The Lethality of Everything

What the wanna-be king has been saying

I don't have time for a whole essay, because of other commitments this weekend and coming week, but there were two small points in things that the Republican President said. I know that he just talks off the top of his head, using the same 400 vocabulary words like a remedial language-learner, but there are a few that give me pause.

One was when he spilled the beans (not that anyone was surprised) on Israel using American-made weaponry. This was on Friday morning, before the retaliatory strikes had started. My guess is that he wasn't supposed to say this, as it instantly revealed the dishonesty in Rubio's statement the previous night during the attack. But, as I said before, no one was actually surprised. Now that Israel's attack had been deemed a success, this approval-hungry POTUS wanted his fair share of the glory (a fair share that is always disproportionately large). The President said "the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come. And they know how to use it.”

And there's that word again - LETHAL. Now I am not naive. I get it that military combat measures and equipment are meant to kill people. But the repeated emphasis by Hegseth and the President on this word "lethal" is getting to be quite worrisome. It seems to be their favorite way of describing the military, as if they are positively relishing the act of efficient sure-fire killing.

When we couple this with the President's frequent use of the word "force" to describe how the police forces (augmented by National Guard and the Marines) will behave towards dissenters, the stakes seem to be very very high. For instance, he has warned that military parade protesters will face "very heavy force." I have no idea where he draws the line between "very heavy" and "lethal." Do you? Does anybody?

Second, he is responding to complaints from people in the farming and leisure industries concerning the immigration raids. Here is some of what he wrote on this:

“Our great farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote. “That is not good…Changes are coming!”

Then, about the workers themselves, he says something that is kind of the obverse of his famous escalator speech in 2015 about evil Mexican immigrants:

"They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be, you know, great, and we're going to have to do something about that. We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have."

The way I read this is that the viewpoint of the employers - put simply, these industries and their corporate leaders have long relied on undocumented labor - the viewpoint of the employers is what swayed Trump to at least sound nice for a moment. But when it comes to recognizing the humanity and full subjectivity of these workers, he is still doing it begrudgingly, and without a firm commitment (BTW, as I write this at 9:30 at night, no change in policy has actually been announced).

Profits above people. If some workers are helped by doing what provides the capitalists with money, that's just collateral kindness, and not really the intention.

Despite the fact that he speaks so casually of matters that are of world historical importance, we are, right now and for the foreseeable future, living by his whims. Kinda like Anthony and the cornfield episode (It's a Good Life) from The Twilight Zone.