Beauty is Imperfection

Here’s a map of attacks on American mosques put together by the ACLU.

While reading it, it’s important to remember that if Donald Trump were to become president, some 3.3 million American Muslims would be under his protection. His job would not be as their inquisitor. His job would not be as their prosecutor. He would not be as some sort of plaintiff against them or judge or arbitrator. He would be sworn protector of the laws that keep them from harm and allow them due process. To merely shrug off that “Yeah, he says crazy things” about a group of American citizens is to ignore the fact that, without his protection, they have none. They have officially become a vulnerable ethnic group the way the Kurds were under Saddam Hussein, the targets of factionalism emboldened by a faraway leader’s nod and wink. When there is no sense of lawfulness at the top, violence is fostered at the bottom by people pursuing any tribal instincts that motivate them. That’s why we have good leaders and why they use such “stilted PC language” that the less patient and more petulant among us have become so bored by. When Janet Yellen makes an incautious statement at the Fed, people lose millions. For the same reason, supporting that “crazy guy who says those gosh darn entertaining things” shows a callous disregard for history and how stuff works–disavowal of Stalin’s history, Hitler’s, Catherine de’ Medici’s .. of people whose monstrousness was possible because they were supposed to be shepherds. I want to make clear that this is not targeted at Republicans or conservatives in general, who, on their good, more libertarian days, know exactly what I’m talking about and many of whom I know do not really like Trump. George W. Bush also knew exactly what I’m talking about, to his great credit. But if Republicans are voting for Trump anyway, they are not voting for their own principles but for the “R” at the top of the form. They are, as Jerry Seinfeld once noted of fickle basketball fans, “rooting for clothes.”