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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/14th-amendment-bigotrys-latest-casualty/"></div>Why do some of us look at that so-called caravan currently in Mexico and see people like us, while others look at the same image and see “rapists”?
The answer can be found in the President’s own words as he announced his campaign for the Presidency in June 2015: &#8220;When Mexico sends its people, they&#8217;re not sending their best…They&#8217;re bringing crime. They&#8217;re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.&#8221;
This week, as the President muses about nullifying birthright citizenship, the strange syntax of the last two phrases is suddenly striking: “They&#8217;re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.&#8221;
This seems to mean — as many assumed at the time — that some migrants are rapists and others are good people. This assumption is what led many to respond to Trump by demanding proof that any migrants at all were rapists, seeking to falsify Trump’s demonization. But what if the phrasing means that all migrants are rapists, and some of those rapists are also good people? Why not? Trump has, since his election, defended a series of men accused of sexual assault — Roy Moore, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Rob Porter, Brett Kavanaugh — describing them all as good men.
In this week’s context, though, it seems that when Trump accuses migrants of being rapists, it actually has nothing to do with the criminal act of assaulting women or penetrating them without their consent. The President does not give a fig about that. Instead, he is focused on those who might penetrate the US without its consent. That is why in recent rallies he has been referring to the caravan as “an assault on us.” In Trump’s way of imagining immigration, the US is the innocent victim of unwanted penetration, and so all those who seek to enter are rapists, as such. This is why some of us can look at that caravan and see people like us, while others look at the same image and see “rapists.”
Notably, the Republican Party, the Party that, in the case of actual rapes, is all too happy to blame the victim and ask, “What was she wearing? Didn’t she ask for it?” is not interested in looking into the role of the US in creating the conditions for current migrations. Nor is it interested in the climate change effects that impoverish formerly arable land and force people into motion as their way of life becomes unsustainable.
Instead, we are now discussing the 14th amendment. Why? Because the migrants besmirched by Trump’s blood libel do not only penetrate us, according to the libel. They also, Trump says, impregnate us — against our will.
“A woman is getting ready to have a baby, she crosses the border for one day, has the baby, all of a sudden for the next 80 years, hopefully longer, but for the next 80 years we have to take care of the people,” said Trump during the campaign. “No, no, no, I don&#8217;t think so.”
(Did he say no? Was it loud enough? Did he mean no? Or did he say no but maybe mean yes? What was he wearing?)
In the view promoted by Trump, the US-born children of migrants are inside us and they have rights over us. Shall we be forced, against our will, to bear the children that result from this violation, though we do not consent? Trump Republicans think the answer is obviously “no.” But this is the very same Party that is all too happy to force women to do just that, even in cases of actual rape and incest.
The only way to restore our virtue is to undo the damage, says the Party that opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Now that same Party is in quest of an abortifacient, willing to suspend or overrule the Constitution, in order to find a way to expel the children of migrants, born here, educated here, our friends, classmates, and neighbors.
This Party, with all the power, is forever the victim. And the victims are always somehow positioned as the ones with all the power. This is where we are. It is also where we have been for a long time. This is not the first time the question of birthright citizenship has been raised, nor will Lindsey Graham <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2018/10/31/birthright-citizenship-arizona-effort-sought-challenge-idea-2011/1825132002/">be the first</a> Republican to propose a bill nullifying birthright citizenship.
There are other precedents, too. The 1985 book Citizenship Without Consent widely touted at the 1996 Republican Convention, questioned whether birthright citizenship was really constitutionally required. The book had a troubling habit of focusing on anchor babies and the hospital bills supposedly generated by migrant mothers’ uses of US maternity wards. But, notably, the missing consent that bothered the authors was not just that of the sovereign state of the US, penetrated by “illegals.” The authors also worried about a lack of consent to citizenship for those born into American democracy. They imagined that all US-born citizens, upon reaching adulthood, would take a formal oath to take on citizens’ responsibilities not unlike the oaths taken by naturalizing immigrants at citizenship ceremonies. That is to say, Citizenship Without Consent had a kind of immigrant-envy at its core, a desire to take for the US-born what immigrants to the US have: a rite of conscious entry into democratic citizenship.
Nothing came of this proposal. Swearing in to citizenship is not something available today for native-born American citizens. The closest thing we have to that is voting. Next week, the US has an important election. It is time to stop, think, and reflect on who we want to be. Voting will not be enough to stop the race-baiting, division, demonization, violence, and disenfranchisements now in the headlines every day. But it is what we have and it can be powerful, as powerful as a wave. Tuesday, November 6th is right around the corner. Vote.
