Archives for June 2018

The breezy, beachside adage almost everywhere applies: “No shoes, no shirt, no service”. Of all the summertime proscriptions through which you’ll gleefully dance as these next three months get underway, it’s this one that’s by far the most palatable. Taped to every barroom entrance, hung on every restaurant’s door (usually and charmingly, one might add, by way of some careful employee’s printed hand), this triple alliance of negatives, this sun-drenched syllogism of what will and won’t be tolerated can be found.

It’s a warning of the consequences should you fail to keep yourself adequately, nay, minimally clad. Yet never is it so stern as to become a rule at which a forgiving shop owner might not wink. It, in this way, takes on the warmth of a friendly warning—being at once both inviting and forbidding, encouraging yet resolute. To see it is to know it’s officially summer. And for that, we rejoice. To heed it is something quite different. It’s to deign to the decorum expected of us at any other boring, cold time of the year—be it winter, fall, or spring. Even during the last, at whose end summer’s tantalizing horizon is all but within reach, all raiment, cap-a-pie, need apply—no questions asked.

But apparently, added to the sequence of “No’s” this summer is this: “No shoes, no shirt, no conformity of thought and of political opinion…no service”. From barren chests to sandy toes, that certainly escalated fast. Doubtless, with that foregoing addition, the quaintness and the charm of the original has lost some of its venial appeal. As we reluctantly burden our sun-burnt selves with heavy shirts and socks, we’ll now have to be on the lookout for this new sartorial and ideological interdict.

First to have been refused service because of this new rule was White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. At a small Virginia eatery, nestled—as we picture it now—at the corner of controversy and indecency, Sanders and her family gathered for an evening repast. Inside the “Red Hen’s” cramped yet cozy dining space, she and her group of seven settled in. They had, by that time, ordered and begun their first morsels and were likely to delve hungrily into the night’s discussions and hors d’oeurves.

Alarmed by the intrusion of such a repugnant patron (as, of course, the ever-respectful though perhaps, at times, not always completely veridical Ms. Sanders has proven at the White House podium to be), the staff attending her called upon their manager and then the Red Hen’s owner to decide on just what they should do with this disconcerting guest. Surely, they couldn’t dream of countenancing such a morally abhorrent presence in their homely little restaurant. To do so would be to spoil the very tables upon which their like-minded regulars flock to eat. To serve a paying customer with whom they disagree on political matters would be nauseating to the extreme. It would be nothing short of irreconcilable. It would be tantamount to liberal heresy, if not complete and utter Democratic apostasy. It simply wouldn’t do.

Arriving on the scene, then, and not a moment too soon, was the Red Hen’s owner. She proceeded to convene her tight-knit coop in the hope that they might collectively decide Sanders’ fate. By way of a plebiscite (the Red Hen is quite near Washington D.C., after all; what else would one expect of a Virginia establishment so close to that epitome of democracy—Capitol Hill?) the group decided against serving Sanders. I hazard to guess that in viewing the final count of such a vote, one would be hard-pressed to find even a single dissent. Sanders’ mere being there, so I’m sure the final tally exposed, would only sully the proud principles for which their humble eatery stood. And they, filled with their conceit, wouldn’t stand for it.

Thus, politely, Sanders was asked to leave. Having no recourse (although she did have time enough to finish her first course), Sanders agreed, dabbed her lips, and—preparing to leave—offered to pay her fare. No need. Her money was no good there, said the owner of that now and forevermore haughty Red Hen.

The interloper removed, and the crisis of an infringement of their conformity averted, one of the waitresses on staff that night posted and then quickly removed from Facebook a partial retelling of the affair. As never it is, said waitress’ attempt to remove the post wasn’t quick enough, and the media soon caught wind of what looked to be an incipient scandal. With sensitive noses incredibly finely tuned, they were right.

Caught in the midst of this exploding controversy, Sanders handled the fall-out with every grace. She expounded on Twitter the events of the evening, only after having been exposed by the loose-lipped waitress. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known a thing about all this. Decorously, Sanders explained that she’d been asked to leave because of her professional association with the president. Politely, though I do imagine somewhat despondently, she acquiesced.

Yet Sanders wasn’t the only Trump administration employee to be harangued when dining out. Kristjen Nielsen and Stephen Miller, the Director of Homeland Security and Senior Advisor to the president, respectively, were harassed whilst enjoying their dinners in D.C. Apparently, too conspicuously were they to be found at popular Mexican-American restaurants in the town. With the southern border in crisis, perhaps some other ethnicity’s cuisine might’ve been more palatable for the passers-by whose attention they caught, but even in that case (had the optics been improved) the treatment of the two might not have been much better.

