Editorials

Xenophobia. It’s a fifty-dollar word with, for good reason, Greek roots. It means fear of foreigners, and it goes all the way back in the western tradition to the ancient Greeks and their Roman successors.

It’s not limited to the western tradition either. There’s plenty of xenophobia in the rest of the world, ancient and contemporary. For a while, some hoped that it was fading, at least in some quarters, and that it had been vanquished by modern internationalism.

Even Disneyland, not known as a shrine to liberalism, has had for decades the ear-worming anthem “It’s a Small World, Isn’t It?” President Barack Obama is the child of international exchange, as is Senator Kamala Harris, though both have voluntarily embraced the USA’s historic African American culture created by the descendants of those who were enslaved here.

Well, perhaps not 100% voluntarily. Racism is a special gloss on xenophobia, marked by onus against dark-skinned people in particular. Those infected by racism regard Black and Brown foreigners, regardless of culture, as barbarians, another Greek word, labelling them as uncivilized. Obama and Harris experience the prejudice against African Americans despite their backgrounds . 

The xenophobic tradition seems to be baked into human nature. It’s not surprising to see it exhibited by the truly uncivilized vulgarian who is now the president of the United States, but even the apparently civil can be infected by it 

Once upon a time I was walking around historic London and happened upon a kindly-seeming vicar in his charming little churchyard. He delivered a learned lecture on the origin and architecture of his church, and then without provocation launched into a vitriolic lecture about the savage nature of the Irish. Needless to say, I did not introduce myself by my married name. 

There’s a book called “How the Irish Became White”, and though some of its premises are dubious the title illustrates a path to privilege which is open to some immigrants but not others. Many ethnic groups were despised by those here when they came, but gradually assimilated into the dominant White sector because they were able to blend in visually. 

It’s interesting to see that today’s white supremacists are adopting the language and rituals of the Know-Nothings, who hated Catholics and Jews when they first arrived in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. My husband’s maternal great grandfather, raised a Quaker, was roundly denounced in the small Dakota town where he lived in the early 20^th Century because he sold land to Slavic Catholics to build their church. 

Every day this week we have seen the unseemly spectacle of technology being used by a man two generations away from some immigrants and serially married to two others to denounce members of the U.S. House of Representatives with similar backgrounds. Ironically, the ancient Romans regarded his presumptive distant ancestors, the tribal Germani, as primitive barbarians. It wasn’t that long ago that there was prejudice here against German immigrants like his grandfather, as any reader of Little Women can discover. 

Not, of course, that he reads books. 

I notice in the opinion section of Sunday’s New York Times that two ordinarily reliable columnists, Maureen Dowd and Nicolas Kristof, seemed to be struck almost speechless by the week’s spectacle. Their horror is engendered not so much by Trump’s appalling behavior, which has become the norm, but by the spinelessness of the party formerly known as Republican, the heir to the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and even on their good days Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Trump makes Ol’ Tricky Dick look like a statesman, Ronny like a mensch. 

But after you’ve said that, what else is there to say? When you look around the world, you see a whole array of equally tragicomic figures running other countries. The new head of the Ukraine is a professional comic, and might not even be a bad guy. The president of Guatemala is another comedian, with not much else to recommend him. Soon-to-be British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is another clown, though only semi-pro . And then there are the not-funny tyrants, e.g. Duterte of the Phillipines . 

So Planet Earth’s in the hands of hooligans, and our very own hooligan-in-chief is entertaining himself by hurling racist epithets at a quartet of young women of color. 

But actually, not to worry. 

If perchance we good guys can get our act together, we’ve got Trump outnumbered. If sensible women and progressive dark-skinned people stick together, it might not be too long before some semblance of sanity is restored to the world. (Though this optimistic prediction ignores the fact that Duterte is a person of color and Theresa May is a woman…) 

With climate change breathing down our collective necks, we must rely on Dr. Johnson’s famous observation: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” 

So, we (men, women and others, of all complexions) have about two weeks to get our act together. Time to concentrate. 

Here’s another quote about hanging, this one from an American, Benjamin Franklin: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  

If those powerful old white guys who think they can control the fate of the world don’t learn to work with the black, brown and non-male majority, we’ll all be in the soup together. You’d hope that even a few corporate Republicans would be worried enough to just get along.