Tears Versus Mockery: A Portrait of One Nation

From ELLE

The public outcry over the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy and the thousands of children who are being separated from their parents at the border as a direct result of said policy, can be distilled into two cable news clips from Tuesday night. Neither is more than a minute long and yet when viewed in tandem they speak damningly about the state of the nation. The footage of Rachel Maddow breaking down on air and Corey Lewandowski mocking a detained child who has Down Syndrome are not polar ends of a spectrum, nor are they a portrait of two nations. They are a composite of who we are and who we have always been.

On The Rachel Maddow Show, the eponymous host closed out her broadcast with a breaking report from the Associated Press, confirming the creation of "tender age" shelters where the government is placing Central American migrant babies and toddlers. Reading the report, she quickly became emotionally overwhelmed, struggling to complete a sentence and eventually ending her broadcast without finishing.

The footage is shocking-visceral and raw. Maddow has long been known for her composure, even when passionately making a point. Indeed, she felt compelled to apologize on Twitter for what she characterized as not doing her job adequately.

Combined, the video and the follow-up tweet offer a humanizing glimpse behind the veneer of cable news commentary. For many, it is as relieving as it is surprising to see that a talking head is not impervious to the onslaught of horror. In short, it gratifying to know that Rachel Maddow is a human just like us.

The trouble with humanizing a talking head on cable news, particularly in this moment, particularly on Tuesday night, is that there must be some acknowledgment that if Maddow is a human, so are all of the familiar faces dotting the media landscape. Corey Lewandowski, as much as we might want to characterize him as an otherworldly monster, is one of us, too.

On Fox News, Lewandowski was called upon to comment on the family separations at the border opposite Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas. Petkanas was in the middle of listing off atrocities occurring in the name of the Trump administration. He said, "I read about today a ten-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who taken from her mother and put in a cage." Lewandowski, in response that reads as somehow both Pavlovian and scripted, interjected "Womp-womp."

Petkanas was flustered and outraged. "How dare you? How absolutely dare you?" he cried as the host of the program stared impassively into the camera. Like the Maddow footage it is hard to watch, shocking. Lewandowski, who ran Trump's campaign until being replaced by Paul Manafort and was hired by CNN as a commentator three days later, seems to have no other objective than being incendiary. He takes no responsibility for his comments, nor does he provide any further justification, choosing instead to pivot back to his talking points. As a pundit, it is in his best interest to create explosive television moments that keep him in the public conversation. As such, he is no different than most other talking heads on cable news, an echo chamber with no higher calling than its own continued existence. It is too easy to call Corey Lewandowski a monster for his comment. What he said was ugly and unnecessary but to place him a category separate from anyone else on television or anyone else in the country is a delusion.

Maddow and Lewandowski don't represent two sides of America-the compassionate versus the evil-they, together, are the whole. An individual may agree with one and unequivocally reject the other but our individual stances will not and have not turned the tide of the nation. We are not a land of good people pushing back against the darkness; we are land of humans susceptible to the soundbite, to the outrage, to the panic, to the outcry, to the shock of genuine emotion, to the quick hit of relief from small wins, to the vengeful victory, and to the facile narrative of good triumphing over evil. We act as if we are a nation divided along clear lines of what is acceptable and what is not, but if there's anything the Trump administration and his army of ever-more-craven acolytes, henchmen, and spokespeople has shown us is that the line is never clear, if it exists at all. We ask our Trump-supporting acquaintances, if we still speak to them at all, how they can support a comment like Lewandowski's or a contention like Kirstjen Nielsen's that separation of families is legally mandated and out of the administration's control, as if to test their humanness. Surely this is too far, we've said over and over again, perhaps expecting some great conversion, an acquiescence to our better selves.

What if there is no absolute better American self? What then? Neither our cries of "shame on you" nor our sense of kinship with a TV host's grief will change the fate of a detained child, so for whom do we continue this battle? For ourselves, for an assurance that we are different, better humans, living in a version of America that matches our hopes and not our lived experience. For a fantasy.

It isn't to say that there is nothing to be done about the atrocities that are being committed in our names. There are actions, large and small, that will make a difference-donating money to organizations to support the migrant children, supporting the lawyers advocating on their behalf, volunteering to translate, protesting, calling your representatives. But none of those is debating about the nature of the national soul. We do not have to like who we are as a people, but it is a fool's errand to pretend are we, or ever have been, any different from what we see before us. This is us-ugly, mean, mournful, desperate. Our refusal to own it will not save us. There is no redemption in having a better intention or a moral superiority.

There are not two Americas for the hundreds of children sleeping in tents in Tornillo, Texas tonight. There are not two Americas for the 50 South Asians families detained in Oregon yesterday. There are not two Americas for any of us, native born or migrant, Republican or Democrat, compassionate or callous. There is one fractious, fraught whole. The promise of society is that we will live in community, grappling with our differences and striving, however arduously, for equity. America is our opportunity and our burden. Our narratives about our country are not salvation; if there is hope, it exists only in action.

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