Two wonderful emails that can’t wait for our email section. The first is about internment, the solution to the treacherous immigrants John Derbyshire sees all around him (not to speak of allegedly treacherous African-Americans). It speaks of what internment of American citizens simply because of their racial or ethnic identity or origin actually means: “My grandparents were interned during WWII at the famous camp in Manzanar, CA, along with my father and his two siblings. I mostly had to research it myself through books, and found out the conditions in those camps were nothing close to comfortable as Mr. Derbyshire seems to think. Such hardships, however, eventually fade in the memory. I would imagine that the wound that never quite healed for my grandparents, esp. my grandfather who was born in this country and educated K through 12 right here in the Los Angeles school system, is the betrayal. It’s hearing all about freedom and the American dream all your growing up years and believing it’s always going to be true for you too, then a war comes along and suddenly the rules of the game have all been changed. Now at age 30 you and your family can be yanked out of your home with only 10 days’ notice from the government and bussed off without knowing where you’re headed or when you’ll return, allowed to take with you only what you can carry on your back. Then, when you do return 2 1/2 years later, whatever of your possessions you weren’t able to sell off at dirt cheap prices before your hurried departure (the neighbors all knew you were being sent away and could bargain down the prices as far as they wanted) was looted from your property, and you have to start your life all over again. Yeah, I’d say that kind of experience is a pretty serious violation of one’s civil rights.” Amen. I’m no p.c. thought-policeman, and I have no objections to talking about the possibility of internment, but to glibly propose it for many ethnic groups in this day and age seems to me to be a hideous form of prejudice and an attack on the possibility of non-racial American citizenship itself.
REALITY CHECK II: An email from an Orthodox priest who responded to my column on Timothy McVeigh and the importance of witnessing death to fully understand it. “I’ve been with a lot of people who died. I first had the experience – more of it than I could handle, actually – as a young medic during the Vietnam war. Then, the proximity to death made me feel “marked” somehow. People sometimes confessed things to me then, as if they made me a priest before I was one or wanted to be one. As a priest as well I’ve been with people many times as they died. It just happened again tonight. I think you captured the unexpectedly banal edge of the experience very well. What always affects me are the FLUIDS. Holding somebody as they expire, you are drenched. The first thing I do when I return home is go down the basement, throw all those black rags in the washing machine, and rush up the stairs, naked, to shower. It feels like a deliverance, however temporary.”
The Dish 