In both cases, the people who noticed Nielsen and Miller dining in their respective restaurants jumped at their chance to reprove them and make a scene. They tossed upon Nielsen and Miller all sorts of opprobrium without any sense of civility, decency, nor regard. The browbeating was so intense, in fact, that Nielsen was forced prematurely to leave her meal. If harassing a private citizen (because of her political opinion) at a public venue to the extent that she’s forced to up and leave doesn’t quite sound like something out of the training manual of the Gestapo or the GPU, I’m not sure what else does. Yet even that concession, that of her leaving because of their bullying and coarseness, couldn’t satiate their zeal.

Protestors, ruffians, louts—call them what you, they proceeded for a second helping at a private residence where Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao where about to depart. Chao is the largely unseen Secretary of Transportation in the Trump administration; McConnell the painfully torpid first-in-command in the Senate. The hecklers, young men who numbered three, pressed her and her husband about this administration’s immigration policy. They demanded how, in light of the current circumstances at the southern border, they find it at all possible to sleep at night. Commendably, Chao stared the trio down and stood up for her and her husband. That said, you’ll likely hear no homage from the feminists to the intrepidity she showed in the face of, dare I say it, this blatant display of toxic masculinity.

Oh no. All of that is a second thought—a mere trifle. All that matters is this pestilence of “righteous indignation” that’s of late penetrated our discourse and acidified our thought. Yet, the “righteous indignation” is just that. It’s righteous, however seemingly egregious, and no thoughtful, decent person would dare look at it askance. It’s sanctioned from on high, from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, to liberal celebrities. It’s the type of righteousness that confers a license to do as you please. Be it to interrupt a meal, to refuse to serve a supper, to confront at a gas station, to pester in a park, to molest in a public place, or to excoriate on the street—every incivility is allowed, every barbarity encouraged.

Alas, it’s with great sadness that summer sheds its former slogan and adopts this new one. “No shoes and no shirt” no longer is enough. Whatever political identity you wear invites your persecution. That which is written on your sleeve condemns you like a leper. No longer is this the season of levity and peace—peace of mind, of spirit, of safety, nor of person. So long as you don’t agree, I have no regard for you, nor you for me. Sanders, Nielsen, Miller, and Chao have learned this illiberal and frankly, disheartening lesson in the hardest way. That said, it’s not a lesson to which they ought to become inured. Summer, after all, has a particular and especial place in the hearts and souls of all Americans. It’s the season that—for almost a quarter of a century and I do hope, a quarter of a century more—we celebrate our anniversary of liberty. A liberty at which and for which, so long as it’s existed, every nation has looked and pined. We’d do well to remember this as we begin adding more and more political prohibitions to our signs.

But a few weeks ago, we were all completely besotted with the whereabouts of First Lady Melania Trump. Though not known to be someone ever-present on the public scene, as is her dearly beloved Donald, she certainly is ever-elegant and attention-grabbing when and if she does appear. A model by trade, whose countenance and whose curves have saucily and revealingly graced the covers of such publications as Vanity Fair, Bazar, and GQ, she, like her husband, is no stranger to the gloss and the limelight of center stage.

It’s for that reason why, after having undergone a small abdominal surgery a little over a month ago, the media has been so bent on seeing her face again. In fact, in her absence, conspiracy theories were beginning to swirl. So goes the imagination of a press corps with nothing but gossip and frivolity to fill its time and our minds. Nevertheless, some in the media attributed her absence to marital strife, others to a sort of relationship coup de grace—some kind of merciful break that might save her from the man for whom she appears to enjoy such scant intimacy. Others conjectured a kidnapping, a poisoning, a repatriation back to Slovenia. Still others (admittedly, a far less imaginative few) thought that her health was failing because of some type of insidious chronic disease. In any case, for any number of these reasons or for none of them at all, she was hidden from the light of day.

Or so she was. At long last, all seemed to be well (the President assured us via Tweet that his wife was getting along and recuperating just fine) until she stepped outside the other day. Now, after having emerged from her convalescence in what was quite possibly history’s most distasteful jacket ever put on display, everyone who was clamoring to see her radiant smile and her runway strut is left wishing she’d stayed a bit longer in the dark.

Just how bad was this now infamous jacket? Unspeakably and bewilderingly so. It will go down as the crowning achievement of fashion’s faux pas—supplanting on its ascent to the bottom the shiver-inducing mom jeans, socks with sandals, and fanny packs. En route to the southern border, where no fewer than two-thousand immigrant children have been separated from their families in the past eighteen months, Melania donned a cargo-green army coat bespattered with the following inscription on its rear: “I don’t really care, do u?”.

