Hank Kalet

Elections have consequences. If we didn’t know that before, the fist six days of the Trump administration are making it abundantly clear.

The latest salvo came today in the form of two executive orders cracking down on undocumented immigrants. The first clears the way for construction of a border wall — a colossal boondoggle that is popular with the anti-immigrant crowd, but that makes little sense from a security standpoint — not to mention the damage it will do to the environment and the potential problems it could create in our relationship with our southern neighbor. It also ends what anti-immigration groups call “catch and release,” the capture of non-criminal aliens at the border who are then released pending a court appearance.

A second order goes after so-called sanctuary cities, or municipalities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities on detainers (requests to keep someone in jail while his immigration status is reviewed) or on the sharing of information. Newark, Jersey City, Princeton, East Orange, and Maplewood have proclaimed sanctuary or welcoming city status, and other New Jersey communities are likely to follow suit. The order essentially threatens these communities with a loss of federal funds — housing, health, environmental, etc. — hoping to force them to back off and to let local police be turned into deputized immigration officers.

Seems innocuous, right? It isn’t. As Ari Rosmarin of the ACLU-NJ told me today (for a story that should run in NJ Spotlight tomorrow), it’s an underhanded way for Trump to keep his enforcement promises — which will require a massive increase in manpower — without hiring new agents. The problem, however, is that already strapped local forces will be further strapped.

And more is coming, as reported by Vox:

The four remaining draft orders obtained by Vox focus on immigration, terrorism, and refugee policy. They wouldn’t ban all Muslim immigration to the US, breaking a Trump promise from early in his campaign, but they would temporarily ban entries from seven majority-Muslim countries and bar all refugees from coming to the US for several months. They would make it harder for immigrants to come to the US to work, make it easier to deport them if they use public services, and put an end to the Obama administration program that protected young “DREAMer” immigrants from deportation.

Vox describes the six orders, taken together, “one of the harshest crackdowns on immigrants — both those here and those who want to come here — in memory.” It’s also a conservative wet-dream version of comprehensive immigration reform — all enforcement and deportation, an ugly reminder that this nation of immigrants has always also been a nation of xenophobia and racism.

Read the history of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century. Jews, Italians, Poles — all seen as dangerous parasites bringing infectious disease and dangerous ideologies, all presented in language that eerily echoes the nonsense we repeatedly hear today about Latinos and Muslims.

The reality is that Trump is not so much a crazy anomaly as a throwback. He is not the nation’s crazy uncle, so much as he’s the suppressed Id, all the ugliness of our history, all our worst instincts, the truth buried under the lies we tell ourselves in an effort to prove how great and exceptional a nation we are.

Send me an e-mail.

And it’s true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
— U2, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”

That we are in an era of double-speak — Orwell’s phrase from his novel 1984 — is not exactly a surprise. American politicians going back to at least Eisenhower have been pretty good at the presidential lie.

• Johnson used the trumped up Gulf of Tonkin incident to widen the war in Vietnam.
• Nixon told the world that he was not a crook, even as his administration and re-election campaign were trying to rig an election that he was going to win.
• Reagan shipped arms to Iran in violation of an embargo, trading the arms for American hostages even as he continued to tell the American public that the United States did not negotiate with terrorists or terrorist regimes.
• Clinton did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky or inhale.
• And George W. Bush pushed the lie that there were WMDs in Iraq so that he could invade.

In some ways, the presidential lie is an American tradition — in fact, Eric Alterman wrote an entire book about it.

None of these presidents has been quite so brazen as the 45th president has been during his first six days in office. Donald Trump has taken the presidential lie to new heights. He lies about easily verifiable facts, about the smallest and most inconsequential things. And then he — and his press team — lashes out at the media for uncovering the lies.

The presidential lie has always been dangerous to our democracy, and often it has had deadly results — millions of dead in Vietnam, Iraq, El Salvador and elsewhere, for instance.

But something about the brazenness of Trump’s lies stands out. The meme that has gone around — that Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth and Trump couldn’t tell the difference — doesn’t really get to it. I think Trump does know the difference; he just doesn’t care. And what makes it so damaging, and potentially more damaging than what we are used to, is the sheer volume of mistruths being tossed around, the easiness with which he posits his own reality, with which he recasts the world in his distorted image. And, perhaps more chilling, it is the fact that his supporters are so willing to take him at his word.

We are entering a moment in which the sheer volume of lies is creating a new alt-truth by overwhelming those of us whose job it is to keep an eye on what politicians are doing, and by overwhelming the ability of average people to process the information that is being tossed at them. Most people do not have the time to do the hard work of verifying what they hear and read, especially if they are being subjected to information overload. Take the press out of the equation — by overloading the fourth estate AND attacking it, fostering a mistrust of the only people in our society with the time and skills to dig into the muck — and the lies get to stand.

