The Roman Salute...

Right.

The spin doctors were having a field day last week with the gesture Elon Musk made at Capital One Arena in Washington after the presidential inauguration. Some insisted that the richest man in the world was inspired by a gesture supposedly used by the ancient Romans.* Others said it harkened back to the Bellamy Salute which American school children once used when presented the American flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Still others attribute it to Asperger's Syndrome, a condition Elon Musk acknowledges he has, symptoms which his defenders claim cause those who have it to "act weird" sometimes. After all he did prance around like a drunken cheerleader at that rally in Pennsylvania last October, didn't he?

Well, if anyone understands the true meaning of an outstretched right arm with the palm facing down, it is the Germans.

The title to this op ed piece published last week in the German weekly Die Zeit translated into English reads: " A Hitler Salute, is a Hitler Salute, is a Hitler Salute. 

Here's what Musk himself had to say:

Can we please retire the calling people a Nazi thing? It didn’t work during the election, it’s not working now, it’s tired, boring, and old material, you’ve burned out its effect, people don’t feel shocked by it anymore, the wolf has been cried too many times.

The strange thing is I agree with him. It is old and tired to call people you don't agree with Nazis and comparing them to Hitler. 

That is unless they do something deserving of that comparison.

What if I were to walk around in public with a tee shirt emblazoned with a swastika, should I be left alone, expecting people seeing it to assume I'm just wearing an ancient Indian peace symbol?

Yeah right.

Or what if I introduced my child to someone as "little Adolph", would I be right to expect people to buy my explanation that my wife and I simply liked that name?

I don't think so. 

The one beef I had with the Die Zeit article is the author's choice of the term "Dog Whistle" to describe Musk's gesture. A dog whistle is a signal intended to be only perceived by its intended target. In this case, the author suggests Musk is sending a signal to white supremacists who as it turned out, reacted very positively to the gesture. 

But any person with the slightest understanding of history, with eyes to see, and a scintilla of a brain to process information, understood exactly what Musk was doing. 

If Musk himself didn't, as he and his apologists claim, then he, and they are far stupider than I could ever imagine. 

As a metaphor, siren would be much more appropriate than dog whistle.  

When I first saw the illustration above, without the blue tape used for effect to cover up a gesture that is illegal to make in Germany, I was appalled beyond belief. But it got worse. I saw another image with a different cropping: 

Not only does his facial expression appear more brazen than in the first image, but as you can see, Musk is making that vile gesture while standing behind the official Seal of the President of the United States.  

I'll share a little personal story of the first time I became conscious of the presidential seal. It was on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. My most vivid image of that day, there would be many more from the days to follow, was of a man solemnly removing the presidential seal from a podium. To my five-year-old mind, that was a very powerful gesture, an act meant to symbolize the death of a president.  

I've carried that image with me my entire life even though I hadn't entirely understood its context nor saw it reproduced again for at least fifty years. When I finally saw a clip of the removal of the seal all those years later, it dawned on me that on the surface it was actually a quite trivial act repeated every time a president delivers a speech, that is, when after the speech and the crowds have left, a worker takes the seal reserved for the president down. But to this day the poignance of that particular moment has not been lost as it took place at the site of the intended destination of the president's motorcade where Kennedy was to deliver a speech that he never got the chance to make.  

To this day I never see that seal and not think of the significance of it as a symbol and of that terrible day.

Unfortunately, now I have something else to think of. 

Symbols matter, and this for many will be the enduring symbol of the current administration. It didn't help that the guy on top who bent over backwards to whine like a baby about the Episcopal archbishop of our nation's capital, demanding her apology after having the gall to beseech him to act like a Christian, while he says nothing about someone whom he's promised a major role in his administration, Sieg Heiling while using the symbol of his office, and of all the presidents who came before him as a prop. 

It seems that with this president, nothing is sacred or for that matter, profane, which couldn't be less of a surprise.

Which leads me to say directly to all the people who voted for him the following: 

Take a good look at that photograph, this is what you voted for.

* There is absolutely no evidence to suggest the ancient Romans ever used this gesture.

Here We Go Again

About five years ago, I thought I made headway with a friend on the issue of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Like many MAGA devotees, this friend, a real friend whom I have known for more than forty years, could rattle off the names of victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants as if they were his own grandchildren. As you might expect, these names formed the backbone of his argument that all undocumented people in this country should be deported, extenuating circumstances be damned. 

