I was scheduled to fly back into Memphis on Tuesday, and as I read the morning news on Monday, the outlook for a pleasant trip wasn’t promising. TSA agents hadn’t been paid for three weeks and were quitting or calling in sick in droves. Hundreds of canceled and delayed flights were happening all over the country, particularly at hubs such as Atlanta and Detroit. I was flying Delta, the airline reportedly most affected, and connecting in Detroit. Oy.
And to ramp up the chaos another notch, Donald Trump had announced that he was sending ICE agents to airports to assist TSA workers. Cool. So, I might be stuck in Detroit waiting for a connecting flight for hours and get shot in the face. Good times!
Seriously, I can’t imagine a less helpful thing to do in this situation than sending untrained — armed and masked? — agents to watch long lines of travelers wind through airports. It made me wonder what I was about to walk into? Would non-white or overtly foreign-looking passengers be pulled out of line for questioning? There are a lot of ways this could play out, most of them not good. Calling in the National Guard would have made a lot more sense, honestly. But we’re past the point of anything making sense, it appears.
Another person was flying into Memphis on the day I wrote this: Trump himself. He was coming to tout the success of his crime-fighting initiative, which involved sending hundreds of Tennessee Highway Patrol officers, ICE agents, and National Guard troops into the city.
Memphis’ crime rate has purportedly dropped since the initiative began last September (though the statistics are decidedly fuzzy on arrest details), but it had already dropped to new lows prior to the occupation. Like so much of what Trump does, the task force was mostly theater — an attention-getting stunt that offered the president an opportunity to bloviate for the cameras, but created little lasting impact. Kind of like bombing Iran and declaring victory, forgetting that the enemy might have something to say about it. Or impulsively levying tariffs and claiming prices are falling as we watch gas rise a dollar-a-gallon higher.
So, what did we really learn from Trump’s occupation of Memphis? We learned that flooding a city with hundreds of law-enforcement personnel lowers the crime rate. Duh. That isn’t rocket surgery, as Trump might say. But when the task force finally leaves, the root cause of crime — poverty — will not have been addressed in the slightest. That’s because improving public education, creating more jobs, lowering housing costs, reducing taxes on food, and fixing public transportation aren’t sexy topics and they don’t have any obvious villains for the president to rant about. And so we spend billions on more cops and new prisons and claim we’re solving the crime problem.
And that’s on top of the billions of dollars we’re now funneling into a cockamamie “war” that we’ve won, or are winning, or need help to win, or are “in talks” to settle, or isn’t a war, or whatever the administration’s line of the day is. The craziest part is that we’ve lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, in effect paying our enemy while they’re fighting us. I guess it would be in poor taste to remind the president that no foreign country controls the wind or the sun or electric batteries, all sources of energy that’s he’s tried to shut down.
Maybe it’s all just strategery, as George Bush once said. Or was that an SNL skit? It’s hard to tell now, honestly. The president makes a “surprise attack” joke about Pearl Harbor to the prime minister of Japan in the Oval Office. Real or SNL? When asked what he thought about critical remarks made by the president of Ireland, Trump says, “He’s lucky I exist!” The prime minister of Ireland is Catherine Connolly. SNL, right? Trump tastelessly celebrates the death of Robert Mueller, a decorated veteran and former FBI chief who was appointed by Trump’s attorney general to investigate his possible connections to Russia in the 2016 election. What show are we watching?
Trump is cracking up, day after day, right before our eyes. It brings to mind the words of Leonard Cohen:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.