I'm sure by now we've all heard the various versions of the Hypocrisy Circus that is the story of the Trump Administration's handling of the case of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national living legally in the US and holding down a union job. He is a husband and father and lived in Maryland before being deported to an El Salvadoran maximum security prison for terrorists - with, of course, no evidence, no facts, and no due process. And now the man who thinks he can annex Canada as the 51st state says he has no power to return Garcia to the US, even though the Supreme Court - his Supreme Court - told him to.
I just can't fully embrace this story. The repulsion is too strong. And I am using 'repulsion' in both senses; the feeling of disgust and horror, and the almost physical inability to approach it; it is literally repelling me. I can't get near it. I feel like it will do some sort of damage to me just by taking a thorough look at it, so I shield myself, retreat.
More and more stories of the Trump Administration evoke this response in me, especially those stories that involve real people being damaged and, in some cases, losing their lives. It is, in part, my response to the serial bullying and abuse of power that reaches into lives every day; being bullied touches on childhood trauma that I think many of us share, and here it is again. Part of it is outrage at the damage done to the institutions that have kept America great when it was great, and helped heal it when it was not. Part of it is partisan. Part is the cognitive dissonance created by an environment constructed of lies and hypocrisy. And part of it is the devaluing and invalidation of a human response, a human feeling: empathy. Which is worth an entire post of its own.
But part of it - big enough to keep me at bay - is the fact that we are in the power of those who have no use for truth or empathy, whose only motive is to fulfil their base desires. They are like the boy in "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby, who could put you under the cornfield if you said the wrong thing. They are evil, but not innocently evil, like the boy in the story. They are evil on purpose.
I use that word - evil - carefully, thoughtfully. It's not a word to be trifled with. But I recently read a comment by H. M. Gilbert*, a psychologist who interviewed and translated for Nazi war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials. He noted, of his experiences:
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Is this the case? At least one guy who knew what he was talking about thinks that it is. At any rate, it is this same evil that we face today, and it repels us. Do you feel it?
* - Interestingly enough, Gilbert later wrote a book called "The Psychology of Dictatorship," which we should all read if we want to understand, from the leaders of the Third Reich, what is going on in America right now. A chilling exchange between Gilbert and Hermann Goring:
Göring: ...after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
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