I’m guessing you don’t need my opinion on Donald Trump’s proposed ban of all Muslims from entering the United States – you’ve probably heard the full gamut, from Steve King to Bernie Sanders. My first thought was for all of the Muslim students I have known and met, both natural born U.S. citizens and visa holders from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, and others. I hear this insane rhetoric, growing louder by the day, and I think of a young fellow from Afghanistan – about the nicest person you could hope to meet – and what his thoughts might be about the people who “liberated” his country, then overstayed their welcome for 14 years.
This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn’t find on a globe with both hands. I’ve lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, to the embassy bombings in the late 1990s and on into the 9/11 era. I can remember a Muslim friend from Bosnia being a bit taken aback by the rhetoric and the kind of full-on nationalism pushed through the corporate media that came about after Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. It’s times like these when Muslims – and yes, people with beards and headscarves more generally – feel compelled to start looking over their shoulders.
There’s a push, primarily by Republicans but with Democratic assent as well, to view international terrorism and specifically ISIS as a grave, even existential threat to citizens of the United States. Opinion polls have been showing that this is paying off – people are good and scared, which is music to ISIS’s ears. But what the hell – thousands of people in America are killed by the domestic terror of gun violence every year, some of it motivated in part by extremist religion. I would say that that was more unambiguously the case in the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting than in the San Bernardino attack, just on the basis of the rantings of the shooter, Robert Dear. We are far more likely to be shot by someone like Dear than by someone like Farook.
So … why are we encouraged to fear the lesser danger? It’s the political magic of otherness. Always a winner in America.
luv u,
jp
The thing is, Trump is a mirror to the Republican base, as 
My life isn’t exactly typical, but my family experience offers some insight into the depth of white privilege. My dad came back from World War II, got his high school equivalency diploma, and went to work. He was white, so it wasn’t that challenging to find a job in those days. He had V.A. and F.H.A. loans, barred to black families, with which to purchase his first, second, third house and so on. By the late sixties / early seventies, we were living in a new house in the richest town in our county, with one son on the way to Oberlin College, all on one salary. Dad’s financial profile more or less tracked the trajectory of the American white working class, declining somewhat through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but he left enough to fund an IRA and, with Social Security, set my mom up for the rest of her life. Black families, by and large, didn’t have any of that – not the jobs, not the equity, not the access to credit, an not the freedom to live wherever they wanted.
Starting with the debate, probably the most telling moments of that sorry spectacle were the attacks against the event moderators – the calls of unfairness most effectively delivered by Ted Cruz, who (as Sam Seder has pointed out) really owns that sense of grievance that has become such a central part of the Republican/Tea Party narrative. There goes the “liberal” media, ripping into us after having given the Democrats the kid gloves treatment. Several of them – Christie, Trump, Carson, Huckabee – took turns revealing their inner Gingrich, whining at such a pitch that their grievance grew legs and very nearly derailed the entire GOP debate schedule in the days that followed. Pauvre petit!
The thing is, you need to listen to their rhetoric. They’re talking about “illegal immigrants”. They’re echoing the applause lines of our own crackpot politicians. No surprise, because we’re witnessing the same experience on our own southern border. People fleeing from the neoliberal aftermath of our bankrupt Central America policy, starting with support for decades of regressive, kelptocratic Mexican governments to our serial interventions in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and elsewhere, pouring into this country in hope of a better life. And we’ve got freaks like Donald Trump calling them rapists, murderers, etc., and not just him. Those Hungarian xenophobes? Turns out, they are us.
I think the part that’s most flabbergasting is the level of hysteria over the Iran deal. You expect to hear overheated rhetoric at an event that features Michelle Bachman and some dude from “Duck Dynasty,” but this was way the fuck over the top. Ted Cruz suggested that the Iranians, once they have acquired the nuclear weapon they so LUST after, will blow it up off the coast of the U.S. to create an electromagnetic pulse, shutting down our electrical grid and killing MILLIONS! What. the. fuck. What a fantasy! And this from a sitting Senator.
First, Trump. As someone who was once a contract employee of this individual (yes, he can say that I too took money from him at some point), I know this guy is more than just a cartoon show for our amusement. What he says and does can have real consequences for people who don’t ride in limos and private jets. So when he talks about forcing 11 million people to leave the country, understand that he is articulating a point of view that is held by a very vocal, substantial minority of Americans. There’s nothing ‘silent’ about this ‘majority’. They want ethnic cleansing.
Schumer’s gambit. Senator Schumer has defended his decision to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran by suggesting that a deal more favorable to the U.S. and Israel can be forced through extension and intensification of sanctions and – I suppose – more aggressive negotiations. In this respect, he is channeling Trump. What’s sad about this is that even the administration, in its defense of the pact, buys into the same imperial mindset that has defined our relationship with Iran since 1979.
I know what some of you are probably thinking. I know because Mitch Macaphee has built a special mind-reading device that reveals the inner thoughts of anyone who so much as glances at this blog post. So … I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING … and aside from all of that stuff about Donald Trump’s white baseball cap, I totally agree with you. That said, some of you probably assume that the reason we do Ned Trek is just to provide a vehicle for distributing new songs. There’s some truth to that. We are not tremendously introspective here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, to be honest – a lot of the time, we’re just running on enzymes. Knee-jerk creatives, that’s us.