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(The Latest Word provides Sandy's latest observations about folk music and other topics. The main Latest Word page contains a list of additional installments.) THE NEW COLOSSUS, VERSION 2.0 Last summer, I visited my old home town, New York City, for the first time since 9/11. As I stepped off the Circle Line boat at Liberty Island, I noticed an odd gleam coming from the Statue of Liberty'' pedestal: There was a brand-new bronze tablet where the old one bearing Emma Lazarus' famed poem, "The New Colossus," had been. On closer inspection, I found the following (with apologies to Ms. Lazarus, who is doubtlessly rightfully retching in her grave):
Not like the
stately giant of poets' fame And then I woke up. But as the months go by and we grind inexorably toward war, it seems less and less like a bad dream than it does a premonition. Five hundred errant votes, plus four planes commanded by methodical madmen, have managed to accomplish what generations of reactionary xenophobes could not: Suddenly, it's 1942 all over again. Only this time, instead of herding those of our enemy's ethnicity in our midst into internment camps along with their families and neighbors, we've plucked them from their families and hidden them in federal prisons and then refused to reveal who they are, where they're being held, and what they're accused of (apparently, being Middle Eastern and falling even one credit hour shy of the requirements to keep a student visa). We do not let their families or even their attorneys contact them, we do not let them confront their accusers, we do not even treat them with the same deference accorded convicted felons who happen to be citizens, All that is necessary to put and keep them there secretly and indefinitely is one federal functionary's written certification that they are "suspected of terrorism." And those suspicions need not even be specified. The lucky ones have managed to be released, but the cloud of suspicion and threat of deportation remains. The rest remain imprisoned, some in solitary confinement, others in the general population next to rapists and murderers. In at least one instance, when prison officials noticed the detainees looking wistfully out the narrow windows for signs of the outside world, the windows were promptly painted over. Some, when deported, were escorted to the airports in shackles and prison uniforms—not even in the clothes they were wearing when arrested, their personal effects confiscated. What is their crime? Officially, violating immigration laws by overstaying visas. Some, as mentioned, failed to keep a sufficient course load to maintain full-time student status (despite waivers by their colleges and universities). Others spent decades fighting for political asylum eventually denied them but granted others who happened to flee communist or other leftist-run countries. Most were justifiably rounded up, the government contends, for failing to obey orders to show up and be deported unquestioningly like good little sheep. After exhaustive investigation, that's all the government has been able to charge them with. It took decades for the government to finally admit the immorality and inhumanity of the World-War-II-era internment of those of Japanese descent, noting that the same treatment was not inflicted upon Italian or German immigrants (whose motherlands were also our enemies back then). Even Supreme Court justices who'd upheld internment's constitutionality in the Korematsu and Hirabayashi cases later admitted they were wrong and apologized (one of them in my presence). Who are the new detainees' cellmates? Not undocumented Caucasian drug runners, smugglers, Russian mobsters, and the like. They remain free until actual evidence can be gathered against them to bind them for trial. Not so the new internees. No evidence is necessary, just a flimsy pretext and the wrong ethnicity. We take pride in being a nation founded on human dignity, freedom, tolerance, and justice. That, we have stated for over 200 years, is what distinguishes us from all nations that existed before us (and many, if not, most with which we coexist today). We looked at post-1917 Soviet Russia, Cultural Revolution-era China, and both left-wing totalitarian North Korea and its right-wing dictatorship neighbor to the South and crow that it couldn't possibly happen here. Our freedoms and enlightenment are precisely what have our enemies seething with resentment. We've proudly declared that we have become far too enlightened to ever again allow maltreatment of residents based on their ancestry. When we were presented with a radically reactionary Attorney General (who couldn't even defeat a corpse for a Senate seat), we scoffed at those who warned we could be driven back into xenophobic totalitarianism. Who's laughing now? Nobody—not even those in power, who appear to be too tightly laced to laugh. We could have partially corrected this and locked the barn door, even after Dubya and Ashcroft ran off with the horses. But the Democratic Party was apparently terrified of being labeled disloyal, so rampant me-too-ism ruled the day at the midterm elections. And now the man who lost the popular vote by a half-million votes and narrowly won the electoral vote by still-disputed means, gets to proclaim that he and the reactionary right have a mandate. Civil liberties, once the backbone of our establishment as a nation, are now seen as mere frivolities. I'd say that Lady Justice is weeping, but I can't tell, because Ashcroft has shrouded her in blue drapery velvet lest her anatomy offend his eyes. God help us. The courage of our convictions sure hasn't. Main Page • Additional Installments • Contact Sandy Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, Sandy Andina, All Rights Reserved |
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