Going along to get along
Would you go along to get along? Who would go Nazi? At what point would you stop? Most Americans would break at the sound of tiny children calling for their mommy and daddy while sobbing so hard that they run out of breath and yet still being torn from their parents’ arms and put in cages for the duration, possibly never to see their parents again. (No, the 6-year-old never found her aunt.)
Most people would demand an end to Trump’s horrific policy, possibly in person, possibly millions of persons. (Note: Canada did this to Indigenous children and it wasn’t national outrage that stopped it.)
I may be wrong. As I write, Democrats want Trump’s policy to end and Republicans do not. Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen heard reporter Olivia Nuzzi’s audio of the crying border children in the small briefing room as she stood before reporters — funny how infant crying drills into the brain — and did not budge.
Both she and Press Secretary Sarah Sanders claimed they had not seen the photos and stories about the border scenes that have flashed around the world, rivalling Abu Ghraib and My Lai as evidence of American depravity. The audio played on.
Attorney General Jefferson Sessions, the one who looks like an angry garden gnome, said there was no comparison to Nazi concentration camps, claiming: “Of course in Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country.” But only in order to trap and kill them there, Jeff. Soon they would ship them to Poland for gassing as part of their effort to wipe Jews from the Earth.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Thomas Homan has always said he is just doing his job. “I feel bad for some of these people, but I have a job to do. I have to enforce the law.”
The border policy may have originated with weird Trump henchman Stephen Miller. He is Jewish — his family is not happy — as are various Trumpers, some running for office, some named Jared. Nobody likes Miller. He is the strangest of the septic Trump entourage, pallid, friendless and possibly incel, with a troubling resemblance to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
As to which Trump aide most resembles his wife, Magda — she poisoned their six small children in Hitler’s bunker, calling it a kindness — there are many candidates.
The list of people not normally expected to enjoy child-tormenting but doing it anyway — it’s like bear-baiting but cute — is long. It includes women with children like Ivanka Trump, women without children like Nielsen, Transport Secretary Elaine Chao, who fled China via cargo ship as a child, and the everlasting token, HUD chief Ben Carson.
They go along to get along, to get very rich after leaving office or in Wilbur Ross’s case, while in office. It has not occurred to them that their stance will be shorthand in their 2060 obituaries: “Trump-era child torturer dies.”
I don’t include Fox’s Laura Ingraham or the ghostly Ann Coulter calling the cages “tough love” or “summer camp.” They’re hyenas “wrestling over the last strands of outrage gristle,” as Patton Oswalt put it.
It was Ralph Nader who asked, “Do you go along to get along?” at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto. I was 19. The answer, I discovered as I entered work life, was that most people do.
Colleagues don’t back up women reporting sexual harassment because they want to save their own jobs. Managers agree to mass layoffs if they can stay. Don’t defend the bullied kid at school. Keep your head down at work. Don’t get the whistleblower’s taint on you.
In Posen in 1943, Himmler assembled his Reichsleiters and Gauleiters to tell them what they would do to the Jews, but that the secret must be taken to the grave.
Everyone was so depressed after Himmler’s speech, wrote historian Gitta Sereny, that “when Bormann offered us a snack after the end of the speech, we sat wordlessly, avoiding each other’s eyes.”
Even Nazis felt uneasy. They got over it, of course. What would break Trumpism? Not child abuse. Not car prices. Not neoNazi marches. Not mining the oozing yellow seam of human cruelty. Whatever it is, it will be taken to the grave.