Today It's Brown-Skinned Doctoral Students; Tomorrow, Who Knows?

Donald's Insatiable Appetite For Obeyance & Conformity Is Just Getting Started

“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely, and the grass was richly green.”

That’s how Shirley Jackson opens her marrow-chilling short story “The Lottery,” published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. Here’s a refresher: a blithely contented small American town (any town, every town, your town) hums along in preparation for what the reader is expecting to be a happy day, maybe a fair or a festival. We learn early on the occasion is called the Lottery while residents gather in the town square, curiously amassing a pile of rocks and stones. But the story quickly whiplashes from the banality of a town event to the blistering brutality of an annual ritual in which a townsperson is stoned to death.

The morality tale, which caused such a kerfuffle when it was published that hundreds of New Yorker readers canceled subscriptions and wrote enraged letters, begs us to reflect on how we behave as a collective. Why do we go along without questioning inherent evil? Why is it difficult to dissent? How do we let “others” become irrational targets of oppression?

The Lottery attacks a belief in a ‘common humanity’. Thinkers and writers like to dust off Jackson’s seminal dark tale and breathe life into it when we are in the grip of obvious communal violence. Like we are now in America.

In The Lottery, poor Tessie Hutchinson draws the black dot from the time-worn black box, which doubles as a symbol for blind adherence to tradition, religion, an authoritarian figure. Her husband Bill defers to “authority” when his wife’s fate is sealed, no matter how cruel or illogical the ritual. He does not resist. The others breathe a sigh of relief – they’re safe, at least until next year. Old man Warner reminds the townsfolk, “we’ve always done it this way.” Only Tessie Hutchinson makes a last-ditch effort to be spared, unsuccessfully.

Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler’s Final Solution, matter-of-factly said during his trial he “was only following orders.” No one better captured the culture of Nazi conformity than Hannah Arendt, the holocaust survivor, philosopher, and author of “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” published in 1963, also originally in the New Yorker. In coining the phrase “banality of evil,” Arendt captured how ordinary people can perpetrate evil while believing they have acted responsibly. At his trial, Eichmann said, “I couldn’t help myself; I had orders.”

Jackson’s and Arendt’s works are often linked because they make the uncomfortable argument that evil can be committed in a quotidian, casual way by people like you, your friends, neighbors, teachers, lawyers, doctors, ICE, Homeland Security, everyone. The Lottery is imaginatively fictional, unlike the bureaucratic mass murder of the Holocaust, but both are warnings about what happens to a broad swath of a population when it is swallowed into an authoritarian government -- whether it’s exterminating Jews, throwing stones at Tessie Hutchinson, or Donald’s complicit justice junta rounding up immigrant students on elite University campuses. Accepted behavior becomes a fatal template of indoctrination, something that morphs into truth because it’s backed by authority and tradition and those who hold the power.

Which is why Donald’s illegally rancid roundup has become America’s most revolting but revealing Rorschach test to date.

Too many Americans have found their Tessie Hutchinson; they use immigration as a scapegoat for loss of manufacturing jobs, economic pain, social isolation, latent homosexuality, understandable resentment toward the overcharged WOKE culture, a yearning for a White America, an outlet for dissatisfaction and frustration. Interestingly, news media bobble heads these days feel compelled to soften immigration atrocity stories with “of course immigration reform is needed,” before they report on every cruel, comical, and unconstitutional example of a questionably deported person.

And it gets easier each time, like a stoning or genocide, because the shock value wears off. “Oh, yeah,” the crowd says. “Another one. Seen this before,” with our fatigued doom-scrolling eyes. “We’ve always done it this way,” as old man Warner says.

Donald’s “Eichmanns” (once quaintly called Justice Department) this week acknowledged mistakenly deporting a Maryland man with protected legal status to a notorious El Salvador prison known for its brutal conditions because of alleged ties to a gang. In a court filing, the lawyers for the deported man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, refuted almost every aspect of the case but Garcia remains imprisoned.

Welcome to the buffet of buffoonery.

Federal officers detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish student without providing evidence the doctoral student “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Ozturk’s only known activism was co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper.

Rhode Island’s PBS station starts a story like this: (sounds a bit like The Lottery, eh?)

“On a recent sunny day in early spring, the Brown University main green space was filled with students sunbathing.” The reporter goes on to say students and professors, especially those from the international community, are afraid to protest the Israel-Hamas war. Donald’s intended chill on immigrant students is working, and so is his plan for the rest of us to buy into a justified bias.

Recently, a local kidney transplant specialist with Brown Medicine, who’s also an assistant professor at Brown University, Rasha Alawieh, was deported after trying to return to the U.S. from Lebanon, even though a federal judge ordered that she not be removed until a hearing could be held. Feh, who needs court orders. Alawieh, who had a U.S. visa, admitted supporting former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah for his religious and spiritual teachings and not his politics, court documents said.

Have we forgotten about Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident and Palestinian activist who was prominent in protests at Columbia last year? He’s still in Louisiana detention camp.

Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown scholar from India who holds a visa as a visiting scholar, was arrested outside his Virginia home and detained for allegedly spreading Hamas propaganda. He was taken to a detention facility in Louisiana.

The government revoked a student visa for Momodou Taal, a Cornell University doctoral student from the UK and Gambia, because of his alleged involvement in “disruptive protests.”

And Yunseo Chung, a Columbia student and lawful U.S. resident who moved to America from Korea as a child, managed to elude Donald’s army of complicit shit-shirts. Good for her! The Department of Homeland Security wants to deport Chung for participating in pro-Palestinian protests at Barnard College.

Arendt said, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” We go about our business, and when that business becomes rote, ritualistic and wretched, it eventually becomes “normal.”

Today’s Lottery is targeting brown-skinned doctoral students. Tomorrow, the bloodthirsty gladiator spectators will have to cheer on a different sacrifice because Donald is just getting started. Donald’s insatiable appetite for obeyance and conformity, like the flowers in Jackson’s every-town, are blooming profusely in America.

And one day, another victim will repeat Tessie Hutchinson’s last words:

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her, Jackson wrote.