your enemies, for your friends have an interest in letting you look good afterwards.

This can be seen especially in the Emperor's conduct of economic war, in which he hasn't followed his own advice but waged it against practically everybody, as The Times was saying,

Over a few weeks, Mr. Trump has declared European and Japanese cars, Chinese telecom equipment and Mexican immigrants national security threats. Those declarations have given the president authority to use Cold War powers to inflict economic pain on countries through tariffs, government blacklists and other restrictions.

(with the odd little exception of Russia, neither a friend nor a foe), and found when he does it to the people he hates, like Iran and China, they just end up laughing at him, whereas the European Union or Japan or Australia always make the effort to avoid hurting his feelings.

So, Mexico, against which he declared economic war on 30 May:

....at which time the Tariffs will be removed. Details from the White House to follow.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2019

It seems this was provoked not by a Fox News person but some talk-radio rant, I don't know from whom, in the absence of some key adults, Pence and Kudlow and maybe Lighthizer, per CNBC:

The Boy Who Cried "Invasion!"

The Los Laureles water reservoir, which supplies water to the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, except not when it doesn't have any water, as in this photo taken 10 March (by Orlando Sierra/AFP).

Cute headline from the Washington Post:
Power Up: Nielsen's ouster signals even tougher Trump border rhetoric

Rhetoric alert! We can expect severe invective storms over the next few weeks, with frequent outbreaks of junior-high sarcasm, malicious lies, and sweeping stereotypes.

One of the things about Trump's border policy that's not getting enough attention is that, while we're knee deep in rhetoric, the policy itself has been a huge fail in its own terms, in its key aim of discouraging asylum applicants from Central America, now arriving in record numbers and overwhelming the border authorities, who are driven to expedients like that El Paso encampment of the end of March:

Literary Corner: Wallternatives

Stretch of the Great Wall in a rural region, somewhat in disrepair, photo by Mark Holmquist/Wikimedia Commons.

When Trump started saying "wall" without an article and Kirst Jen Nielsen decided to imitate him, as if this was the latest style ("From Congress, I would ask for wall. We need wall" and "DHS is committed to building wall and building wall quickly. We are not replacing short, outdated and ineffective wall with similar wall"), I was inspired to some song parody after Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, 1955:

https://t.co/VjRRfCiBjW

— Hans Scholl (@HansSchollo) December 22, 2018

The attached video, a rapid tour of the US-Mexico border made out of Google Earth shots, is a really extraordinary piece of film and I urge everybody to watch it, even though it looks kind of long.

Trump's latest summary of his infatuation with wall covers a tremendous number of bases in a very compact way, in one of those song-like forms he sometimes experiments with:

Literary Corner: Days on the Border

One of the most 25th-Amendment things yet, from Trump's Mar-a-Lago Thanksgiving press availability, as reported at Huffington Post Canada, starting around 16 minutes in, when he informed the startled reporters that he had closed the US-Mexican border a couple of days earlier. Startled, I mean, because if he had done that they thought they probably would have heard about it, And of course they hadn't....

I. Closing the Border

Actually two days ago
we closed the border.
We actually just closed it.
We said nobody’s coming in
because it was out of control.
You take a look at Tijuana Mexico
and see what's happening there
it's really a bad situation.

President Trump is Not Authorized to Speak for Himself

National Guard troops outside Hidalgo, TX, in 2011. AP photo via MPR.

Yesterday, in the wake of Trump's announcing to a press availability on Tuesday that he was pulling all the US troops out of Syria and "The White House" clarifying a few hours later that no, that was not in fact the case ("President Trump," they did not add, "is not authorized to speak for the Trump administration"), BooMan wrote,

He may be crazy and flat wrong on many details, but he is the president and if he wants to end our commitment to the region, you’d think that he could force a change in policy. But he can’t. Obama found himself handcuffed in some respects, too. If there is such a thing as the “deep state,” this is how it manifests itself. Even presidents have to bow to them on occasion.

I thought that was exaggerating both the existence of a "deep state" and this president's involvement in the government:

Can Jared Kushner Do His Job? What Job?

In my film version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, I'm casting John Kelly as the unnamed governess, Donald Trump as poor little Miles, and Jared Kushner as the unspeakably evil, but possibly imaginary, ghost of Peter Quint. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

I can't get over all the solemn concern as to whether Jared Kushner will be able to do his job without a security clearance—like Mara Liasson audibly shaking her head on NPR: "He won't be able to read the President's Daily Briefing!", that single page of amply illustrated bullet points highlighting stories where the president's name shows up. Imma come right out and speculate there isn't that much classified information in the PDB anyway, not only because the governess is afraid Trump might get angry, or pass what he learns to Putin or Netanyahu or who knows who, just by way of showing off how clued in he is, but because there's no real positive point in it—what useful thing would Trump be able to do with such information? He doesn't even believe it if it doesn't show up on Fox.

If There is No Wall

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8, 1923. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Donald Trump is best known as an oral poet, a jammer, improvising his work for a live audience from a repertory of formulas, like an ancient Irish bard in the banquet hall of heroes. In his other main literary genre, the Tweet, many of the same features are found, the formulaic repetition, the hortation, the dart from topic to topic, but it has never seemed at least to this reader to add up to poetry—too instrumental, I think, too devoted to trying to dominate the reader with its threats and demands and even cries of pain, a combination of the imperial rescript, the child's whine, and the barking of the Labradoodle. The recent doubling of the maximum Tweet length from 140 to 280 characters may be changing that, though, giving him room to stretch and lyricize, if this morning's cycle is anything to go by.

Note especially the way he veers playfully off topic in the third section and then returns, bringing the larger work to a unifying close.

If There is No Wall

by Donald Trump

I. The Wall is the Wall

The Wall is the Wall,
it has never changed or evolved
from the first day I conceived of it.
Parts will be, of necessity,
see through and it was never
intended to be built in areas
where there is natural protection
such as mountains, wastelands
or tough rivers or water.....

II. NAFTA is a Bad Joke

....The Wall will be paid for,
directly or indirectly,
or through longer term reimbursement,
by Mexico, which has a ridiculous
$71 billion dollar trade surplus with the U.S.
The $20 billion dollar Wall
is “peanuts” compared to what Mexico makes
from the U.S. NAFTA is a bad joke!