A more unprepossessing, un-presidential, unaware, and above all, uncaring sartorial choice has never been put on display. Purchased from the Spanish-based women’s shop, Zara (for less than $40, no less) Melania warmed herself in Washington’s late-June heat with what’s become the jacket seen around the world. Travelling to Texas (itself no cool clime, with stultifying summer temperatures that regularly laugh as they pass triple digits—inhospitable, one would think, to a long, dark trench coat, no matter its price nor its adolescent appeal), Melania was photographed wearing the garment as if it mattered not.

And that’s the First Lady’s contention: it mattered not. Speaking on her behalf, Ms. Trump’s public representative put to rest all angry inquiries by declaring that the jacket had no ulterior motive. There was nothing subliminal in its inscription—nothing untoward in its text. Are we to believe this unbelievable line of reasoning, that this was “just a jacket” and merely the last thing Ms. Trump saw on her way out the door? Grabbing it in haste, she probably hadn’t even checked its obverse or worn it in months.

But for a lady so fastidiously accoutered, so gaudily prinked, and so fashionably forward and well-endowed, this meager defense defies all logic. More than that, it’s insulting. It assumes that the lot of us watching—surely, as mine is, with a mouth agape upon witnessing such an unforgivable faux pas—are mere simpletons without wardrobes or scruples our own. Are we so credulous as to think that a message blatantly plastered on her back hadn’t intended to be explicitly seen? Add to this the fact that this was Ms. Trump’s first official entrée into the public eye in over a month. Wearing this jacket almost certainly had its intention, and it can’t be so easily swept away by Ms. Trump, by her linguistic gap, nor by the sophistry of her public relations team.

So, taking seriously her public-relations explanation and suspending our disbelief, the jacket had no hidden message. What’s more, we’d be wrong to let such a superficiality blind us to the that fact which really mattered most. That fact, of course, was her sojourn to the border in the south. There our First Lady was, the absolute paragon of altruism and sympathy as she tended to those children riven of their parents at our country’s pervious gates. That’s the only “message”, if one could use the word, to which our attention should turn.

Or is it?

According to President Trump, his wife’s jacket wasn’t intended to be silent nor innocuous as her spokeswoman had claimed it to be. Rather, the message on her jacket was intended to be mockingly and invidiously clear. Spilling his two cents on Twitter, the president gave the lie to Melania’s spokeswoman’s claim when he explained that the message on Melania’s jacket was in fact meant to be a jab at none other than the fake news media. What’s his is hers, as any prosperous marriage knows full well, so it should come as no surprise that Melania has taken finally to sharing in her husband’s bête noire.

The scapegoat of every scandal (sometimes deservedly, though most often not), it was in fact the CNNs and MSNBCs and the Washington Posts and the New York Times of the world at which her jacket’s message was directed. In his words, the president expounded on the wardrobe controversy by saying that “Melania has learned how dishonest they (the fake news media) are and she truly no longer cares!” Apathy, then, is the new policy. At least now it’s been made explicit. Some had suspected it, others insinuated it. But this instance, quite unequivocally, puts to rest all feeble hopes that this administration has any decorum or heart.

In the span of one week, two of this country’s foremost conservative intellectuals, David Brooks of the New York Times and George Will of the Washington Post, have promulgated what’s become an increasingly popular, albeit politically heretical idea. Avowed, bespectacled, and in every way consummate Republicans though Brooks and Will might be—though one can be forgiven for looking upon the former with some degree of suspicion from time to time—they’ve both taken to their pens and their on-air pulpits to urge voters to break from the Party with which they’ve so long allied. This is no small thing. This is a turn from the very Party from which they both emerged as great public thinkers and the roots to which they owe a great deal.

And yet, their gospel, their papal bull, their Clermont speech as this Crusade to save conservatism from itself gets underway is this: leave in the lurch the Republican Party you once loved; cast your colors from red to blue, your ballot from “R” to “D”; above all, fear not divine nor demagogic retribution from neither God, the devil, nor Trump—commit yourself to an apostasy from the GOP. Only then can you expunge this conservative sin.