One name he failed to mention, because his story was not reported on Fox News, was that of a relative of mine by marriage, my wife's cousin. He was killed as he was driving with his wife from a wedding in Chicago to their home in suburban Milwaukee, when their car crashed head on with a car driven by a man going the wrong way on an interstate highway as he was being pursued by the police. Fortunately, my cousin-in-law's wife managed to survive the crash, meaning their two young boys who were thankfully home at the time, were not left orphaned. As these things so often go, the perpetrator of this tragedy who was intoxicated, also survived.

He'll have plenty of time to think about his actions that terrible night while he sits in an American prison, before he is sent back to Mexico where he'll most likely have more time on his hands to contemplate. 

I brought this up with my friend just to let him know that I did in fact, have skin in the game when it comes to the subject of undocumented people in this country committing crimes. I wanted to point out to him that despite the unspeakable tragedy of the senseless death of a loving husband, father, brother and friend, I do not hold all undocumented people in this country accountable, only one. 

That's the way it goes with human beings. If you take a representative sample of any group of people, then make a graph that measured the quality of their character, you'll inevitably come up with an enormous bell curve, with a handful of exemplary people at one end, an equal number of despicable people at the other, and a whole mess of people like my friend and me, average folks somewhere in the middle. 

Then I pointed out for every undocumented alien who commits a crime, there will inevitably be at least one who did something remarkable in the service of others. It's just that for some reason, their story doesn't get reported very often, especially on the ultra-right-wing media outlets my friend and millions of folks like him gravitate toward. 

Nonetheless, my friend seemed to get it. That is until our next argument when again he parroted off the names of all the American victims whose story he heard on Fox. 

Well today, you-know-who is about to become president again and he is promising mass deportations starting tomorrow, his first full day in office. With it will come some justice I suppose along with unimaginable human suffering. And I'm willing to bet my firstborn that none of this will do one iota to improve the lives of the American people as promised. 

The new president, the first and hopefully last Felon-In-Chief, plans to start deporting people by the way, right here in Chicago for reasons I can only assume stem from his animus toward this city. I don't know why he hates us so much, one of our largest buildings proudly displays his name so it can be seen for miles around. 

He loves that kind of shit.

But I digress.

When I told my friend that for every undocumented resident who commits a crime, there is at least another who does something remarkable to help someone else, it seemed so obvious that I just let it rest at that. Now I have something to back it up. Last week as Los Angeles was burning uncontrollably, this story came across the wires. (so to speak). 

Be sure to read it.

In a nutshell, as people were forced to evacuate their homes and their communities for their own safety, another group rushed in to help them. In addition to the first responders who were heroically doing their job, there were many others who volunteered to help put out fires in order to help save homes that hadn't yet caught fire.

Many of these people were undocumented. Here's the money quote. Israel Garcia from Guatemala made this comment as he was in the middle of saving a stranger's home:

I don't know who lives here, I don't know if they had children. But if they did, I'm thinking about what the children are going to feel when they come back and see that their house is gone. And I ask myself, how would I feel?

Interestingly enough, just now as I went in search of an article to share with you, I googled "undocumented immigrants help put out fires in LA." Dozens of articles with the story came up. Not surprisingly, none of them came from Fox. The lone article that popped up from that beacon of "fair and balanced journalism", as they once described themselves (but not anymore), was an article with the headline: "Man arrested near LA fires with a 'possible' blowtorch was an illegal immigrant." I read the article and so far, at least at its writing, the man had not been charged with anything.

And so it goes.

In other news, this month we said goodbye to Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States. Due to circumstances largely beyond his control, Carter was perhaps not our best president but was without question, our best former president. Jimmy Carter was a man of remarkable good will and charity, someone who took to heart the fundamental teaching of his faith, that is to say, love your neighbor, even if he is your enemy. 

Present at his funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. were all the living presidents, including one current and one future, as well as one recently deceased. These six men, as a representative sampling of Presidents of the United States are a good example of the bell curve of human nature. At the one end, representing exemplary character is Jimmy Carter.

At the other end, well let's put it this way, enjoy the next four years.