WHEN a candidate for possibly the most powerful position in the world, said person having once held that very position, says very publicly that immigrants eat cats and dogs, well, we know we’re in trouble.
When I was a kid in the UK, in the socially ugly seventies, there was a similar nasty playground taunt was that directed at Pakistanis.
Of course, the way it was expressed was much cruder than that and everyone knows what term was being used then and it was not a diminutive expressing fondness.
The everyday racism and sexism, and whatever prejudice you could wish to have in what ever flavour you desired, was an open characteristic of society then.
Family entertainment was prime-time comedy shows about Chalky, and that was supposed to be funny because he was black, and how stupid the Irish were. The Paddies.
Ah, the good old days. The whole family sits around and laughs at the immigrants. That’s what we need. We want our country back.
The horror is that fifty odd years since these social characteristics, on the biggest stage of all, these age old prejudices against immigrants are bellowed out.
They are there in what Nigel Farage says. They are there in what a sad parade of tricolour-wrapped Irish protesters say.
For all the progress society has made the darkness has come with us.
Even Ireland, a country utterly shaped by the experience of emigration, isn’t immune to them. Even Ireland. Is that the progress we’ve made? That we can now boast of our own homegrown bigots?
Trump’s outburst is a headline that sounds like something new. It sounds like the worst thing. ‘They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.’
No wonder Kamala Harris looked bewildered and bemused. And, of course, we all laughed. Laughed at him and such ludicrous claims.
But, if you stop and think about it, it’s not funny. Not funny at all.
This is just the kind of dehumanising language that does so much damage and is so, so dangerous.
It’s funny because it is so ridiculous, but it is far more sinister than it is funny.
Language dehumanised the Irish in Britain to the extent that it was acceptable to put them in prison for lengthy periods of time even when they were demonstrably innocent.
And even when they were demonstrably innocent it was acceptable to keep them in prison.
Language about how stupid the Irish were and how violent they were meant they weren’t like everybody else in society. They came from somewhere else. They were different. Not like the other members of society.
Look back at those 1970s cartoons in the daily newspapers and see the sideburned, ape-like Irish, and their violent ways. They’re not quite human are they? They’re not like everybody else in society.
Immigrants aren’t people, you see. They’re immigrants. They’re not men and women and children and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and friends. They’re immigrants. They’re different.
The obvious truth is that words matter. Images matter. Lies matter. Saying that immigrants are eating pets is the kind of lie that the far right has been feeding off forever.
The thing about immigrants is that they are always up to something. They’re always doing something that the ‘ordinary’ members of society don’t do. Always committing crime, always a threat to our children and our women, always involved in criminality, always eating the wrong thing.
I’m still optimistic. I still think things are getting better. That’s not to say that they couldn’t get worse again but they are getting better.
By and large those who trade in bigotry and prejudice are not socially acceptable.
But then sometimes they end up running for the most powerful position on the planet and have millions of supporters.
How Irish people, especially Irish-Americans, by definition of immigrant blood, can support this is beyond explanation. It makes no sense.
Immigrants are not eating household pets, they are not any more violent or criminal than the rest of us, and they are not taking sparse resources away from us.
Millionaires and billionaires are doing that. Immigrants are just people like you and I.
It’s no harm at all to restate that and to keep restating it.
The fact that we have to is the worry.