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The 14th Amendment: Bigotry’s Latest Casualty

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/renovating-house-senate/"></div>One thing that sent Christine Blasey Ford to therapy in 2012 was a marital disagreement about a house renovation. Such renovations create the kind of dramatic conflict that can really test a marriage: this is the trite premise of all those house design shows on HGTV. But the story Blasey Ford told was anything but trite. Against the advice of an architect, and against the wishes of her husband, she was insisting that their renovation plans feature two front doors. Two front doors? The architect and the husband objected. So off to therapy she and her husband went. It was there that the feelings that drove her insistence came to the surface. Fittingly, almost poetically, the battle over the doors to her home opened the door to her trauma; and she told her story in therapy. This week, she told it again, in detail, to the nation.
She had been attacked when she was 15, thrown against her will into a bedroom by two 17 year old boys, immobilized on a bed by one, Brett Kavanaugh, who groped her, pressed his body against hers, and tried to remove her clothes. When she screamed for help, he clapped his hand over her mouth to silence her, and made her fear for her life. When asked, at the hearings on Thursday, what she remembered about that day, Blasey Ford said she was haunted by the laughter between the boys and by the moment when she appealed to the second boy for help using her eyes, only to realize he would not intervene to help her.
She also mentioned but did not dwell on another detail. The door of the room into which she was thrust was locked by the boys. When she found an opportunity to escape, she dashed from the bedroom to a bathroom across the hall, locked herself in there, and waited. How long? We do not know. After a time, the boys left the bedroom and, as she so memorably put it, “pinball[ed]” down the stairs. She must have been listening hard to track their movements, deciphering the sounds and inferring their meaning from behind the locked bathroom door. She was not yet out of trouble, after all; she was locked in a bathroom, hiding. She heard her attackers talking and laughing with each other on the stairs and then the noise of a larger conversation, as the boys rejoined the social gathering. Here is where I imagine she must have spent some time calculating. Was it safe yet to try to escape? Had she waited long enough? Were her two attackers now otherwise engaged? Distracted by drinking and hanging around with their friends? Were they far enough from the front door that she could get by them and make it safely out of the house? What courage it must have taken her to open that locked bathroom door, risk the descent down the stairs, and then run out the front door to the street. She did not mention such details on Thursday. She may not remember. But she recalled in her statement her relief as she realized, outside, that the two boys were not coming after her. That says it all.
So does her story of happening on one of her attackers at the Safeway store a few weeks later. Here, too, doors play a role. In answer to questions from Rachel Mitchell, the prosecuting attorney hired for the occasion, Blasey Ford explained there were multiple entrances to the Safeway, and that when her mother chose one, Blasey Ford, a teenager wanting her independence, chose another. Ironically, the one she chose was not the safe-way. The door she went through put her face to face with Mark Judge, one of the two boys who had attacked her. Blasey Ford said hi, as they had done in the past, before the attack. Judge seemed nervous and uncomfortable, she recalls. Somehow in her testimony, she recalled his feelings, not hers.
So much of what happens in our lives depends on the doors that appear before us, or not, on which ones we choose to go through and which we pass by. On the TV game show with the most Trumpian name imaginable — “Let’s Make a Deal” — contestants must choose Door number one, two, or three. The game show teaches us that our fate depends on our free choice and that we deserve what we get, as a result. But it is a poor, even cruel lesson because, in the United States, some people walk breezily through doors that seem magically to open for them, while others jiggle handles that will not turn, and still others search in vain for even a threshold on which to stand. Brett Kavanaugh said at the hearings on Thursday that he had no connections at Yale and got there only by dint of his very hard work in high school, as if no doors were opened for him by the exclusive and well-connected Georgetown Prep, or by his mother, the judge, and his father, the lobbyist. For some, it seems, all the doors are the safe-way. For others, it seems, none are. Some of us are told we are free to head this way or that, only to suddenly find ourselves thrust from behind into locked rooms. For many others, still, in our racially divided and radically unequal society, the only doors that seem to open are doors of no return, prison doors that lock behind them, the key thrown away for years.
I thought of all these doors as I watched two women, activists, stand in an elevator doorway and reproach Jeff Flake on Friday for his announced intention to vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, both survivors of sexual assault, asked the Senator: did their suffering mean nothing? If the men who attack women are promoted, what does that mean about how our society values women?
Scholars of immigration politics see elevator behavior as a useful metaphor. When you get on an elevator and someone down the hall calls “Wait!” do you wait? Or do you quietly hit the button and close the door behind you? What you do in this context may predict your views on immigration. With the cameras on him, Jeff Flake looked like he was keeping the door open, on Friday. Or maybe it was the elevator’s sensors that prevented the doors from closing on the two women. Either way, they stood on its threshold and made their appeal. The women spoke and demanded that Flake listen. “Look at me when I am talking to you,” one said. And he did.
