Homeland Security Ate My Speech Read online

  Regarding the overseas potentates that threaten your hegemony, you should refrain from the temptation of negotiating with them. Like us, you have lethal weapons at your disposal and invincible armadas able to sail from bases on every continent. Take, therefore, the war to your enemy, decimate his cities, fields and, above all, his communications systems. Make him and his children tremble at the trumpet of your very name.

  First though, deal with the enemies inside, who reproduce like rabbits. You have already proposed registering Muslims, something we did with severe efficiency, forcing them to wear badges and cease their infidel practices. If this measure turns out to be insufficient, you should deport them. Do not listen to those who declare that this will bring economic ruin and ignominy to the realm, nor that it cannot be physically accomplished. In a mere two years—from 1609 to 1611—my son managed (with the help of a heavily armed local militia) to be rid of this pestilent rabble, purifying Spain as you should purge America.

  And while you’re contemplating such a defense of national security, why not register the unruly poor as well, making sure they really deserve the charity so liberally lavished on them? I started with the beggars, decreeing in 1558 that only those veritably infirm could request alms, forcing the rest to work for their bread instead of rioting and chanting slogans. Though not all begging should be forbidden. When your students, like ours, accumulate calamitous financial obligations, they should be licensed to seek help in designated public areas. Besides such festive youngsters cheering up the populace with their antics, the budgetary cuts will liberate funds better destined to military expeditions.

  And talking of education, why not introduce as an obligatory text in your schools, The Perfect Housewife, a manual, fashionable in our time, which counseled young women to obey their husbands, no matter how abusive, drunk, cruel, and irritable they might be. A discrete way to restore the natural hierarchy that God has created among species and sexes.

  And if current domestic insubordination were to contaminate the republic itself, consider the possibility of resurrecting the Holy Brotherhood of the Inquisition. You have already suggested that you believe your enemies should be subjected to more extreme measures than mere waterboarding. How about fire? Nothing provides a fearful nation with more security than a select number of Auto da Fes, assisted by a surveillance system that already rivals mine, the envy of the nations of my time. And make sure the sword of justice is swift so that a death penalty constantly delayed by litigation is not rendered useless as a deterrent.

  As to violent variations in the climate, do not heed demands that you intervene. Such scourges are God’s way of testing your convictions. Instead of trying to cleanse the earth, cleanse your bodies and souls of sinfulness, in particular dealing with sodomites mercilessly. The Lord will respond with fresh air and sparkling water.

  One last recommendation. During my reign, I considered the Jews to be Satanic, and was always grateful to my grandparents for expelling them from Spain in 1492. But I admit that there is one policy of their descendants in the Holy Land that I admire and suggest you imitate: build walls, many, many walls.

  With best wishes, mejores deseos, to you and your future subjects, suggesting, just in case, that you share these thoughts with Mr. Cruz, whose very name evokes the Cross our Savior bore and which thrills our Christian soul,

  Philip II, the Prudent King

  2.

  AMERICA MEETS FRANKENSTEIN

  Who created Donald Trump, who breathed so much life into him?

  In order to explain the origins of the New York contender’s astonishing run for the Presidency, many politicians and pundits have persistently recurred to Frankenstein, one of the founding myths of modernity, the story of a colossal monster who rises up and rebels against his maker. These observers point to the toxic political climate engendered by the Republicans over the last decades, Trump as the extreme incarnation of an incendiary stoking of fear, racism, and xenophobia, a misbegotten monster come home to roost.

  The easy formula that equates Trump to the Monster and his Party to his Maker, irrefutable as it may be, does not, however, help us address the urgent problem of how to prevent the belligerent billionaire from prevailing.

  For that, we need to turn to the novel Frankenstein, first conceived two hundred years ago in the dismal summer of 1816 by a young woman called Mary Shelley. And we should read it in a way that spurs us to go beyond the simplification to which her complex and cautionary tale of hubris has been reduced and confined by popular culture.

  I admit to having succumbed, as a child of seven, to the pleasures of that simplification.

  It was 1949 and I had just seen Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and I can remember gripping my mother’s hand tight as we returned from the cinema in Manhattan to our house in Queens, not far from where Donald Trump, then three years old, was growing up in indubitably more opulent circumstances. I imagine that Trump might have reacted to the fiend by punching him in the face or carrying him out on a stretcher, but I confess that I was scared out of my wits. But I was also fascinated, determined to surmount my apprehension by visiting his every available avatar, from James Whale’s film version to the sequels, Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein, and even The Ghost of Frankenstein, where Lon Chaney took over from the perennial Boris Karloff.

  My mother did not mind taking me to gorge myself on these shows as long as I promised, once I came of age, to read the original novel where I’d discover that Frankenstein, my Mom said, “is not the monster but rather the arrogant genius who designed him. And that will open up issues that have no facile answers.” And, in effect, I did go to the source in late adolescence and was indeed tormented by a question that must have haunted Mary Shelley when, vacationing in a Swiss villa with Lord Byron and her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, she began writing Frankenstein: who is the real monster, the unwilling creature who has been granted a deformed life or his overreaching creator?