In essence, the upshot of their combined message is to make of you a defector, a turncoat, a liberal. That is, at least for a little while, if only long enough to spite the GOP. As the 2018 midterm elections approach (all of whose predicted results have vexed and eluded the best and savviest of statisticians—as of now, it appears Democrats are best-suited to reclaim the House but not the Senate, yet give it a day, and these predictions will surely change) Brooks and Will want of their readership an army of apostates marching to the polls against the beat of the Republican drum. Once a bounding baseline, with scores of timpani, the ode to conservatism has fallen recently flat. Chagrined at having countenanced so many milquetoast, pseudo-“conservatives” that fill the Senate and House chambers today, Brooks and Will want to orchestrate an overture to a new song.

Will is particularly unimpressed with the current Republican status quo. Taking one step further, perhaps, my analogy to Christianity and her tireless crusades, Will referred in his article to the “carnage” that is the “Republican misrule in Washington”. I know not the mortality rates, but I’m certain that the word “carnage” needn’t here apply. As far as the White House is concerned, I fail to see anything sanguinary about this presidency. Forget for a moment, if you can, all of Trump’s vitriol, raillery, and noise. Forget also just how utterly—and in some cases, shamelessly—supine to his temperament the Republican wing of Congress has become. In action, not in word, this president, if not this legislature, has forwarded a rather conservative agenda. Be it his crowned jewel of a justice Neil Gorsuch, his much-ballyhooed tax cuts, his de-regulatory measures, or his Middle Eastern stance, Trump is governing as the conservative we never expected him to be. Of course, the chameleon that he is, he’s changed his colors more than once for the worse by implementing broad and economically illiterate tariffs, praising murderous dictators, and spurning ageless allies, but such is the complexity and vagary of President Trump. Taken to the scorecard, though, it would be hard to argue that this administration and the legislature to which it responds hasn’t been overall conservative in such a way we haven’t recently seen.

Because this Trump presidency has been such a mixed-bag, it’s often a challenge to parse out the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff. Yet if it’s conservatism Will wants, at least on the net balance, it’s conservatism he’s received.

Yet his argument for defecting from the Republican Party seems not to be one rooted in conservatism and its preservation, but rather in his own personal frustration. It’s for this reason that he’s called for us as voters to ensure that the congressional Republican caucuses are “substantially reduced” come this fall. Reduced so much, in fact, that they’ll be rendered effectively impotent and useless moving forward toward the second half of President Trump’s first term. By taking from Republicans what’s become their “atrophied” and dormant muscle, they’ll be stripped of the strength given them by an all-too gracious Constitution. As if Republicans were teenagers from whom car keys could be punitively snatched, only then might they get their acts together and learn to wield their “Article I power” that they’ve so gallingly forsaken.

So, while Will spares no enmity for President Trump, his major contention is with the Republican members of Congress. One can agree that the latter has been embarrassingly otiose, for quite a long time but especially as of late, but this leads to a confusion in Will’s line of thought. He’s upset that Republican congressmen have been ineffective in passing meaningful legislation—which is, I suspect, a frustration to which any fan of progress will admit. Rather than perhaps advocate that his readers cast ballots for Republicans who might take seriously their constitutional prerogative and in the process boot out the slumbering incumbents who’ve accomplished for us and for him so little, he’s calling instead for Democrats to replace them wholesale.

Yet if his aim meets its target and the Democrats do indeed take back the legislative branch, his frustrations won’t very much change. He simply won’t have to levy them upon those he looks as part of his own Republican flock. His gripe that “Article I” (the legislative branch) has prostrated itself to “Article II” (the executive) will remain as it currently is and will only exacerbate in time. The inefficacy of Congress will be just as it’s been, save for a more feverish and zealous cry for President Trump’s head. Gridlock will permeate from which we won’t escape, legislation will lie fallow, the Overton window will shrink, and all of this will be a subtitle to the real headline that will define the next two years: Democrats going in for impeachment and the kill.

Ask Will, though, and this fate is worth the price. Should, against his wishes, the Republicans win the midterms and retain the Senate and the House, the decadent state of conservatism as he sees it will persist. So far as he’s concerned, the electoral victory will be nothing but Pyrrhic; his Party will win with numbers, but lose the fundamental ground upon which it once proudly stood.

Brooks offers a slightly more nuanced and cogent take. Playing for his part the strings of philosophy, he harkens back to the first principles of conservatism and applies them in our day.

A word, though, on first principles. They’re paradoxical things; they’re at once ethereal—seeming to float weightlessly and impractically above it all—and rudimentary. They’re the cornerstones over whose emergence you can’t leap, the pillars upon whose strength every institution grows, and the artifacts to which we too seldom return. Brooks does, as always, a fine job of describing exactly what these first principles are.

