Invasion of the Aliens

Summer is the high season for dystopian blockbuster movies, sensationalistic films featuring visitors from outer space, zombie invasions, and uncontrollable epidemics.

But the title of this article doesn’t allude to films but to reality, specifically the Trump administration’s effort to portray migration across the U.S.-Mexico border as an invasion.

Trump’s “Invasion of the Aliens” narrative is fictional; it could easily be made into a Hollywood movie. There is no invasion, just the kind of migration that has been taking place forever, with ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys. We are not currently at a peak, but talk about invasion is not just an exaggeration, it is a deliberate distortion.

The “invaders” are mostly Central American women and children, not marauding members of a Mexican warrior tribe or even members of MS-13, and Trump and the members of his administration and his cheerleading squad in the right-wing media know it.

[Here is the irony that American historical amnesia has precluded anyone from writing amid millions of words on the “invasion.” The only real invasion across the U.S.-Mexico border was perpetrated by United States troops in the 1840s on the orders of President Polk, an unprovoked act of aggression as a result of which the United States stole half of Mexico. The Freudians might say that what we have here with the invasion metaphor is the return of the repressed. We repress and seemingly forget what we feel guilty about. But, as Freud wrote, “What is forgotten is not extinguished but only ‘repressed’; its memory-traces are present in all their freshness.” And, I add, these guilty repressed memories can pop up in inverted form.]

Why the lying narrative? Lying is as natural to this administration and its Propaganda Ministry as chicken to KFC, but there is much more to this than the Habit of Mendacity that runs through this administration. The use of the concept “invasion” is perfect when what you are about politically is instilling fear and loathing, and that is what Trump and his hateful troop of xenophobes, white supremacists, and opportunistic apologists are about.

Throughout history people have feared invasions and despised invaders. But it requires a tour de force of propaganda to cast the desperate women, children and men coming here fleeing drug gangs and hunger as threatening invaders.

Except for people like Trump and white supremacists of his ilk who believe brown (Central Americans) and black people (Haitians) from the shithole countries of the south, as opposed, to say, immigrants from mainly white countries like Norway, are shit themselves, bearers of disease, crime, idleness, and dependency on government. 

Polluters of the Anglo-Saxon gene pool. Obstacles on the way to making America great and white again.

Go back to where you came from, they spew, seemingly unaware or uncaring about the absurdity and irony of their command. Jews shall not replace us, they vow, ignorant that Jews have no interest in replacing a bunch of ignorant dingbats and are mainly worried about replacing themselves, as low birth rates and marriage of Jews to gentiles represent an existential threat.

To say that all this is surreal is to suggest more thought and art than there is in it. It’s delusion, insanity, the absolute zero point of reason. Yet this is where we are.

It would be wrong, however, to place most of the responsibility on a few fanatical individuals capable of murder to maintain white supremacy. Lay it instead at the feet of the instigators and enablers, ensconced in comfortable chairs in right-wing safe spaces, the studios of False News, officially Fox News.

Hateful talk breeds hate-filled actions. Murderous wishes are fulfilled through homicidal deeds. As The New York Times reported in an in-depth article on August 19, the words and actions of mass murderers like the El Paso killer faithfully mirror the rhetoric, fantasies, and paranoia of right-wing media darlings like Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh.

Expressing murderous fantasies:

The New York paper reported that “Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: ‘“You can shoot invaders.”’

Even more disturbing, later, appearing at a campaign-style rally, Donald Trump responded to an identical suggestion shouted by someone in the crowd. “Shoot them,” the anonymous Trump fan screamed. You can “only do that in the panhandle,” Trump responded.

Ginning Up White-supremacist Paranoias:

Not to be outdone, as the NYT reported, “a few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity. ‘The objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture,’” Mr. Limbaugh said, adding: “This is why people call this an invasion.”

Instigating xenophobic acts:

Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”

The El Paso massacre is emblematic of the near-total intersection between the inflammatory anti-immigrant themes in Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the right-wing media, on the one hand, and the ideas and words used by perpetrators to try to justify murderous attacks on black churches, Muslim mosques, Jewish synagogues, and shopping centers brimming with Mexicans.

As the Times reported based on a painstaking analysis:

“There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was ‘simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.’”

For me, El Paso was the last straw. As I write this, Donald Trump is going to exclude any number of animal and plant species threatened by extinction from the protection of the Endangered Species Act. Meanwhile, he has put a bullseye on the backs of Latinos virtually making us an endangered ethnicity.

Enough. Since El Paso, I have graduated from being an acerbic but mostly passive critic of Trump and Trumpism to an-in-your face verbal challenger of anyone within earshot who expresses support for Trump or, which amounts to the same thing, is a Trump apologist.

I realize there is some danger on this path. I am not immune to fear, as the late dialogue advocate Bernardo Benes believed when he flattered me by saying that I was the only one in Miami who did not feel “el miedo insuperable,” the fear that cannot be overcome. I have felt it before and overcame it before. This is no time to be paralyzed by fear or to be cowed by cries of “civility.” If there is to be civility, let the bigots begin.

[Read the full New York Times article here.]