The video of their encounter went viral and Flake, in response, changed his position slightly, breaking ranks to ask that the background investigation be reopened. On Fox News Friday night Laura Ingraham wondered What is wrong with Flake’s staff? Why didn’t they call the Capitol Police, she asked, and have those women taken away? It was surely an uncomfortable moment for Flake, who was literally cornered in that elevator. But he was not in fear for his safety. Had they been called, what would the police have arrested Archila and Gallagher for? Practicing citizenship? Claiming equality?
The two women in the elevator doorway were inspired by Blasey Ford, who showed them a second door where they had thought there was only one, closed to survivors like them. Archila said, “It was Dr. Ford’s story that allowed me to tell this secret to my parents. I now have to do the work of how me and my parents process the experience, and I don’t know how this is going to go.” She chose to walk through a new doorway without knowing for sure where it would lead. That takes courage.
Because of what happened on Friday, perhaps now, when Blasey Ford sees her house, with its strange-looking two front doors, she might think not of her assailants, and her trauma, or not only of that. She might also think of Archila and Gallagher, whose momentary power to hold open the doors of privilege, was on display for all of us to see. Empowerment and political action are a tonic for those who feel powerless. Is it too much to hope that democratic citizens everywhere might be inspired by all this? &#8220;This is a demonstration that what thousands of people have been doing — telling our stories and standing up for ourselves — is working,” Archila said afterwards.
Courage is contagious and, as all those who watch HGTV know, renovation can be habit-forming. You might plan to start with the House, and before you know it you find you are taking on the Senate. Where will it end? HGTV’s ubiquitous “open concept” is what we, in democracies, call transparency. How far should we go to achieve it? Should we just move a few walls? Take it all down to the studs? Or demo the whole thing and start over? Whatever we do, it will take courage and we are lucky to have had this week several reminders of what that all too rare virtue looks like in action.
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Renovating the House (and Senate…)

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/thousand-points-fight-jon-stewart-limits-mockery/"></div>These days, I find myself feeling like Faye Dunaway in Chinatown when Jack Nicholson slaps her face demanding the truth about the identity of a young woman she cares for, and Faye Dunaway cries: “She’s my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter…” In my own waking nightmare version of this scene, reality slaps me in the face, demanding to know who Trump is, and I cry: “He’s Reagan! He’s Hitler. He’s Reagan, He’s Hitler.”
In both scenarios, it is unclear whether a wealthy, belligerent character is just a regular aggressive man who pushes people around to get his way or an exceptionally immoral one who will rape and plunder without hesitation in order to remake the world to his liking. Which is it? Early on in the course of events, it can be hard to know. As many women report, an abusive relationship often creeps up on you. That is why domestic abuse centers share signs of “early warning.”
Reagan was no Hitler, though that didn’t stop Reagan from making an official visit in 1985 to a cemetery in Bitberg, Germany, where German military and SS members were buried. The visit was to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of WWII but there were protests against Reagan paying respects to SS war dead. Reagan defended his visit as follows: &#8220;These [SS troops] were the villains, as we know, that conducted the persecutions and all. But there are 2,000 graves there, and most of those, the average age is about 18. I think that there&#8217;s nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” Sound familiar? Reagan too thought there were victims on both sides.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, writer, and political activist, tried to prevent Reagan’s visit, but to no avail: &#8220;I […] implore you to do something else, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place.&#8221; Except maybe it was his place. Reagan, who had been governor of California, chose to begin his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair — the same County where in 1964 civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were murdered.
Imploring is what the current President wants to see us all doing: Bending the knee, rather than taking a knee. Or maybe on our knees, like he said to a woman on The Apprentice: “Must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”
In a <a href="https://www.cbs.com/shows/the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert/video/rZuRc6hvPHNDgUakcS6gAeg7UQ_wVRJ3/jon-stewart-is-ready-to-negotiate-with-donald-trump/">brilliant eight-minute appearance last month on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert</a>, Jon Stewart objected to the cruel wrongs at the border, without imploring, while also exploring the limits of mockery as critique. Both imploring and mocking are staged from a position of weakness and this was highlighted by Stewart, who began, literally on his knees. Emerging from beneath Colbert’s desk, on stage, Stewart turned to the camera, and opened by highlighting his Jewishness, the position from which Elie Wiesel also spoke when he implored Reagan not to go to Bitberg. But where Wiesel spoke as the Jewish conscience of what he cast as American cluelessness about Europe, Stewart takes on the role of a quintessentially American character: the Jewish nebbish. He begins with a nervous titter and says, somewhat cartoonishly: “Hello Donald, it’s me!” And then, haltingly, “the guy you made sure everyone knew was Jewish on Twitter.”
