At the end of Costa-Gavras’ classic film Missing, after Ed Horman, portrayed magnificently by Jack Lemmon, accuses the US Ambassador to Chile and a slimey Military Attaché of complicity in the Pinochet Government’s murder of his son, Charley, the attaché drops his veneer of sympathy and gives dad the hard truth. He tells him Charley was responsible for his own death because he was snooping around where he didn’t belong in a country that wasn’t his…and he got what was coming to him.
It is a certainty Jeff Sessions would have been right at home supporting Pinochet’s murderous coup against Allende. I can’t imagine there is much in Beauregard’s skill set that he wouldn’t have been able to avail the host criminals, who rained blood on Chile’s hopes for democracy and reform.
Near 50 years later we are now getting a full taste from the buffet of those depravities, as Sessions turns us into accomplices to systematic human rights abuse at our southern border, even as he is abased weekly by his fickle employer. The fact that the Attorney General’s job security is a unifying theme in an otherwise frayed GOP conservative caucus underscores its full complicity in the outrage.
But just as Ed Horman discovered after finally learning his son’s fate, we have been informed directly by Sessions that the ordeals now suffered by migrant families, torn apart to be held in separate prisons for the crime of seeking a better life at the shining city on the hill, are entirely their own doing. In fact, our current policy is actually tough love because eventually it will discourage others from setting out on such hardships and stay put where they are, come what may…government attack, spousal abuse, gang violence, destitution…whatever.
This is principled leadership promised so articulately by Trump at his campaign rallies: “We’re going to get em the hell out of here!”
It is doubtful Sessions needs much in the way of rationalization to push this policy; his entire career has been one long dog whistle tribute to the glory days of Jim Crow Dixie. Yet and still, it is shocking, even knowing his bigotry well, the terse lack of empathy now displayed for children ripped from their mothers’ arms.
MAGA has always been an amorphous term. Of course, those clear-eyed enough to see Trump’s ugliness for the bile it is could imagine just such an outcome. To Sessions et al MAGA means simply whitening America, turning back the demographic clock with any and all means necessary. Conscience is for snowflake liberals, taking a country back requires the will to hurt people. It’s all for the best.
And what are Democrats doing as America’s soul is destroyed? That’s a good question. When you find out let me know. The increasingly bleary eyed Nancy Pelosi, as well as Chuck Schumer, appear intent on watering down the issue by mixing it with other grievances, like the tax bill, tariffs and Trump’s corruption. And while an increasing number of lawmakers are joining Jeff Merkley and others down at the border to see things unfold for themselves, no formal unified response to stop the calamity has even yet been floated.
It now seems to be dawning on people, formerly consumed by finding any shred of decency or genuine concern, that – surprise! – none is anywhere in sight amongst this collection of moral devoids.
Right now the awful reckoning of that reality is being suffered by immigrants misguided enough to actually want to become Americans. How long will it be before the natives themselves begin to suffer the same kind of fate? The lesson down south is as clear as the Texas sky after a tornado: the wretched core will go anywhere they’re told. Believe it! BC