Cosmopolitan bias

Hedgehog in vampire costume, via wideopenpets.

Can't stop thinking about that exchange between White House political advisor Stephen Miller (or "David Duke's favorite Jew" as The Forward has called him) and CNN's Jim Acosta, with reference to the awful immigrattion bill submitted by Senators Cotton and Perdue aiming at cutting legal immigration to the US by 50% and restructuring the rules to bring fewer unskilled workers and relatives of citizens and more "high-value" entrepreneurs and professionals to our shores:

Q.... Yes, people who immigrate to this country can eventually -- people who immigrate to this country not through Ellis Island, as your family may have, but in other ways, do obtain a Green Card at some point. They do it through a lot of hard work. And, yes, they may learn English as a second language later on in life. But this whole notion of “well, they have to learn English before they get to the United States,” are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?

MR. MILLER: Jim, it’s actually -- I have to honestly say I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It’s actually -- it reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree that in your mind --

Q Sir, it’s not a cosmopolitan --

Acosta, who is of Cuban origin—his father came to the US as a refugee in September 1962, weeks before the Cuban missile crisis erupted—obviously isn't thinking about the many Caribbeans and upper-middle–class Africans and South and Southeast Asians who could find access to green cards through the Cotton-Perdue immigration proposals, but about the many people who could be shut out by this system. especially from Latin America, including, let's say, qualified engineers and doctors and the like. But he puts it very artlessly, giving Miller his opportunity to start browbeating.

Ross Douthat, Death Eater

Witch feeding rat and toad familiars, via American Folkloric Witchcraft.

Is Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, a practicing wizard?

There's just the one positive clue, a throwaway reference to "the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad", who seems to have done the primary research and theorizing for yesterday's column ("The Muggle Problem"). Oh, sure, Ross, that's just some blogger? Because it sounds a lot like a familiar to me.

Ross was concerned about the "lovely, lively, but ultimately childish novels" of J.K. Rowling, of which the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published just 20 years ago Tuesday, and the world in which they are set, and the political discussion to which they have given rise, especially among liberals, to which he seems to object. "Watch yourselves, libs, callow dorm-room analysis of popular literature and TV shows showing that they justify your political views is conservative business," he doesn't say.

Naturally, to commemorate the occasion, where many of us might think of celebrating the story of a single mother on the dole in Scotland who became a billionaire by the unusual means of teaching many hundreds of thousands of children to love books, the Monsignor would like us to understand that the Potter books may be "lovely and lively" but they are really not very nice under the skin, and the thing he picks on is the idea that magical folk constitute a biologically privileged elite, contemptuous of their nonmagical Muggle relatives and neighbors, in which the liberal witches and wizards who talk a kindhearted and compassionate game are really no different from the outright racist conservatives, merely more hypocritical:

Cosmopolitans are the *real* bigots

Borgo Cassati, portrait of Captain Sir Richard Burton in his disguise as "Mirza Abdullah of Bushire, a vendor of fine linen, calicoes and muslins", which enabled him to enter the no-go zone of Mecca in 1851-53. Image via somebody's abandoned Pinterest.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, offers his own take ("The Myth of Cosmopolitanism") on the Great Realignment theme introduced this week by James Traub and David Brooks:

NOW that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan.

If you think there's something going on there where Shakespeare's John of Gaunt (Richard II, act 2 scene 1) is getting presented as Trump with a classy English accent, you're right.