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| Hundreds marched for peace and children in Madison, Wisconsin on August 26 2017. Marchers led by youth questioned the necessity of police and criminals shooting them, saying, "I want to live." Photo by Paul McMahon, (Heartland Images) |
Putting aside the inherent problems in the psychiatric field working by metaphor and abstraction, a belief in race is delusional and is a dangerous pathology.
The abiding belief in race and the anti-human behavior this delusion causes is not dysfunctional in American society.
The resurgence of American racism led by Donald Trump today builds upon the ideological ground on which America was founded: Genocide, social dominance, enslavement and terror. Trump is in a sense the logical inheritor of American racism.
It behooves the reader to consider the foundational aspects of deadly and torturous racism when one reads the daily ravings emitted from the White House, because oppression and control of ethnic minorities is as American as the military-industrial state.
On the up side, Paul Krugman has his swing back for some time now.
His piece in today's New York Times is a joy:
As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up when they questioned those charges. Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified.
Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a 'concentration camp,' where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.
And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump, who had already suggested that Arpaio was 'convicted for doing his job,' pardoned him.
By the way, about 'doing his job,' it turns out that Arpaio’s officers were too busy rounding up brown-skinned people and investigating President Barack Obama’s birth certificate to do other things, like investigate cases of sexually abused children. Priorities!
Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.
Fascism has been here for some time.
Trump just targeted elite sectors of American society positioned and inclined to fight back.
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