In the end, it will become clear that Stewart occupies the Jewish position in order to ironize it. But first, by linking Trump’s outing of Stewart as a Jew on Twitter years ago with the cruelties now being implemented at the border, Stewart gives a specific context to Trump’s support of neo-Nazis, his administration’s move to denationalize naturalized citizens not just in response to complaints (as used to be the case) but proactively, and its <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/7/9/17549402/citizenship-military-mavni-immigration-service-naturalization-discharge-history-mavni">new abrogation of agreements with foreign-born soldiers to fast track their citizenship</a> — <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/07/04/625980910/white-house-launches-effort-to-take-citizenship-from-those-who-lied-to-get-it">all measures disturbingly reminiscent of the denationalization of Jews in Nazi Germany</a>.. Indeed, it is an irony that historians may later remark that, it was at this very moment that the <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/26/supreme-court-overturns-korematsu-673846">US Supreme Court finally renounced the Korematsu decision</a>, not, however, in connection with the new tent cities in Texas then going up, but to disavow any analogy to the Muslim ban case, and thus to allow Executive prejudice to become policy.
Stewart goes on: “If there’s one hallmark to your presidency that I think we’re finding the most difficult it is that no matter what you do it always comes with an extra layer of gleeful cruelty. And dickish-ness.” Here Stewart seems to implore, but he undoes that immediately: “Donald, you could have absolutely made a more stringent border policy, and have made your point about enforcement, but I guess it wouldn’t have felt right without a Dickensian level of villainy. You casually separated people seeking asylum from their children. From babies. It made me realize something. You may be orange, you may like hamburgers, you may be a clown. But you are no Ronald McDonald.” The joke is subtle but brilliant since Ronald McDonald is not just any clown, but a mascot, not only for the fast food chain, but also for the charity it founded to support families whose children are in hospital. Its <a href="https://www.rmhc.org">tag line</a>? “Keeping families with sick children together and near the care and resources they need.”
Stewart’s reference to Ronald McDonald undoes the nervous nebbish tittering at the opening as well as the impression that Stewart will beg for mercy. When Wiesel implored, he sought to elevate Reagan to the height of the office. He called Reagan “Mr. President.” Like the Book of Esther’s Mordecai at the gate of Ahasuerus/Xerxes I, Wiesel was in the role of shtadlan. Shtadlan is Hebrew for “intercessor,” the representative of the disempowered community sent to beseech the powerful. That role was always played by men, but Mordecai, who gave succor to his orphaned niece, Esther, is figured by some commentators as a lactating, nursing man: feminine. That he also uses wiles to combat evil fits with this traditional gendering. Stewart does not supplicate. He mocks. He calls Trump, “Donald,” not “Mr. President.” And though he offers Dickens as an analogue, in the end he seems to say that even that reference is too high culture for this clown.
But mocking Trump as a clown risks elevating him to world-historical significance because that is precisely how Charlie Chaplin responded to Hitler in his time: by mocking the dictator as a clown and buffoon. Chaplin played the same game as Stewart, lampooning his own masculinity, anticipating Stewart’s effeminate talk with his own effeminate walk, and letting others think he was hiding his Jewishness. (Chaplin was not Jewish but when asked about it he would refuse to answer, since that would breach solidarity with those at that moment threatened with genocide). Perhaps this is why mocking is not Stewart’s final move.
Stewart shifts gears one more time, now showing clips of Fox News talking heads and Huckabee-Sanders calling Trump a true leader for the crimes at the border. Stewart knows imploring will not work. It didn’t work with Reagan either. Just ask ACT UP; or Rock Hudson, who was ignored by the Reagan White House when, dying of AIDS, he asked for their help.  And of course, Reagan still went to Bitburg. And so, Stewart finally says, he will not implore: “Clearly we are not going to be able to negotiate or shame you into decency but there is one place where I draw the line; I won’t allow you and your sycophants to turn cruelty into virtue.” Stewart closes by drawing on Abraham Lincoln, who said that those who defended slavery had just one demand, but it was not one to which it was possible to yield: “Cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right.” As political theorist George Kateb would say, the refusal of this immorality exemplifies democratic individuality.
