What do Mem Fox and Henry Rousso have in common? Not much, at first blush. She’s Australian, from Adelaide, and a prolific writer of children’s books. (When they were younger, my kids adored those books; I myself have a soft spot for Tough Boris, which is about a pirate, a stowaway, and a parrot.)
Henry Rousso is an Egyptian-born French academic whose family sought refuge in France due to the rise of antisemitism in Egypt. Rousso writes about Vichy France and the Holocaust.
But within the past week or so, these two very different people both found themselves confronted with the might and the arrogance of the new American regime. Fox was “detained and insulted” by American border agents at LAX while she was en route to a conference in Milwaukee. She said, “I have never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness.”
Rousso was held for more than ten hours by American border officials in Houston while he was on a way to a conference, had his fingerprints taken, was frisked, and was threatened to with deportation and a ban from the United States.
What is going on? Writing in the Huffington Post (France), Rousso declares, “It is now necessary to face up to total arbitrariness and incompetence” in the United States. The combination of arbitrary power and incompetence is terrifying in itself.Both Fox and Rousso are strong, articulate, and well-connected people. Rousso’s connections at Texas A&M helped prevent his deportation. But as Rousso notes poignantly in his piece in the Huffington Post, others were less fortunate: manacled and chained because “that is the process.”
That cannot be the process; we must not allow it. If people as privileged, as articulate, as well-connected as Fox and Rousso are subject to this kind of treatment, think of the treatment that the less fortunate suffer in obscurity.
Yet lurking in this morass of incompetence and arbitrariness is another factor: malice. We know that the new regime in the United States has targeted Muslims, Mexicans, and the media. We know that when he was a candidate, the man who now sits in the White House encouraged his supporters to silence those who spoke out against him. The malice of those who occupy positions of power in the White House, people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, is palpable. They not only promulgate policies that are transparently designed to fan hatred and intolerance; they embrace people who openly spew hatred, people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer.
We as a nation are better than this. We must be. But if we are better, we must act. We must speak out. We must continue to defend those who suffer the insults, the indignities, and the injuries inflicted by this incompetent, arbitrary and, yes, malicious regime.
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