  Raising that anguishing question again today lets us delve deeper into what is truly terrifying in the Trump insurgency: the fact that immense legions are voting for a man who feeds on fear and relishes torture and mass deportation. Without these troubled multitudes who project onto him their uncertainties, nightmares, and desires, Trump would not exist. Aren’t the real monsters, therefore, the men and women enthralled by his outrageous charisma, his strong-arm bullying, his celebration of greed and manliness?

  The temptation to build a wall around those people, to get them out of our sight and our lives, is often overwhelming. All the more reason to be wary of imitating his supporters, degrading and demonizing them as if they were invasive, malignant aliens.

  It is precisely this dehumanization of the Other that Mary Shelley’s novel critiques. Though most film versions portray the monster as speechless, in the book he has a delicate and despairing soul, and he is able to articulate his loneliness, demanding that he not be judged by his outer deformities. Am I being naïve to suggest that what we should feel for Trump’s devotees is compassion? Leaving aside the violent, irredeemable fringes of fanatical bigots and neo-Nazis, can we not venture that the huge majority of Trump voters dwell in an existential desolation that is encapsulated in the epigraph from Milton’s Paradise Lost that is quoted on the title page of Frankenstein, Adam’s plea to the God that fashioned him: “Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?”

  His followers may have created Trump and fostered his rise, but which merciless God was it that promoted them from darkness and made these men and women feel so anxious about their families, so helpless and lost in their abandonment, that they would exalt a demagogue who appeals to their vilest instincts and thrives on their sorrow and insecurity?

  Whether Trump is ultimately defeated or not, those masses of our misguided fellow citizens will remain vastly among us. They pose the real challenge. It was the darker side of America that spawned them, that facilitated their need for a Superman savior like Trump,
so it must be the other, more luminous America, that should, after looking deep into the mirror, contest and defuse the wrath of so many frustrated millions, convincing them to stop conjuring up false demons from the abyss and start confronting the all too tangible demons of war, poverty, racism, inequality of gender, and ecological catastrophe that threaten us all, the true terrors and monsters we must vanquish side by side.

  Only if we find a way of stripping the backers of Trump of their delusions and dread, only if we find a way to include them in the solution to the shared dilemmas of our time, will the last words of Mary Shelley’s novel, as she bids farewell to the Monster and what is monstrous in us, deserve the slim chance of coming true, turning these lines into a wondrous prophecy: “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”

  3.

  MY MOTHER AND TRUMP’S BORDER

  Donald Trump, reacting to a spate of recent terror attacks, called on the government and law enforcement to fight, McCarthy-like, the “cancer from within.” He then went on to exclaim: “How they came into the country in the first place is beyond me.” Obviously, he believes that these and thousands of other possible (and according to him, inevitable) assailants did not undergo the “extreme vetting” that he proposed as indispensable to keep Muslim terrorists and those advocating Sharia law from entering the United States. Whether this prospective weeding out of aliens at the border, a process antagonistic to American values, would bolster our security is doubtful.

  A long time ago my mother, Fanny Zelicovich Dorfman, who, alas, has not been alive for some 20 years, fell afoul of a system of interrogation similar to the one the Republican candidate wishes to put into place. Her story might provide a sober perspective on the pitfalls and traps that such examinations entail.

  Though Fanny would later recount her detention by immigration officials lightheartedly, as was her wont when tragedies descended upon the family (and they were many), there was nothing amusing about the episode when it occurred.

  My sister and I found out about my mother’s mishap when, on the last day of our stay at Camp Tevya in Massachusetts—it must have been some time in late July or maybe August 1953—my parents did not turn up to retrieve us. Instead, my father asked some nearby friends in Boston to take care of us while he sorted out the mess his wife found herself in.

  The problem started because my mother, having accompanied my dad on a trip to Europe that summer, decided not to fly back with him but instead to take a leisurely boat ride to the States, where our Argentine family had resided for the last nine years, most of them with a diplomatic visa, as my father was a high-ranking official of the United Nations. Which meant she was by herself when she confronted the immigration authorities.

  They had begun by asking her the usual questions about her name (are you now or have you ever been known by any other legal names?), her address, and her resident status and then, perhaps emboldened by the McCarran Act that had been passed the previous year despite President Truman’s veto, they went on to probe other aspects of her identity.

  “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

  It was simple for my mother to answer that. She rarely disagreed with my father about anything, but regarding communism she had demurred from his fervent Bolshevik sympathies, though she always did so gently, and with humor. At the dinner table she would announce, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, that she had founded an organization called the SRCLCommunist Party—the Slightly Reformed Conservation Life Communist Party—of which she was the chairman, secretary, treasurer, and sole member. So she answered, truthfully, that no, she was not currently nor had she ever been a member of the totalitarian group that the immigration functionaries were seeking to exclude from America.

  “Do you advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or subversion?”

  The question was ridiculous, but my mother bit her tongue. She did not tell them that she loved many things about America (she adored Roosevelt), to the point of having contemplated becoming a citizen, but that the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Joseph McCarthy’s quest for ideological purity, and the hounding of her own husband and many of his friends now made the country unpalatable, so much so that we were already planning to move to Chile. But what was the point of getting into an argument with these people?

