Genealogy of Insidious Threat

Al Baldasaro has a point, which by reason of association, I am grudgingly admitting Donald Trump does as well. Unless there is classified information about the threat of sedition during the last days of Roosevelt's administration to which we aren't privy, he had Japanese Americans interred as he walked the country into the Asian Pacific theatre without much evidence that Japanese Americans would rise up for their Emperor back home. When it was over, sure, recrimination simmered, reparations were bandied about, but I certainly don't recall Japanese militias rising up to slaughter clueless Protestants busy buying Buick's under Eisenhower.

But since this is the century of digital device, we're all militant victims, even ISIS terrorists with no limits. Pedestrians like Michael Gerson and David Brooks decry Donald's demagoguery, on the one hand, and then vent spleen. "God help us is they get their hands on bio-chemical weapons." This is what Brooks said on the Newshour, doing his job.

Now, of course, things aren't that simple, and people were wrongly abused after they were rounded up under Ashcroft, in the heady winter days of 2002. Reactionary Islamists were matched with reactionary American military personnel, and here we are, how many terrorist acts later. The Obama Administration was liberal with the Tsarnaev brothers remember. And way back in 1987, my long missed friend Tom Reid and I had dinner with an Iranian on a foreign student visa who gave me the heebies, acted out like a repressed homosexual, or spastic made the young man a tad frenetic. It was a bizarre sharing of fettuccine alfredo, as bizarre as the fact that HUD forces me to live with two Afghan refugees of the Taliban, and no one wants the specter of actual camps for hostile aliens, since we'd all have to foot the bill, but don't kid yourself. As diametrically opposed as the noted activist Cassie James and I are, the woman I insulted after she returned from England, we know Fascism is never really far below the surface, unjustly so. I may be wrong about this, but believe Trudy Richardson rationalized attacking me with the Department of Health and Human Services using a "threat of violence" argument with my almost deranged father's sister. 

What threat of violence? One black woman after another exploits me, their white counterparts either indifferent or guilty of bad judgment, and my confrontational anger toward Trudy's dissembling crap is all of the sudden violent? Is there a secret video where I slash the radials on her automobile? The corrosive nature of my bitterness comes from what I've had to sustain in 30 years with this landlord and Philadelphia's corrupt welfare praxis.  It is a more justified trigger than what motivated Timothy McVeigh, but more limited in the scope of its unsated vengeance, limited by the fact that I have no command and control over a militant crew willing to disrupt the paradigm. Systems that keep up Presbyterian Homes always win, until public anger builds to the point that a sea change occurs. In terms of IL corruption, that will be a long time coming.

In terms of ISIS, however, proactive authoritarian crackdowns seem necessary, though the price tag is too high in geopolitical terms. Punish Iran and Saudi Arabia. Therein lies the source, along with taking away the fiction of sovereignty from unstable states, which I've already mentioned. The difference between me and the right wing like Paul Ryan, is I'm willing to pay the price for a real war as a trade off against the worse of fanaticism to come.