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Monday
“Some say the world will end in fire/ Some say in ice,” goes Robert Frost’s well-known poem. And while the poem, which in the past I’ve applied to climate change, is really about relationships (fiery anger and cold withdrawal can both be lethal), it works as a pun to capture our current situation. ICE, the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has become the Trump administration’s Gestapo, disappearing people off the streets and sending them to prisons and, in some instances, a Salvadoran concentration camp.
In this case, ICE is helping end our constitutional republic since the right of individuals to due process is at the core of who we are. Once the government can lock people up secretly and without a hearing, we have become a dictatorship.
ICE started with immigrants but it has since moved on to people with legitimate visas and green cards, and there have been at least two instances of American citizens being incarcerated before relatives showed up with birth certificates. ICE claimed these were mistakes but according to former Soviet grandmaster Gary Kasparov, who knows authoritarian measures when he sees them, “mistakes” are actually tests: dictators want to see how far they can push their power.
The Iceman Cometh is the title of a Eugene O’Neill play that can be applied to our situation. While there are multiple interpretations of the title, including that it alludes to Jesus’s apocalyptic warning about the bridegroom coming and catching the handmaids asleep, at one level it is a reference to the character “Hickey” Hickman. A successful businessman who returns home each year to throw a party, this year Hickey has another plan: to throw cold water on people’s pipe dreams.
These pipe dreams are rationalizations for non-action. The other characters, all alcoholics, invent continuous excuses for why they aren’t doing anything meaningful with their lives. Instead, they choose to hang around Harry Hope’s saloon. Early on, one of the more reflective patrons delivers a pronouncement that at first put me in mind of Trump supporters:
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
How are Trumpists to deal with the impending threat of climate change, a Trump recession, and a rapidly changing and complex world? Easy. Just let your leader lull you into the pipe dream that, by asserting white supremacy and going it alone, America can be great again.
The play shows the fury these people experience when someone comes in to wake them up (Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris). By the end of the play, they have convinced themselves that Hickey is insane and that they can return to their pipe dreams and their alcoholic stupor.
But I want to focus on another pipe dream that is more insidious. This is the one the ICEmen are attacking. The pipe dream is that America has a set of safeguards that will protect its democracy. That our inalienable rights are written into the Constitution and therefore operative. That the courts will affirm the principles of due process, of birthright citizenship, of the rights to speak freely and to assemble, etc. And that the American people are fundamentally decent. ICE has entered our lives like Hickey into the saloon and ripped these illusions from our eyes.
As we see ICE crossing one red line after another, how long before we see its actions resulting in people getting killed? Domestic prisons yesterday, a Salvadoran concentration camp today, what tomorrow? This, after all, was the trajectory in 1930s Germany, and we know where that ended up. To invoke another ice poem, this one about death, Wallace Stevens writes, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
Elsewhere in his poem, Stevens writes, “Let be be finale of seem,” pointing to how the grim reaper will cut through all illusions. Corpses wrapped in winding sheets, resembling “big cigars,” have a way of confronting us with reality. “If her horny feet protrude,” the poet points out, “they come to show how cold she is, and dumb.”
We’re not at the killing stage yet and, with enough resistance, may escape it. We just can’t make the assumption that ICE will stop there given everything else it has done. Right now, our only hope is collective action.
With ICE’s escalating raids in mind, I turn to Martin Niemöller’s famous poem. It’s worth noting that the poem is personal and comes from a deep place. Niemöller was a battalion commander of the paramilitary Freikorps that brutally put down the Ruhr uprising in 1920; he voted for Nazis in 1924, 1928, and 1933; and he was making anti-Semitic statements as late as 1935. He was thus like those former Trump supporters who finally see the light.
In his case, seeing the light landed him in concentration camps until the end of the war, and he narrowly escaped death:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
They came for him, and Trump’s ICEmen won’t stop at undocumented immigrants and people with visas and green cards. Ask not for whom their bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