Without evoking the likes of Hume, Burke, Buckley, Arnold, or Locke, Brooks provides a brief primer on conservative thought (one wonders if it’s yet too soon to canonize Krauthammer into this distinguished group). He clarifies the way in which it fundamentally differs from liberalism—with the former prioritizing order and institutions (in the sense that Burke might’ve espoused) and latter regarding more highly liberty (a Rousseauian insight).

The distinction that he draws is intellectually astute and philosophically fun, but what’s important is its application today. On this line, Brooks seems to have converged with Will. You can, says Brooks in a binary, albeit slightly nerdy ultimatum, “be a conservative or a Republican, but you can’t be both”. Putting to practice this logic leads you to the very same end at which you’ll follow Will. Brooks simply presents his letters a bit more artistically and esoterically before getting to his similarly penetrating point. That point is that if you deign to vote for a Republican this coming fall, you may as well kiss your conservative credentials good-bye. But is this really the only choice?

In France, as in America, insolence is a synonym for youth. From Paris to Philadelphia, there as well as here, today’s youngster lacks something in maturity for his age. I know—to say as much is to say nothing new; it’s to repeat the gripe of just about every outgoing generation from times immemorial till our own day. It’s to raise the endless complaint of every ossifying optimist who—hardened by age and by achievements falling short of their dreams—has seen the spark of his own youthful divinity fade away.

For those of us only slowly, lately, and (if I can be so frank) hesitatingly coming to terms with our own newfound adulthood—shedding, as it were, the ill-fitting skins and skinny jeans of our youth and stepping onto the terra incognita that is, at least so we’re told, the “next chapter” of this life—this much is exceedingly clear. But what that fragile and sheltered youth of today lacks in maturity, he more than makes up for in audacity. The two are proportions in the inverse; where the former wants, the latter overflows. And with an impish insouciance and a general absence of deference or care, today’s youngster isn’t shy to make known the imbalances of the scale.

Such a callow contrarian was on display last week when French President Emmanuel Macron made his way about the crowd at the Fort Mont-Valerien in Suresnes, a WWII memorial located a stone’s throw west of Paris. At an event commemorating his predecessor Charles de Gaulle’s daring attempt to organize a French resistance army under the noses of the Nazis (who were at the time occupying France), Macron fraternized with the people lining the streets. They were gathered not only to meet their equally doughty, albeit slightly shorter current president (de Gaulle stood at an imposing six-feet-five inches; a stature rare for a man of his day and even rarer for a Frenchmen of ours) but also to celebrate one of France’s rare sources of pride.

After Hitler had achieved one of the most audacious maneuvers in the history of war, France was split into two. The Nazis had just slashed through the Maginot Line—a sprawling armed redoubt that traversed the entire eastern French border—of which much was shared with the newly avaricious and daring German stage. Beginning in southern Belgium and stretching all the way to the gates of that bastion of neutrality Switzerland, the Maginot Line was deemed impenetrable. At least it was supposed to be, according to the countless and—as time would prove—credulous opinions of France’s military commanders, amongst whom de Gaulle counted himself. Confident in his Maginot Line and its ability to rebuff any German advance from the east, de Gaulle thus turned his attention north.

It was there, at the Belgian border, through which not so long ago a restless Kaiser Wilhelm II descended into France that de Gaulle turned his sights. At that border in the late summer of 1914, the wily and whiskered German commander decided to embark on a most daring and consequential first strike. Wilhelm, against all expectations, used none other than Belgium as a conduit through which he might advance his troops into France. In so doing, he knew he would be inviting engagement by the British (of whom allegiance to Belgium was expected by way of an 1839 alliance) but he saw it as the best way to confront his empire’s inveterate enemy—that effete and pestering France. Confronting the Parisians yet again (the two countries had engaged numerous times since Napoleon’s capture of Jena), Wilhelm’s move was a famous, in some ways retributive, and ultimately sanguinary success. Soon were to begin the battles at Verdun, Champagne, and the Somme—each of which was more deadly than the last. And with them came an endless lustrum of disease, stalemates, and death.

De Gaulle knew and appreciated this history well, but that didn’t mean it was wholly applicable in his own day. Underestimating this new and differently and oddly mustachioed German head of state (Hitler, forgoing the fashions of the past, chose instead to constrain his facial hair to a humble smudge atop the upper lip), he anticipated the Führer to do exactly the same as Wilhelm II. Applying history as his guide, de Gaulle hurriedly sent his limited troops to the northern French border. The idea was that these soldiers could plug up the sieve that Wilhelm II had exposed so fruitfully—a break in the chain that still remained France’s weakest of all.

