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Monday
The Kakaesque horror of Trump’s deportation of immigrants to a Salvadoran hellhole, including (thanks to an admitted “administrative error”) legal U.S. resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, demonstrates that George Orwell should have added 40 years to his masterwork. Can we retitle it 2025 and note that it is no longer predicting a dystopian future but describing a present-day reality? And will we ever wake up from this nightmare?
As I was reading about these deportations to El Salvador, I started experiencing an unsettling sense of familiarity. Something similar happens in one of my favorite Oz books, L. Frank Baum’s Rinki-Tink in Oz.
I vividly remember, as a child, reading about the seizure of the king and queen of Pingaree by ruthless raiders from the twin island of Regos and Coregos. When Prince Inga, aided by three magical pearls that give him strength, protection, and advice, goes to free his parents, they are deported carried to the prison of a foreign dictator. In return for a substantial bribe, Nome King Kaliko agrees to hold them as indefinite prisoners in his underground prisons.
In light of recent events, I am almost as disturbed by rereading the episode now as I was when I read the book at age 10 or so.
After Inga, aided by the pearls, invades the islands, Queen Cor figures they must use the boy’s parents as hostages:
We must take the boy’s parents away from here as quickly as possible. I have with me the Queen of Pingaree, and you can run up to the mines and get the King. Then we will carry them away in a boat and hide them where the boy cannot find them, with all his magic. We will use the King and Queen of Pingaree as hostages, and send word to the boy wizard that if he does not go away from our islands and allow us to rule them undisturbed, in our own way, we will put his father and mother to death. Also we will say that as long as we are let alone his parents will be safe, although still safely hidden. I believe, Gos, that in this way we can compel Prince Inga to obey us, for he seems very fond of his parents.
Their plan is to send them to the novel’s version of a Salvadoran prison:
“It isn’t a bad idea,” said Gos, reflectively; “but where can we hide the King and Queen, so that the boy cannot find them?”
“In the country of the Nome King, on the mainland away at the south,” she replied. “The nomes are our friends, and they possess magic powers that will enable them to protect the prisoners from discovery.”
Thanks to advice from his wisdom pearl, Inga tracks his parents to the nome king’s realm, only to encounter a ruler using the logic presently being used by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele. Bukele is being paid $20,000 a year per inmate he takes in, and Nome King Kaliko is similarly transactional. As he explains to the king and queen of Pingaree when they protest their innocence and charge Gos and Cor of lying about them,
I know it. I consider it a clever lie, though, because it is woven without a thread of truth. However, that is none of my business. The fact remains that my good friend King Gos wishes to put you in my underground caverns, so that you will be unable to escape. And why should I not please him in this little matter? Gos is a mighty King and a great warrior, while your island of Pingaree is desolated and your people scattered. In my heart, King Kitticut, I sympathize with you, but as a matter of business policy we powerful Kings must stand together and trample the weaker ones under our feet…. The fact that you are a prisoner, my poor Kitticut, is evidence that you are weaker than King Gos, and I prefer to deal with the strong.
Bukele is operating similarly. He knows perfectly well that many of the prisoners being sent to him (those not taken directly out of U.S. prisons) are innocent of gang membership. But as Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark observes,
Let us speak plainly: Nayib Bukele is a minor strongman who will do whatever Donald Trump demands of him. If Trump wants Abrego Garcia in the United States, then Bukele will return him. By the same token, if Bukele understands that Trump does not want Abrego Garcia returned, then he will keep the man.
Bukele has no interests in this game other than pleasing his political patron. His exercise of Salvadoran “sovereignty” can only be read as an expression of Donald Trump’s will.
Anyone who asserts otherwise is either a villain or a fool.
So if Bukele affirmatively refuses to repatriate Abrego Garcia, it will mean that Trump has told him not to.
I suspect, however, that Bukele does not talk as frankly to Trump as Kaliko talks to the rulers of the twin islands. “In spite of your false statements and misrepresentations,” he tells them, “I will earn the treasure you have brought me, by keeping your prisoners safe in my caverns.”
Heaven knows what will happen to Abrego Garcia and the others illegally sent to foreign prisons without a chance to appeal their cases. In the novel there’s a deus ex machina ending that I found disappointing as a child. Dorothy, now a princess in Oz, has been keeping track of events through Glinda’s magical Great Book of Records, “wherein is inscribed all important events that happen in every part of the world.” When she learns about Inga, she gets Ozma’s permission to intervene.
She shows up in Kaliko’s realm with a basket of eggs, which the nomes find to be toxic, and demands that he release Inga’s parents. Kaliko at first argues that he has to honor his contract. In this, he sounds a bit like the Trump administration, which is contending that it is no longer “custodian”:
“I can’t do it, Dorothy,” said the Nome King, almost weeping with despair. “I promised King Gos I’d keep them captives. You wouldn’t ask me to break my promise, would you?”
Dorothy replies,
“King Gos was a robber and an outlaw, and p’r’aps you don’t know that a storm at sea wrecked his boat, while he was going back to Regos, and that he and Queen Cor were both drowned.
So between being offered this out and threatened with eggs (presumably purchased at non-inflationary prices), Kaliko frees the king and queen of Pingaree.
Right now, the only hope of those imprisoned is the U.S. Court System. Can judges compel Trump to release people who have been deported to foreign jails? Or will they prove less powerful than Ozma and her emissary Dorothy? We don’t yet know the answer.
