NOTE: I don't often use curse words on this blog or on social media, but you can't really comment on the subject without using the word, so my usual rule is suspended. If you don't want to read it (looking at you, Mom), best move on to some other site.
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By one person's unofficial count, anchors, analysts, and other media personalities on CNN used the word "shithole" on-air some 200 times yesterday. It was included in the top headline on washingtonpost.com, too, which was somewhat surprising to me.
I grew up at a time when "shit," and its various other forms, were unwelcome on television (other than HBO, of course). I remember the first time I heard it on broadcast television--it was the episode of ER where Anthony Edwards's character, dying of cancer, screams the word in frustration at the pain. And it has only rarely been heard since.
To my ear, it's still jarring in some contexts, despite what I will confess is the rather casual and frequent way in which I use it, and many other such words, myself. I was often told, as a child, that using profanity was a sign of a poor vocabulary or low intelligence. With all due respect to my teachers of yore, that's a bit of bullshit on their part. I'm not sure anyone has ever accused me of having a poor vocabulary or low intelligence. Ma'boy* Eli is one of the smartest people I know--not just kids (he's 14) but people--and when we're together, just the two of us, we turn the air comically blue.
* For those who are not already aware, Eli is my honorary nephew. He's the son of one of my very best friends, and we see each other pretty much every day. One of the great honors of my life has been to be involved in his life as I am. The problem is that there is just not a good word to describe our relationship. So I'm testing out "ma'boy" as one possibility.
So it was surprising, even titillating, to hear so many people pretending to be erudite while reporting and commentating on Buffoon's use of "shithole" to describe Haiti, El Salvador, and a number of African countries. I will admit that I was a bit disappointed that the word did not make a complete appearance on CBS This Morning today. It hid, variously, as s***hole, sh*thole, and s-hole, the last of which sounds quite a lot like another curse word that doesn't often appear on the networks.
There has been an awful lot of pearl-clutching at Buffoon's vulgarity--almost as much as when Joe Biden's congratulatory comment to Barack Obama that the Affordable Care Act was "a big fuckin' deal" was caught on a hot mic.
But that misses the point. Calling those countries "shitholes" is not especially worse than calling them "terrible places to live." It's just a more exciting, visceral, surprising way to put it.
And while calling those countries "shitholes" might be terribly rude and undiplomatic, the truth is that the countries specified are in fact terrible places to live. Poverty is rampant in Haiti, which has still not recovered from the devastating earthquake that struck it eight years ago today. El Salvador is in the middle of a terrible crime wave (which we may have indirectly caused by deporting thousands of members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, or MS-13, back to El Salvador). And there are many countries in Africa in which poverty, famine, war, extremism, and disease threaten the survival of the residents.
None of that matters. As usual, context does.
It's worth noting first that Buffoon ran on an explicitly racist anti-immigration platform. He cobbled together much of his support by convincing lower-middle-class and poor whites that the chief reason why they aren't doing well economically is because of (dark-skinned) immigrants who come to the U.S. and take jobs away from (white) American workers. He's taken steps to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows people who were brought to this country illegally as children to stay, work, and go to school, without a clear replacement program. And he's railed against something he calls "chain migration"--a program that permits U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to sponsor the immediate family members for green cards.
Buffoon's comments were made during a meeting with members of Congress about immigration reforms. To their credit, Congressional Democrats appear to be willing to work with Buffoon to try to get something positive done on this issue. I don't think I could spend more than a couple of minutes in the same room with the man. But when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the only Democratic attendee of the meeting, asked Buffoon for assurances that the reforms would protect people from Haiti, El Salvador, and a number of African countries, for whom deportation would likely be a death sentence, Buffoon said questioned why we want people from "shithole countries" to be here instead of places like Norway.
Norway is almost completely composed of white people of Northern Germanic ethnicity. Not for nothing, Hitler's Germany invaded Norway in 1940 in part because its people are Aryan (to use the Nazi term) or Nordic (to use the non-Nazi term) and were believed by Hitler's racial theorists to conform to their ideal "master race."
It does not take much of a stretch to understand the principle at work in Buffoon's mind. If you're a white person from Norway, we want you here, even if you're a rapist or a murderer; even if you have AIDS (yes, there are people who have AIDS in Norway); even if you are poor and have little education and no marketable skills. But if you're a brown person from one of those "shithole" countries, no matter what your situation, the shit attaches to you.
It is, expressly and apologetically, a racial standard. White equals great; brown equals shit.
Buffoon has given us nearly five decades of proof that he is a white supremacist. In the 1970s, he was sued by the federal government for discrimination in housing for refusing to rent to blacks. In the 1980s, he famously took out full-page ads in the four major newspapers serving New York City, imploring the return of the death penalty in New York so that it could be applied to the Central Park Five, five young men of color who were falsely accused, tried, and convicted of raping a woman who was jogging in Central Park. In 2002, they were exonerated by DNA evidence, but 14 years later, while campaigning for president, Buffoon continued to assert their guilt. In that same campaign, he called Mexican immigrants "rapists" and "criminals." Buffoon spent years arguing and attempting fruitlessly to prove that Barack Obama, our nation's first black president, was not born here, despite conclusive evidence that he was. And last year, after the clash between white supremacists and protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, Buffoon claimed that there were good people on both sides.
Let's be clear: You cannot be a white supremacist and be a good person.
Let's be clear again: Donald J. Buffoon is a white supremacist.
Let's be clear a third time: When Buffoon decried immigration from "shithole countries," he wasn't complaining about living conditions in those countries. He was claiming that the people who live there and want to come here are shit that should not be allowed in because they are brown.
I know that he does and says so many outrageous things that it's hard to be outraged by this guy anymore. But he has reached a new level with these comments.
We have not always lived up to our promise as a nation. Each wave of immigration we've experienced has brought out the hatred of the ignorant. We once imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent because people who looked like them attacked us. But there has always been in us an undercurrent of appreciation for those who wanted to come here to build a better life. This was never better expressed than by Emma Lazarus, whose sonnet "The New Colossus" is inscribed on a plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
So, for the fourth time, let's be clear: America did not become great because we accepted only the best-qualified immigrants. We became great because our system of equality of opportunity, of general liberty, of the rule of law and not of men is a fertile soil in which greatness grows when people of good will and hope, rather than power and privilege, are planted in it.
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