Of course, as we know, de Gaulle guessed wrong. Hitler feigned the Belgian route and opted instead for a blitzkrieg through the dense and inhospitable Ardennes. Of all of Hitler’s military strikes, of which most were abjectly ill-conceived, this was by far the most tactically well-designed. The German Panzers didn’t skip a beat as they hastened toward the French coast and thence the Channel where Calais, Dunkirk, and perhaps even Dover lay in wait. De Gaulle recognized the maneuver only too late. In a flash, Germany reached its destination in the west, and France was divvied up into two. The north came to be occupied by the Third Reich, as it remained until the end of the war. The south came to be the home of the Vichy government—a state within a state on whose subservience Berlin depended.

But this dependence, well-earned though it might’ve been, was complacent. Little did the Nazis notice the insurrection bubbling beneath the ground. In a desperate and astonishingly intrepid attempt to reclaim his home (and perhaps redeem his military miscalculation) de Gaulle sought to organize a rebel army that would combat its Aryan oppressors from within. These became the French resistance fighters, a doughty group of rebels about whom American students of the twentieth-century know surprisingly little. It’s a shame, really, as we pride ourselves on casting our lot for the under-dog clawing his way toward liberty.

The Fort Mont-Valerien in Suresnes is home to the Mémorial de la France combattante, a memorial, as any Anglican reader with even a drop of the Gallic in his bones might’ve guessed, commemorating this rebellious gang of French patriots and combatants. They were the thousands of men, of whom seventeen are symbolized and memorialized at the site, who sacrificed their lives to re-capture their country’s now lost way of life. Beyond the resistance fighters, it also commemorates those soldiers who fought and died outside of the continent—those who faced down the Desert Fox Rommel in the Maghreb, an area of sovereign states we know today as Senegal, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco.

Such a memorial is deserving of every respect, yet as President Macron made his way along the corridor, a young lad caught the statesman’s ear. Singing the Internationale as Macron engaged with the crowd, a bushy-haired boy made himself stand out. Hearing that cacophony of communism, that odious socialist anthem, Macron the centrist stopped in his tracks. The boy then proceeded to egg on Macron by calling him “Manu”, a convivial contraction of the president’s first name, Emmanuel.

For his part, Macron played the intransigent patriot to this insolent youth—and he played it well. Tolerating none of the boy’s Socialist nonsense on such hallowed ground, Macron proceeded to reprimand the youth at length for his poor taste. Of course, France is in many ways the birthplace of modern socialism as today we know it, with its roots stretching back to such intellectual luminaries like Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and even Marx himself (though born of Trier, Marx’s germinal years as a socialist were spent in the streets of Paris as a journalist and agent provocateur) but I think that the boy had rather frivolity than history in mind when he sang his song. On top of that, it was after all National Socialism against which France and her allies fought, making all the more odious his singing of the song which exalts socialism—the second half of that political movement’s aim.

Dignity preserved and sanctity renewed, Macron made the boy aware of just how important the memorial is to France. It was the well-timed tongue lashing, the much-needed wrist slapping that the boy deserved. It’s the least for which those countless fallen troops might’ve asked.

Are we to believe that I.C.E, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is akin to the Einsatzgruppen? If one takes earnestly the denunciations by which the agency has been lately pelted, we might do well in believing that the two are one in the same.

The latter, as if one needed to be reminded, existed only so long as did the Third Reich. Falling mercifully short of its promised thousand-year reign, Hitler’s dystopian vision of an Aryan millennium lived quite long enough. Even in the course of a few short years—really a blink of an eye as far as the longevity of empires are concerned—Hitler’s regime succeeding in ravishing the innocence of all posterity and scarring its peace of mind. Under the winking eye of his bespectacled second-in-command, Heinrich Himmler, the Einsatzgruppen operated in Europe with a license so morbidly unconstrained that it might not be wrong to call it carte blanche. The rank and file of the group swelled with the crème de la crème of the German soldiering class. Those men by whom it was composed had a few archetypal (and now stereotypical) attributes in common. They were tall, blond, muscular, gracile, Germanic to the bone and Teutonic to the core.

