It’s amazing, how events like this week’s can make you understand things like the butterfly effect. I just looked it up: “The Apprentice” first aired January 8, 2004. I was living in Ann Arbor. It was a Monday. The Knight Wallace Fellows had our seminars on Tuesday and Thursday, so the following night would have been the first of the new year. If I recall correctly, it was a duck barbecue at the director’s house. None of us would have suspected that a fuse had been lit the previous night, that one TV producer had breathed life into a monster that would blow up the richest country, a beacon of freedom all over the world, not 20 years later.
You “Game of Thrones” fans remember little Arya Stark, making her way in the wilderness and putting herself to sleep at night with her own form of fantasy-novel doomscrolling: Reciting the list of people she wanted to kill for having wronged her. I have my own list, although I’m not homicidal and some of them are dead already (hey, Roger Ailes!), but Mark Burnett, producer of “The Apprentice,” is on it. He’s a very public Christian and has never once expressed regret for having rehabilitated this transparent phony, this con man, this moral homunculus who just today cost my household 3.37 percent of our life savings, into what we used to call presidential timber. Today presidential timber is a termite-infested telephone pole.
A Kennedy Center Honor is coming for Mark Burnett. Bet on it.
Today I got an email from an old friend who asked I use no identifying details in telling their story. They and their spouse are laying the groundwork for permanently leaving the U.S. for Canada in the next year. The details involve applying for permanent residency, picking a home base, checking out neighborhoods, etc. This sentence in their letter stood out:
I have admired Canada since I first started visiting here in 2001. I’ve simply given up on the U.S. Even if Trump and Vance were to die tomorrow, the GOP and Fox have so corrupted the country I see no way to truly combat an active embrace of falsehoods. It’s never going to end.
I’m reminded of a line from Neil Steinberg, way back in the first Bad Administration: I’d rather be on the last train out of town than the first. Me too, but I don’t fault my friend one bit. Meanwhile, measles is starting to spread in Michigan.
OK. Sorry to be a downer, and after I was feeling pretty good yesterday. It’s hard to stay on the sunny side, this week.
Check out this interview with Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “one of the best-known evangelicals in the United States, famous for his writings on faith.” Today, his faith compels him to support you-know-who, and to argue against empathy. Here’s one passage:
You’re talking about the Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador. The White House claims that they were all gang members, but we actually don’t know that. It seems like some of them were not. Time magazine wrote about these men: “Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.” The President and his Administration were revelling in this.
I think you ought to have a concern about the mistreatment of anyone. Look, I take a very Augustinian view of state power. You know Augustine, the Church Father?
I’ve heard of him.
This is the main Western theological tradition in Christianity. Am I making sense?
Yup.
An Augustinian view of government says that government coercion is never pretty. It is necessary, but it’s never pretty. And, when government acts in a coercive manner, it always leads to some form of pain. That’s what government coercion is. And so I am not justifying it. I’m simply saying that if you are going to return people against their will to their country, where they are seen there as gang members and they’re going to be treated as criminals—
They were Venezuelan, and they were sent to El Salvador, but go on.
O.K. No, that’s true, but at least in theory, they are to be sent back to their home country. And I think that’s a part of the spat between the Trump Administration and Venezuela at the moment. But, I also think the vast majority of Americans would say, Look, our understanding of refugees who are legitimate refugees does not include gang members who clearly are coming to the United States with an effort to expand their colonization of criminal activity.
We just don’t know for sure that they were gang members. There’s been some reporting that suggests some of them are not.
I understand that, but want to be honest with you, and I think you’ll be honest with me. Look, you can’t say that everyone with that tattoo is a gang member, but there’s no reason anyone other than a gang member should have that tattoo.
One of the “gang members” had another tattoo entirely, but do go on, Reverend.
OK. Three blogs this week is the best I can do. Let’s see what the financial markets do tomorrow. Maybe we’ll all be penniless by next Thursday, eh?
Happy weekend! Hands off!