Reality, then, becomes what the politicians, the Trump administration, say it is. We were able to battle back during the Bush era and — while I hope we can do the same today, and I plan to continue to do my part as journalist, writer, general pain in the ass to push back — I fear we are close to the tipping point.

Send me an e-mail.

Here are a few sentences from today’s Charles Blow column in The New York Times:

At one point in the speech, Trump delivered the bewildering line: “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” Patriotism does not drive out prejudice; to the contrary, it can actually enshrine it. No one was more patriotic than our founding fathers, and yet most of the prominent founding fathers were slave owners.

It perfectly encapsulates the false duality Trump and his supporters are attempting to foster. Patriotism and prejudice, as Blow points out, are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would argue that patriotism is a form of prejudice: Patriotism posits the greatness of the nation in which one lives and implies that other nations are less vital or great. This does not mean that patriotism is a negative term, only that it carries a form of exceptionalism with it.

We often conflate the words prejudice and racism. They are related. But prejudice has a much broader definition; racism is based on hatred, while prejudice is prejudgment and can have both positive and negative connotations. I tend to be prejudiced in my response to the music of Bruce Springsteen, meaning I am likely to respond positively to new songs before fully considering whether they hold up.

Patriotism is prejudice. It starts from the assumption that your homeland, your nation, that our homeland, our nation, is exceptional, that it is great, that it has earned our pride and devotion. None of this precludes other kinds of prejudice. As Blow says, the founders were both patriotic and slaveholders. To take it a step farther — and to court controversy — Adolph Hitler could be described as a German patriot, someone who elevated love of country and a belief in its exceptional nature to its most extreme, hate-filled and violent ends. Hitler’s patriotism was the purest form of prejudice — and 6 million Jews and 5 million others were killed as proof.

What is just as troubling (I pointed this out the other day) is that Donald Trump’s false proposition — “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice” — is being proffered within an “America First” framework. “America First,” remember, was the slogan of American Nazi sympathizers in the run up to World War II and is not the benign slogan that many Trump supporters seem to think it is.

Again, patriotism is not a bad thing — a love of country that is not blind to a country’s flaws, that seeks to push the country to be its best self is a positive thing, though we need to understand that there will be differing definitions of what is its best self. It’s when love of country precludes criticism of country, when it prizes unity as an end in itself, when it demands obedience to a flag or a leader that we are in dangerous territory.

Trump’s rhetoric has not taken us there — yet — which is why we have to remain vigilant.

Reminder: As an Alien in a Land of Promise is available for purchase

Hank Kalet’s As an Alien in a Land of Promise is a book-length mediation on homelessness and American capitalism. Interspersed with Sherry Rubel’s black-and-white photos, the hybrid work of poetry and journalism tells the stories of those living in a now-defunct homeless camp in central New Jersey, asking why our economic system turns people into refuse.

Based on a year of interviews and research in the former Tent City in Lakewood, Kalet tells the stories of people like Angelo, who lost his job in the crash of 2008, and the musician Michael. Interspersed with their voices – and those of “the pastor,” are writers like Jonathan Kozol and Michael Harrington, whose earlier research informs Kalet’s work.

The poet Eliot Katz, a former advocate for the homeless in New Brunswick, calls the book an “inventive mix of objectivist-influenced, journalistic poems and moving photographs” that “brings real, often-ignored human stories, statistics, and local geographies to life.”

B.J. Ward, author of Jackleg Opera, says Kalet “works in the poetic traditions of the inspired and observant narrator in Whitman’s ‘The Sleepers’ and, with his sense of lineation, Williams’ image-emphasis.”

Kalet is a journalist, essayist and poet, whose work appears regularly in NJ Spotlight and has been published by The Progressive, In These Times, The Progressive Populist, Main Street Rag, Lips, The Journal of New Jersey Poets and elsewhere. He is the auther of Stealing Copper, Certainties and Uncertainties, and Suburban Pastoral.

The book is published by the independent Piscataway House Press.

For more, see asanalieninalandofpromise.wordpress.com/ The book can be ordered at channel-surfing.blogspot.com/p/buy-books-by-hank-kalet.html, from Piscataway House, or Amazon. For press information, contact Hank Kalet at hankkalet@gmail.com. Press kit available upon request.

Send me an e-mail.

On my Facebook page, I offered some comments to my conservative friends who have been attacking the left as “sore losers.” I figured I’d share here, as well.

Send me an e-mail.