Invoking conscience is what finally moves Stewart away from the mocking that is the double of Wiesel’s imploring . Mocking and imploring are two sides of the same Mordecai-coin — both are practices whereby the powerless address the powerful. In both, no matter how bravely performed, the shadow of bent-knee subservience is discernible. Both postulate an ongoing relationship that is the less powerful party’s lifeline and death knell, at the same time.
Refusal, by contrast, severs the relationship between protestor and protested and proclaims they have no future together. Knowing this, and seeking a different future for herself, her staff, and all of us, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/06/23/why-a-small-town-restaurant-owner-asked-sarah-huckabee-sanders-to-leave-and-would-do-it-again/?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.c816cebaccc6">Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Red Hen, politely and discreetly asked White House Press Secretary Sara Huckabee-Sanders to leave her restaurant</a>. As Hannah Arendt notes, politics is not always the result of willed intentional choice and deliberate planning. Sometimes politics comes to you and orders a cheese plate in your restaurant. That is when you are called upon to show who you are. Will you serve power, as power demands? Or show it the door? Charles Pierce <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22094866/donald-trump-sui-generis/">says in Esquire</a> that we are in the most “radically different — and radically perilous — political context that the country has seen since the run-up to the Civil War.” We may quibble with that, but there is no quibbling with his conclusion that now, “every fight is worthy no matter how futile. Even if all you’re doing is creating a historical record, that’s worth doing. The institutions of government, and the people operating them, have to stand up just to stand up.” Many are. More should.
Trump is aware of this and that may be why, at a Montana rally in July, he insulted George H.W. Bush’s Republican Presidential campaign slogan from 1988, a “thousand points of light.” Speaking about “winning,” Trump crowed that people everywhere “get” the meaning of his slogans, “Make America Great Again” and “Putting America First.” But not “Thousand Points of Light.” He said: “‘Thousand Points of Light,’ I never quite got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out? And it was put by a Republican, wasn&#8217;t it?&#8221;
Without necessarily endorsing the original idea, we can attend to what Trump was doing in mocking it. Yes, he was finalizing his claim to the Republican Party over those who like to think they are his betters. But he was doing something else, too. The joke not only mocked Bush Sr., who was always too patrician for the base. It also mocked the very idea of people serving as points of light in the darkness: the very idea of a Jon Stewart or a Stephanie Wilkinson — or any of us — refusing to turn a blind eye to evil or to join Trump’s Administration by calling it “right.”
Trump and his followers have put in their order. Let’s not serve them. Every day they put on a show to distract us. Let’s not let them.They tweet to raise the costs of resistance (fire the NFL players who kneel!). Let’s not give in to them.
Instead, let’s be inspired by women like asylum activist Elin Ersson. In a Facebook <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2018/jul/25/not-sitting-down-student-halts-deportation-of-asylum-seeker-video">video that went viral last week</a>, Ersson refuses to be seated so the airplane she is on can take off. Why? Because there is a man on the plane being deported from Sweden to Afghanistan and his life is at stake. Standing alone in the aisle, she says, “I am not going to sit down until this person is off the plane.” The pilot has the right to refuse, too, she says, as the crew tries to persuade her into compliance. Meanwhile, a fellow passenger notes the deportation is perfectly legal: “Your country has rules.” She does not dispute it: “I’m trying to change my country’s rules,” she replies. She knows she cannot do it alone: “As long as a person is standing up and if more people are standing up, then the pilot cannot take off.”
After she explains the situation to a fellow passenger, he explains it to some others and there is a smattering of applause. “We are with you,” he says. And then, Ersson says, “the football team at the back is actually standing up. I want to salute them for standing up.” She tears up. The mood of the cabin shifts a bit in her favor. Perhaps for this reason, a male passenger decides right then to take matters into his own hands. Can’t she see she is frightening the children? he asks, as he lunges for her phone. He wants the situation returned to normal, where young women are compliant and men like him are in charge. But this time his aggression only tilts the mood further in her direction. The crew returns her phone and sends him back to his seat. Soon she is told the deportee is being taken off the plane. Only after confirming the truth of that does she exit.
This is what Hannah Arendt calls action in concert. Someone has to start it. Others have to join. It requires courage and good fortune. For a full 5-10 minutes, Ersson is in this by herself. It is really not clear which way things will go. The inconvenienced passengers could turn on her. Her reddening face betrays the difficulty of the situation. She tears up, first from the stress, and then with apparent gratitude when she finds that some of the passengers actually support her. Not all of them, but enough to tip the balance. That’s all we need.
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A Thousand Points of Fight: Jon Stewart and the Limits of Mockery

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the depts. of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. Her most recent books are Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge UP, 2013) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham UP, 2017).