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  And then came the clincher:

  “Do you intend to assassinate the president of the United States?”

  My mother could not help herself. She laughed at the absurdity of the question. All she wanted to do was get off the boat and join my father and drive north to pick up her two kids. She thought a jest might lighten the proceedings.

  “If I was going to assassinate the president, would I tell you?”

  Confident that her charm—which was indeed prodigious—would get her through any thorny situation, she was surprised when they blocked her entry to the United States and sent her to Ellis Island for further investigation of her subversive and possible lethal activities. Her protests that she had been joking were met with a grim response: “This is no laughing matter, Mrs. Dorfman.”

  Family lore and her own storytelling aptitude—always ready to augment any incident, inflating it to epic proportions—has it that she spent three nights and days in detention, but my guess is that it was not more than 24 hours. What is true is that the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, had to intervene personally to convince the United States authorities that Fanny Zelicovich Dorfman was no threat to the security or future of the nation nor to the health and well-being of its president.

  Sixty-three years later, as we endure another era dominated by fear of what is foreign and different—Muslims instead of Reds as the enemy, Sharia Law instead of doctrinaire Marxism as the target—my mother’s encounter with those inquisitors and their queries offers anecdotal proof that the form of extreme vetting proposed by Donald Trump, besides being unconstitutional, would end up snaring innocent people like her at the border while letting seasoned criminals slip by undeterred. Those who are truly determined to destroy America will undoubtedly hide their objectives (or did they not undergo extensive training?), and those who are naïve enough to make a joke about our current paranoia will be delivered unto the inefficient hands of Homeland Security.

  And that, in effect, is no laughing matter.

  4.

  LATIN AMERICAN FOOD AND THE FAILURE OF TRUMP’S WALL

  Donald Trump has built his campaign around the threat posed to the United States by the “aliens” who have swarmed across the border from Mexico and who are, according to his tirades, a bunch of “bad hombres,” rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. Though, of course, he has made a point of attesting to his love for Hispanics by tweeting a photo of himself eating a taco in Trump Tower Grill in order to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Given his tenuous grasp of his own country’s history, there can be no doubt that he does not know that Cinco de Mayo commemorates the defeat of a foreign enemy, France, back in 1862. A pity, because he would do well to ponder the traits with which the commander of the Mexican army characterized the head of the invading troops: arrogance, foolishness, and ineptitude—soberbia, necedad, y torpeza.

  These are the very features Trump is exhibiting as he munches his taco and dreams of deporting (at least) eleven million “illegals” and building a huuuge and beautiful wall to keep them from ever coming back, and promises his rabid supporters that the colossal barrier with which he intends to divide the two countries will be paid for by Mexico.

  What Trump does not seem to realize is that this is a battle he has already lost. No, I am not talking about the unfeasibility of constructing parts of his wall in the middle of the immense Rio Grande, shared by both countries. Or how he would need to defile sacred Native American land. Or the requirement that the wall be transparent enough to see the other side and
simultaneously made of materials dense enough to withstand erosion and therefore opaque. Or what an impossible engineering feat it would be to rise high enough to keep out drones and deep enough to discourage tunnels that, so far, have thwarted every effort to be blocked. No, I am talking about a more modest foe of his proposal. Even before the first brick is laid, his wall was vanquished by the very taco he grins at demonically in his Twitter post, vanquished by that taco and its many food cousins from all over Latin America.

  What? Food as the unsung hero, ready to foil Trump’s dream of an ethnically pure America?

  As proof of what some readers may consider a startling assertion, I offer a store that my wife and I frequent here in Durham, North Carolina, where we have settled after decades of wandering. I am sure that Trump’s campaign will not bring him to this town where Barack Obama received 75.9% of the votes in 2012, the highest victory in the whole state. But if the Donald, a former wrestler who claims to relish a good brawl, were indeed to venture into this adversarial territory, I would recommend that he stop by this supermarket that Angélica and I visit, at times for convenience’s sake but more often to indulge in personal nostalgia.

  I can savor under its vast roof the presence of the continent where I was born, going back, so to speak, to my own plural origins. On one shelf, Nobleza Gaucha, the yerba mate my Argentine parents used to sip every morning in their New York exile—my mother with sugar, my father in its more bitter version. Even to contemplate the bag that this grass herb comes in, allows me to recall how anxiously mi mamá y mi papá awaited shipments from the authoritarian Buenos Aires they had escaped in the forties. A bit further along in the store, I come upon leche condensada en una lata, the sort I would sip from a can on adolescent camping trips into the mountains of Chile, where my family moved when I was twelve. And nearby, a tin of Nido, the powdered milk my wife Angélica and I first fed our son Rodrigo as a baby, almost half a century ago in Santiago. Or Nesquik para niños, the chocolate we relied on to sweeten the existence of our younger son Joaquín, when he accompanied us back to Chile after many years of banishment from Pinochet’s dictatorship.