The “Battle” for Los Angeles
So, I was watching Knives Out the other night because it’s a great movie and one of my all-time favorites. I had forgotten how truly reprehensible most of the Thrombey family actually are. Director Rian Jonson uses them to great effect as a stand in for American entitlement, laziness and off the cuff racism in the face of their wealthy father having a better relationship with his immigrant Latina nurse than any of his actual children. The Thrombeys say things like “We’re losing our way of life and our culture,” “America is for Americans,” and “We let them in and they think they own what’s ours.” Knives Out is a great movie because it's a wonderful mystery but ALSO a fucking scathing attack on the first Trump presidency; and guess what, its still remarkably valid in his second ill-fated term in office.
This brings us to the current day protests in Los Angeles and the efforts by ordinary citizens all over the country, not just in LA, to impede or prevent the extrajudicial kidnapping of immigrants. I’m not going to link anything with news about the protests because that’s easy to find. What I AM going to do is link this essay by Michiko Kakutani which helps explain why Trump is SO obsessed with sending troops into cities with large immigrant populations, which creates more chaos and creates more opportunities for him to send in more troops to “protect our cities” and make sure that those OTHERS, those who ARENT FROM HERE know their place.
I know that I make a lot of allegations here conflating trump and his followers with fascists/nazis but its really hard not to when they are LITERALLLY DOING THE EXACT SAME FUCKING THINGS that Hitler did. Economic depression in Germany following a massive war? Blame the Jews and their “otherness”, their “different way of life” from Christian Germany. Economic lows in America following decades of corporate greed, misanthropy, and abandonment of working class Americans? Blame immigrants, regardless of how they came into this country, of stealing the promised future of the 50’s when the USA was ”Great” from white middle Americans who think “their way of life and culture” are under attack.
What is AMERICAN culture? Seriously what is it? Are my father’s Scottish ancestors who settled around Salem Massachusetts in the 1650’s more American than my mother’s German family who settled in New Jersey in the 1920’s? My grandfather, a first-generation German American, joined the Navy and fought in the second World War. He was forced to fight in the Pacific because of his German parentage and perceived potential disloyalty to the country of his birth.
How many generations until we accept people? Two? Five? Is the majority Arab American city of Dearborn Michigan, where the hijab is as common as any baseball cap, a cause for celebration of the great promise of the American Melting Pot or a threat to the “American Way of Life”?
To be born on American soil is to be an American. To immigrate and join the swirling mass of color, music, food, art, sport, politics, and LIFE is to be an American. No White Christian Nationalist can take that away from us.
Chinga la Migra
Abolish ICE
Take off your masks you cowards
With love, from all the Bhoys