In Oedipus Tex, the mathematician-composer P.D.Q. Bach’s 1990 comedic answer to Stravinsky’s tragic oratorio, the titular hero discovers the truth of his situation—that he has married his mother, Billy-Jo Costa, Queen of the Rodeo—and, fulfilling the requirements of tragedy, he takes the rhinestone-covered barrettes out of her hair and gouges out his eyes. At which point the chorus sings:
“And immediately after he’d put out both his eyes, he … kind of wished he hadn’t.”
Everybody has regrets. Nations and their governments do, too. When things are upside down in the state, you end up with Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, or the Trump administration.
Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian activist involved in the Columbia protests who was arrested in a Keystone Kops-level caper launched by Marco Rubio’s incompetent State Department, which proposed to revoke a student visa that Khalil doesn’t have. Khalil is, in fact, the holder of a green card, meaning that he has been given permanent resident status in the United States by the U.S. government. Which is to say, Khalil is in this country as a permanent resident thanks to a decision of the U.S. government, which, after looking back on what it had done, kind of wished it hadn’t.
If the government had been doing its job, things might have gone differently. If, in the course of Khalil’s green-card application, the government had said: “You know, we don’t love the fact that you’re a rabble-rousing Hamas apologist, so we’re not going to give you a green card,” then that would be one thing. And that is a thing we do: We ask green-card applicants about belonging to communist or totalitarian political parties, that sort of thing. And that is appropriate. But having given Khalil a green card and then regretted it, the government has arrested Khalil—who is charged with no crime—and proposes to deport him because it doesn’t like his politics. Khalil has been targeted because he is prominent and holds views that the administration does not like—and they are not likeable views. But again, he has not been charged with a crime—much less convicted of one—nor has he been accused of any kind of violation or irregularity where his immigration status is concerned.
We shouldn’t treat green cards as though they are Citizenship Lite. It is a permanent status, but there is more to citizenship than the legal relationship. Citizenship is supposed to mean something about a man’s relationship to the state that governs him, but the U.S. government has done much to weaken that over the years, for example by assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen whose offense was being the “Osama bin Laden of Facebook,” as people called him. The government also killed his teenage son, whose offense was being the teenage son of the “Osama bin Laden of Facebook.” The al-Awlaki precedent—and I suppose Barack Obama never bothered to think through the fact that he was setting a precedent that might be used by some future doofus with autocratic tendencies, the Benito Mussolini of Truth Social—suggests very strongly that what can be done to a green-card holder can be done to a citizen. If “enemy combatant” covers “online propagandist riding in a car with his son,” then the miasma of horsepucky that Marco Rubio et al. have belched up in the Khalil case—that his presence in the United States undermines U.S. foreign policy—can be used for pretty much anybody, including any critic of the government. I’m busy trying to undermine U.S. policy in the matter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because I believe that the Trump administration is pursuing the wrong—evil, stupid, cowardly—policy.
(If you’re going to deport me, drop me off in Montreux.)
We increasingly live in a society that is unable to make distinctions. And there is a difference between having political criteria on the front end of the visa-application process and using a foreign-policy pretext to expel a legal permanent resident because he has been engaged in political activity that is, however nasty, entirely legal as far as the government is concerned. If the Trump administration believes that Khalil has broken the law, then let it charge him and prove its case in court; if the Trump administration believes that Khalil has committed some immigration violation, then there is a process for that, too—and the process isn’t arresting him without charges as a public-relations stunt.
Because this is the fact: Donald Trump’s lawlessness is a far greater threat to the peace and security of these United States than is the champagne radicalism of some campus dope at Columbia.
The pathos of the greatest tragic heroes comes from the fact that, once laid low, they realize that they have only their own actions to blame, even if they didn’t understand what they were doing at the time. Oedipus puts out his eyes because in spite of those organs he could not see what was comprehended by the blind oracle Tiresias. And, afterward, he kind of wished he hadn’t.
American voters would do well to reacquaint themselves with the classics, which are classics for a reason.
