Election Fallout - Dressed Like Mexicans, Democrats Seek Asylum In Sanctuary Cities

'We are appropriating another culture', said a progressive Democrat stung by Donald Trump's electoral victory and searching for ways to avoid the sure to come vengeful retribution once he takes office. 'Besides, dressing in sombrero and serape, growing a mustache, and eating tacos and enchiladas is too transparent, too obvious.  They won't take us'. 

 

This referring to Chicago, a sanctuary city whose mayor and aldermen have steadfastly refused to alter their asylum policy regardless of the incoming President's promise to send in ICE storm troopers to round up illegal aliens and send them back home.  Good luck with that, since the President has already warned that he will turn off the federal spigot - no more block grants, generous no-questions-asked financial transfers from the federal treasury to city coffers.  Fend for yourselves, the President-elect has signaled. 

Yet the Chicago mayor dug in his heels. 'It's a matter of principle', he said. 'We are Democrats to the core, open-armed to receive our black and brown brothers from wherever they come', and here he launched into a fiery speech about the Illinois Central, the freedom train bringing thousands of freed slaves North, out of the clutches of Jim Crow, tenant farming, and the spite and animus of redneck crackers. 

'I am freedom', the Mayor intoned in a speech before a packed congregation at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on the South Side.  'I am you! I am black! I am a slave come north to freedom's land, hallelujah.  And here the poor Mexican, oppressed by the white Spanish grandee, fat and content in his hacienda, driving Jose and Maria until the very skin on their hands turns red and raw, all for a few pesos more, will be welcome.  Our city is his promised land, praise be to Jesus, his land of milk and honey, his refuge, and his home'. 

Here the congregation rose in unison and shouted, 'Praise the Lord', but with a bit less enthusiasm than they did in the past.  The billion dollar tax bite the mayor engineered through the city council to pay for asylum-seekers hurt.  Principle, faith, and citizenship all have their limits, and the good people of Chicago were reaching theirs. 

So when the political refugees from Washington began showing up at his door - of course not dressed in sombrero and serape but snappy fitted suits and Rolexes - seeking asylum in one of the last bastions of progressive defiance in the country, the Mayor was less enthused than they had thought.  

They of course had underestimated: 1) the bottom-feeding nature of municipal politics; 2) the history of Chicago and Illinois which built venality and corruption into an industry; 3) the race-baiting, entitlement, walkin' around money, no-show jobs and nepotism rewarding families through at least three generations; 4) the insignificance of federal authorities looked down upon as meddlers, coddled bureaucrats, and do-nothing hangers-on; and 5) the Idi Amin persona of the Mayor himself - a take-no-prisoners autocrat more used to bastinado than simple imprisonment. 

 

The Washington refugees came well-credentialed - all of them to a man had fought the good fight against injustice, racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and had the scars to prove it.  They were lettered, honored, degreed, and proud and felt sure that Chicago and the other sanctuary cities to which they applied, would take them.  How could they not?

A classic case of hermetically-sealed, insular brains.  Most of these politicos and bureaucrats had never been west of the Potomac, dealt with issues a priori - when a thing was right, there was no need for proof.  They were Ramanujan to Hardy at Cambridge - the village genius who simply knew the mystery of mathematics and the old aristocratic don who insisted on proofs.  'You must prove it, Ramanujan, prove it, prove it, prove it'; but Ramanujan was listening to the music of the spheres and paid no attention whatsoever. 

And so it was for the progressive disenfranchised, who in the most pedestrian way, based on arrogated presumptions and a God Almighty conviction that right was right and needed no trials, no proofs, found themselves in Indian country. The Mayor of Chicago might have presented himself as a true, concerned and considerate progressive, but he was nothing more than a black arriviste, getting his after centuries of bending to the lash and the whip. 

His predecessor, Marion Barry of DC, Mayor for Life, brilliant maestro of corrupt municipal governance, the genius of racial politics, bag man for his constituents east of the Anacostia, dispenser of favors, jobs, and permissiveness that kept him safe until he got busted for crack.  'The bitch set me up', said Barry as he surprised, crack pipe in hand, was handcuffed by federal agents. He got elected again, for why wouldn't a crack-smoking, drug dealing, gang-banging posse of constituents re-elect one of their own? 

 

Barry like all Democratic mayors of big cities talked big, national, hi-falutin' talk about racial justice, but they cared little about that and were only interested in overseeing kickback ready public works and re-election. 

'What were we thinking?' asked one refugee of another when they were told to go clean up needles and syringes in the inner city, to 'get your hands dirty, see how real people live' apprenticeship in the Mayor's Chicago, not some airy-fairy idea of nitty-gritty urban living.  'And be sure to tell them the Mayor sent you and to be sure to pull the right lever in November.'

The Mayor of Chicago and his sanctuary city counterparts across the country had no interest whatsoever in any Mexicans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans who were not part of his racial algorithm for electoral victory. They were convenient instruments for raising taxes - fungible money that disappeared as soon as it was generated - and nothing more.  They were not the ones that would keep him in power. 

So, these Washington progressive applicants were now neither fish nor fowl, wanderers without a political home.  Donald Trump would so badly eviscerate liberalism and take the wrecking ball to each and every federal department lining Independence Avenue, that there was no place for them there.  There never had been a loyal opposition among Democrats whose campaign of never-Trumpism made them targets for the worst pogroms and purges seen since Warsaw and the Soviet gulag days.  And now that they had seen what 'liberal', sanctuary city-minded municipal governance was like, there was no refuge for them there either. 

 

'It's the prairie or nothing, Dave', said a former Senate aide; but the thought of long days milking cows, tending chickens and goats, and firing up the thresher was mind-numbing. 

Of course the incoming Republican throng had no sympathy whatsoever.  Good riddance to bad rubbish, was the most generous meme of new administration.  They if ever dismissed by the electorate would find the private sector welcoming.  These liberal idealists with only faded utopian ideas had nothing to fall back on.  The fairy tale ended badly, and no one cared.