Racism and squalor behind every Leisureland

Last Thursday, at just about the time President Trump was making his notorious remark about the “s---hole countries” whose citizens are not welcome on our shores, I was sitting in a movie theatre watching “Downsizing.”

This film is unlikely to win many Oscars, but it’s built around an interesting, if far-fetched, premise. As humanity’s pressure on our environment increases, scientists discover a way to make Earth’s limited resources go farther, a mechanism that reduces a human’s physical size to approximately five inches, thus diminishing his impact on the environment.

When Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), an occupational therapist who is struggling to make ends meet in Omaha, Neb., discovers that his $100,000 nest egg translates into $12 million in the “small” world, he decides to undergo miniaturization.

Five hours after the process begins, a five-inchtall Paul wakes up in Leisureland, an ideal miniature community of “small” people who can afford sprawling mansions and other luxuries — golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools — that would be denied to them in the “big” world.

Soon reality intrudes on paradise. Someone has to clean the homes, mow the lawns, groom the golf courses and pick up the trash. Mostly they’re black and brown people. Paul discovers that the help leaves Leisureland every evening through a hole in the formidable wall that surrounds it, and they make their way to the warren of shabby hovels in which they reside, places of squalor and disease.

The symbolism is a little heavy-handed, but there’s no mistaking the principle: the fantasy world of Leisureland is impossible without the labor of individuals who live in misery and privation. In other words, as soon as you create a Leisureland, you have to create a “s---hole country” to support it.

And, of course, that country is populated by black people and brown people. The overwrought metaphor in “Downsizing” wouldn’t ring true if the help were all white people.

The essential tenet of racism is that this is the way it has to be, that there is something inherently inferior in black- and brownskinned people that suits them for menial labor in the eyes of people like Trump and that makes them create countries — and continents — that are poor, dirty and squalid.

Other factors — imperialism, colonialism, dearth of natural resources — are dismissed. Race is the basis for an easy rationalization of the status quo by those who benefit from it.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t the only racist in our country, but he is the racist that we’ve somehow elected to lead us. His isn’t the kind of racism that burns crosses in front yards. It’s more insidious and, thus, more difficult to identify, acknowledge and condemn. In fact, some of Trump’s apologists have suggested that his remark will resonate with his base, and indeed it has.

Ironically, the miniaturization process that drives the movie “Downsizing” was developed in Norway, the land that Trump prefers over the “s---hole” nations of Africa.

But the speculation that Norwegians want to come here is the presumptuous flip side of his “s---hole” remark.

Summer before last in the Oslo airport, I fell into friendly conversation with a young Norwegian who was flying home to Bergen with his two young children.

He spoke with obvious pride about his gorgeous nation, which the 2017 World Happiness Report ranked as the world’s happiest country, while the U.S. came in at number 14.

I might have asked him if he’d prefer to live in the U.S., but the question is impertinent and the answer is obvious.

Norway may have its own problems, but why leave a country with a secure social safety net for one with eight times as many homicides that is led by a man like Trump?

Not every nation has the natural resources and stability of Norway, but nearly all citizens of nearly all countries — even the “s--hole” countries — take pride in the lands of their birth, even if they have to leave them in order to survive.

Trump’s myopic racism prevents his understanding of this obvious human trait; thus he continues to diminish our international standing and influence.