Most of the terrible crimes to which these homogeneous, flagitious men were never made to answer were not only permitted, but encouraged by their commanding officers. Scruples, as they are for the civilized world, weren’t chains by which their superiors were to be encumbered. By extension, neither were they. Indeed, few excesses were seen to be too much and seldom was a restraint on inhumanity to be found. To be murderous was to be expected, but to be gratuitous in the act was a higher art. Given the go-ahead from the Reichstag under which it operated, the Einsatzgruppen murdered whomever it pleased, stole whatever it wanted, and answered to no feeling of iniquity nor remorse. To deign to scruples would be to invite the unit’s own demise. In time, the group sprawled across the Sudetenland in the east, romped across the Rhineland to the west, and administered with unity and efficacy a throng of concentration camps all the way from Poland to Ukraine. It was, from its beginning till its end, a bestial paramilitary gang of SS thugs—the worst of all humanity that has yet been put on display.

And while I thought that the group had all but disappeared with the fall of Berlin in 1945 and the trials of Nuremberg thereafter, recent media reports have me questioning what I thought was my sound grasp on our historical past.

Apparently, our border patrol agents, on whom we as American citizens have come to place an immense and thankless responsibility, are actually no different from Hitler’s own personal brown shirt brigade. I.C.E agents, so it appears, are the second coming of the Nazis in every manner but name. Yes, our fellow Americans, our protectors of the southern border and—as it currently stands—our defenders of the written law are indistinguishable from those Germans who murdered millions of Bolsheviks, communists, gypsies, invalids, and Jews. They’re on par with those who thought nothing of firing their lugers and letting pour the effluvium from the Zyklon vents. It seems to be the case, if our disinterested talking heads on the evening news programs are to be taken seriously (and why should they not be?), that these brave Americans manning our southern border have become little more than synonyms for Aryans and stand-ins for fascists. The runic insignia “SS” and the three letters, “I.C.E” may as well be one in the same.

This, at least, is the idea that’s been making the rounds. Television host Soledad O’Brien, usually a steady and circumspect voice in the foggy mist, wondered aloud on Twitter if indeed “Nazi Germany” could happen here in America. Her answer, not surprisingly, albeit historically ignorantly, was an unfortunate yes. NPR reporter Maria Hinojosa did O’Brien one better by comparing I.C.E directly with the Gestapo—the secret police force responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews (the Gestapo, it’s worth adding, was eventually subsumed by the SS). Surely, the misdoings of I.C.E, wheresoever they might appear to be, will be measured commensurate to those of the genocidal murderers of an entire ethnic group.

Not a pundit, but someone worthy of note, First Lady Melania Trump’s lawyer, Michael Wildes joined O’Brien and Hinojosa in throwing in his own two cents. Appearing on Fox News, Wildes equated the “inhumanity” at the Mexican-American border with the “detention centers of Nazi Germany”, which served, mind you, as places of exploitation, labor, rape, and almost inevitably of death. And while we don’t hold him, a private and, by all appearances, successful attorney to the same standards to which we hold those who communicate the news, you mustn’t accept falsities from anyone who takes hold the public ear.

Perhaps most distressing of all, though, was the response to the current immigration crisis by General Michael Hayden. A decorated military man and estimable government official who served not only as President Obama’s director of the CIA, but as Presidents Bush’s and Clinton’s director of the NSA, Hayden posted on Twitter an image of Auschwitz with the caption, “other governments have separated mothers and children”. The intimation, if the venerated general wasn’t being overtly clear, was that President Trump’s approach to the current immigration crisis is akin to the way in which the Nazis treated prisoners at that most infamous of all concentration camps. Doubtless, a man of Hayden’s military pedigree would know the historical context well enough to apply it, or to withhold its specious application today.

These four people, of whom three are somewhat prominent fixtures in the public eye, ought to be ashamed of their comparisons of I.C.E with the SS, of our strained and underfunded immigration infrastructure with concentration and death camps, of Trump with Hitler, and of America with the Third Reich. Not only are these comparisons incendiary, but they’re mendacious, slanderous, and historically blind.

Children are being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, that much is true. Yet this is a result not of our deep-seated racial animus nor of our inveterate religious intolerance toward those to whom entry into this country has been blocked (on solidly legal grounds, it might be added). Rather, it’s the result of an ill-conceived court decree—one effectuated by the left-leaning Ninth Circuit in the year 2016. It was a ruling to which even President Obama was forced to abide. Prior to his doing so, Obama and his administration were guilty, albeit inconspicuously, of separating young Central American children from their mothers and fathers at the border. This unsavory truth, however, wasn’t adequately newsworthy at the time. On the contrary, it was brushed aside and counted as yet another unprepossessing story destined to elude the light of day.

And while Obama’s successor might not be going about the execution of this law in the most decorous of ways, he is ultimately doing exactly what Obama was compelled by the courts to do. Like it or not, President Trump is doing that which his job as chief executive demands. In a word, he is executing the law as we’d expect any president to do.

