Do The Chief's Readers Agree?

All right. She's elegant, urbane, charming, multilingual, has philanthropic tendencies, is a child nurturer on a global scale, graduated summa cum laude from finishing school, has a good heart and is a veteran of supermodel stardom.  

But Melania Trump still did not rate a documentary. 

Not because of her politics. Not due to her marriage vows.  Were it not for her spousal affiliation, a film about her would draw hardly enough of an audience to fill a niche, with room to spare a concession stand. 

What has she accomplished in her own right that by itself would tantalize filmmakers? The same could be said of other "First Ladies" whose mere matrimonial attachments made them not just darlings of paparazzi, but fast-lane presidential frontrunners, for the asking.

Their media-generated persona affords them stature, complexity and a surreal identity that supersedes their actual selfhood.  It started with Jacqueline Kennedy.

Melania no more deserves a namesake cinematic extravaganza than does my Roto-Rooter guy.  Neither do the Kardashians, who are products of grubby, transformative mythmaking by sorcerers who conjure celebrities and legends out of cyphers. 

People are assigned auras and mystique not on the basis of talent, who they actually are and what they have done, but on their mass market appeal potential to addle-brained, fantasizing suckers who buy into it.

Melania is not particularly objectionable in her own right. She shouldn't be blamed for being a media creation. Almost anyone in her position, even democratic socialists, would luxuriate in her position and indulge the idolatry that pays the bills and feeds their vanity. 

The mockery reposes in the promoter, not its product.

Greta Thunberg is another such commodity. If the media decrees that she is a transcendent figure with a portfolio as a champion of world peace, then by golly she becomes it, even though the shoe doesn't fit. 

And when pop vocalist Billie Eilish, who has achieved chronological adulthood at least, proclaimed at the recent Grammy Award ceremony that "nobody is illegal on stolen land," it doesn't matter that her own multi-million estate is situated smack dab in the middle of land owned by the Tongva indigenous tribe. 

She too is as legitimate a stakeholder as one of those cheesy Viking colonizers. Who knew?

The suppressed Fourth Estate is replete with stories of social justice warriors who have surreptitiously paused their activism and made an exception to their proletarian advocacies by feathering their own family's nests with every privilege and tax shelter under the sun. They abound on the map, from the Hamptons to Palm Beach to Park Slope.

Public figures, whether in politics, business, entertainment, even when still alive, are often reinvented into de facto fictional characters by the intrigues of media image making. Most of the public cannot or else chooses not to see through it.

Most sobering is that the same chicanery that is done to build up or tear down leaders, can be done to shamelessly shift the tectonic plates of words to seismically change their implications. This is more an exercise in polemics and propaganda than in lexicological discretion. Examples are equity, global oppression, insurrection, genocide and the chameleon of tag lines, racism. 

Words continue to be spelled and pronounced the same, but dance abstractly to the beat of different conceptual drums.  It's a hustle that comes in handy in debates that are more exchanges of vitriol than of idea.

The late George Carlin, one of our greatest stand-up comedians and stand out philosophers, said "By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth."   As a prophet of MAGA exceptionalism, he also noted "When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat."

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a lightning rod for conflict among opposing zealots in our politicized nation. Demonizing and deifying ICE are both wrong, and absolutists on both sides have corrupt motives or are guilty of willful ignorance.

ICE officers should not wear masks.  Neither should the protesters, a minority of whom are outright rioters and vandals.   

The officers should be identifiable at least by badge, if not by name, as they are in most law enforcement jurisdictions. Doxxing these officers should be aggressively prosecuted and punishable proportionally as federal felonies, but the adjudications must not be rigged.

Officers should be mandated to use only minimum force consistent with achieving a necessary legal objective. Accountability must be exercised, tempered by the realization that human error under extreme duress should be considered mitigating circumstances and penalized accordingly. 

When mayors, cynical about federal authority, call for "expelling" ICE from their township's "private property," they are showing illiteracy of the Constitution's "supremacy clause." Some are driven to be defiant by pure righteousness, others by tainted connivance. 

"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."

Surprised Carlin didn't use a more caustic word than "disappointed."

Although some ICE agents have withdrawn as a result of the direct action of conscripted activists, many remain. The "resistance would remain even if they all retreated. "Just because you got the monkey off your back, doesn't mean the circus has left the town."

Carlin again.

ICE should prioritize their arrests and deportation to convicted, violent felons. There should be, subjected to revisiting, an open-ended moratorium on detentions for technical fouls, such as overstaying visas, while recognizing these violators remain non-immigrants under law.   

Border patrol is not fascism. Neither is riot control, as long as it is symmetrical to the protest.   

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is calling on the United Nations to investigate allegations of discrimination. There is no more flagrant example of consummate irony in all of history.

Only citizens should be enfranchised to vote. 

Identification, such as those accepted by banks and federal government agencies, should be compulsory.  Likening this condition to the loathed Jim Crow laws, as a prominent US senator did recently, reflects cold, private ambition more than it does familiarity with history and empathy for minorities. 

It demonstrates the patronizing, condescending and exploitative mentality towards Black people that Malcolm X warned us about.

For purposes of the national census, only citizens and permanent residents should be counted.  All people, regardless of status, should be blessed by the same rights and bound by the same responsibilities.  

Still, non-legal residents should not be eligible for full and identical entitlements and benefits, though there must be a safety net to which they too are welcome. They must be protected against exploitation and being driven underground. It is not a fallacy that some disbursement programs and practices have favored them, and Americans have gotten the short end of the stick.

Drivers' licenses should not be dispensed willy nilly. 

Although many road signs consist of international symbols, it is still essential that all drivers, especially of large long-haul commercial trucks, be fluent in English. Taking that position does not make one an intemperate colonizer or Gestapo informant. Neither are you a xenophobic zealot if you condemn proven gargantuan fraud by individuals or groups, regardless of their immigration status.

Thoughts from a clear head and speech from an unforked tongue does not constitute an "existential threat'.

Judges should all force themselves, by a courageous act of self-hypnosis, if necessary, should they not be up to the challenge of intellectual discipline, to rule strictly on the basis of law and not personal ideology or their most deeply rooted feelings, even when resoundingly justified. 

This ideal is exemplified by Moshe Landau, the Israeli judge who presided over the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the logistics for dispatching millions of Jews to the extermination camps during World War II.

Landau conducted the trial with immense, superhuman restraint, clarity, objectivity and fairness, despite the enormity of the known crimes of the defendant.  

At the pace America is changing it may not be the same at the end of this sentence as it was at its beginning.  So as we await the coming tsunami du jour, heed George Carlin: "Think off center... Always do whatever's next."