letter on deportations
hi all,
I assume most of you don’t live in Iowa. (Is there life in Iowa? The world may never know.) As such you may not have heard the news about the superintendent of the Des Moines public schools being taken into ICE custody. It’s awful and all the more so for the way it’s exemplary rather than exceptional. I wrote a letter to the arts paper Little Village laying out how I think people of conscience should think about this, it’s at this link if you’re interested (if you’re in a hurry this provides a briefer summary of my position). I’ll add that I think this is an area where the Democrats aren’t anything like an opposition so much as three good cops in a trenchcoat standing in the place where an opposition would be - standing there in order to fill up that space to prevent a more robust opposition from growing. To be a little more pointed, left liberals who are trying to do the whole ‘long march through the institutions’/sewer socialism thing are, despite their best intentions, both deluding themselves and aiding the good cops in the ongoing production of governability. I think this becomes very clear if we transpose these positions to the responses to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. I allude to some of this in the letter to the editor but don’t go into detail - I never know if I’ve done too much or too little detail in this kind of thing (I don’t actually like denouncing things, I like thinking broadly in, uh, an open mode. I may take some time later to think about this stuff at more length and ranging a bit more as is my custom, but I dunno for sure - “I've got a lot of nothing taking all my time.”) Anyway, if you’re interested, check out the letter. Hang in there friends. Bad days will end.