At the border, children are being separated from their parents. The situation is troubling and bleak. The former suffer the transient stresses of detachment from their parents, while the latter face prosecution (as per Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy) for their illegal entry into the country. By and large, these are families coming from Central and South America—usually from contemptible and squalid places—who’ve decided against seeking entry at any number of the licit checkpoints scattered along the Texas border. Conceivably, these desperate and tired families have forgone the checkpoints for one of two reasons: first, it could be a sheer matter of ignorance that leads them to attempt an illegal crossing (that is, because they know not that there are in fact legal checkpoints that even exist) or second, because of insolence (knowing that the likelihood of them being turned away at said ports of entry is inauspiciously high). But because of the court’s decree, the children of these endeavoring, audacious, and—on no small number of occasions—spurious parents can only stay in the detention centers for twenty days. Thereafter, they must be re-located either to foster homes, juvenile holding centers, or to the properties of their next of kin. Of the three options, none is particularly desirable but all beat the countries whence they came.

A simple and an anodyne way to rejoin these children with their parents and nip in the bud this bubbling controversy and its Nazi comparisons would be to do away with the twenty-day cap. First installed by a case named “Flores” in 1997 and, as noted, strengthened a decade later by the Ninth Circuit court, this law puts a premium on expediency (by having the children move through the system so quickly in less than a month) at the cost of humanity (in that it almost always takes longer than twenty days for their parents to be booked).

Really, though, there’s very little that’s simple when you’re dealing small children being separated from their parents for hours, let alone days. This, mind you, comes at the heels of a long, hot, and precarious journey with their now separated parents from Latin America whence they came. Tired and uncertain, these children can be seen in crowded detention facilities overseen by I.C.E. There, images reveal them crying, idling, sleeping on mats, and pacing in cages as they await to be re-united with their parents and deported out of the country or granted admittance into it.

That said, so far as the plights of illegal aliens are measured against the rest of the world and through the lens of history, these children aren’t being abused. On the government’s dime, they’ve been provisioned shelter, sustenance, entertainment, language classes, group activities, and every solicitude that our under-funded government agencies can offer. That’s not to say that I would send my child there for a three-week sojourn, but the conditions through an earnest and panoptic lens must be viewed.

Children at Auschwitz had an altogether different fate. Upon alighting the cattle cars in which they were stowed (usually by that point buried in their own excrement, blood, and sweat), they were lead to the camp and its mocking gates. Arbeit macht frei, read the stolidly orthogonal iron bars, but on the children, the cruel irony of these three words was certainly lost. As such, most children wouldn’t have the opportunity to indulge the illusion of liberation through work—an illusion to which some of their more hopeful elders still grasped.

Then, shorn of their hair, of their clothes, of their valuables, and finally of their pride, these poor children were ushered toward the “showers”. This was done with little delay. It was an act of alacrity, never one of clemency. The elder women, to whom they looked for reassurance and poise over the course of their long journey, were visibly broken. So too denuded, they followed the children closely behind as all were to congregate for one last time in the chambers. The men of “able” body had at that point already been separated from the women and children and sent away to begin their new and abbreviated lives. However, as they were quickly to learn, there was to be in their new line of work no consolation, much less remuneration; the men realized that regardless of their toils, they’d too be made to join the women and children in the breathing of a shared and fetid fate. All were to die in a cloud—to disintegrate in a plume of smoke.

Those children deemed sufficiently anomalous might hope to extend their lives ever so slightly, though no less painfully. If she was a twin or of a curious stature, the child might fall into the hands of a one Dr. Mengele, under whose “care” she would live out the rest of her days. She would suffer unspeakable harm until she was rendered useless in death (although, more often than not, her autopsy would prove her most valuable asset to the deranged physician). The “Good Uncle”, or the guter onkel as the tongue of the time might’ve said, would endear himself to his little subjects by feeding them treats before exposing them to the barbaric, macabre, pseudo-scientific musings that so fervently danced about his head. The number of children who died at his hand is unknown.

Doubtless, it’s a moribund re-telling of the past, but it’s only through this lens we can better appreciate the moment in which we live. The situation at the southern border is embarrassing, frustrating, seemingly intractable, and lamentable, but the one thing that it’s not is comparable to Auschwitz and the Holocaust. That’s something we’d be wise not to forget. I.C.E, in a word, is not the equivalent to the Einsatzgruppen. In fact, thankfully, there is no American organization to which such a dishonest and scurrilous equivalence should be drawn.