The Weekly Sift

I’m back from from a week playing tour guide in Chicago for some of my friends. We hit all the highlights: studied our reflections in the Bean, looked down on the Calder sculpture from the top of the Willis Tower, saw the Cubs win an afternoon game at Wrigley Field, ate deep-dish pizza and hot dogs with more stuff on them than meat in them, and so on.

Strange thing about having been away for two weeks: I don’t feel like months of news has happened. The world certainly didn’t stand still. The Manafort trial started, votes were cast in primaries and one congressional special election, the Nazis returned to Charlottesville like swallows to Capistrano, a new inside-the-Trump-White-House book came out, Alex Jones got booted from most of the major social-media platforms, Trump went back to race-baiting the NFL players, etc. But none of it leaves me with the how-will-I-ever-keep-up feeling that I’ve had since November, 2016.

I wonder if that means Trump has jumped the shark. Or maybe just that I had a vacation.

Anyway, Laura Ingraham’s mainstreaming of white-supremacist rhetoric and an article in Quartz about Ben Franklin’s anti-German-immigrant rantings got me reflecting on the timelessness of xenophobia in America. Very often it comes full circle: Today’s xenophobes repeat the same stuff that was said about their people not so long ago, particularly the claim that they could never possibly assimilate into America. (Laura is Catholic. One of her complaints about today’s immigrants is that they’re “not too big on The Federalist Papers“. But if you are big on The Federalist Papers, you know that one of its authors, John Jay, was notoriously bigoted against Catholics, whose authoritarian religion would make it impossible for them to assimilate into our Protestant Republic.) A bunch of stuff like that gets pulled together into “Anti-immigrant rhetoric is an insult to your ancestors”, which should be out soon.

It’s possible that something else from the weekly summary will get spun off into its own article, but I haven’t made that decision yet. Look for the summary by noon, and any spin-off before then.