During the Watergate hearings, Congress asked for several years of Nixon’s tax returns and the IRS immediately complied. When it was found that Nixon had underpaid his taxes for several years to the tune of almost half a million (1973) dollars, they asked for a couple of years more. In their hands the next day. But the new normal is that our elected representatives are treated the way Trump treated his contractors for decades. Pay my bill? No, you get bupkes.

I saw that bit about Nixon in the two minutes I looked at Facebook while best beloved made tea the other morning. And it filled my head with politics. Whatever I’d been dreaming before that whispered off into the ether.

William Barr’s announcement the other day that the administration was reinstating the federal death penalty after a hiatus of something like 16 years is another indication. Five executions are scheduled for (if I recall rightly) December and January. (I’ve been thinking about the death penalty a bit the last couple of days anyway because an American colleague mentioned she’d nearly been converted from her pro-DP position over lunch by a co-worker of ours from Croatia. (I have no idea if her being American and his being Croatian have any bearing on things – I was at another table and heard none of their conversation.) I hadn’t talked to her about this particular element of our politics before, though neither of us shy from discussing hard topics including faith and belief.)

I don’t think this will be the first time I’ve blogged that I am vehemently anti-death penalty. I’ve stood on the other side of this argument and long ago came to the conclusion that we as humans should not have the final say in the matter. There are practical issues regarding the expense associated with the appeals process that have bearing. There’s also the matter that justice is complicated and lawyers and judges and juries get it wrong, by accident and by design.

Increasing the use of the death penalty, especially at this juncture of the president’s precarious position with regards indictment or impeachment, seems to be another way of inciting the public’s blood lust. I have this feeling that if he could televise the feeding of death row inmates (not to mention members of Congress who aren’t Republicans) to the lions as a means of distraction, he would do so.

But it’s not just the greed and incompetence and distraction, or the sheer amount of self serving and double dealing of every one associated with the president. No, it’s the sadism. It’s the joy they take in the cruelty they inflict. Trump’s insistence that anyone who isn’t of his class and outlook be locked up, with no actual recourse (or understanding) of the laws that should protect all of us. The so-called Central Park Five, long since exonerated and whose guilt Trump proclaimed on the pages of New York’s newspapers 30 years ago have been hauled out again and declared guilty ex cathedra.

Yesterday it was the sliming of the city of Baltimore where his slumlord son-in-law can’t be bothered to call in the exterminator for the dozen plus apartment complexes he owns where the tenants suffer under 200-plus code violations. ‘Cleaning up the building I own? That’s for the little people to deal with,’ or so I imagine him saying.

Is that sadism or just willful negligence? Is there, in fact, a difference? Certainly not from the point of view of his tenants.

Or Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rejecting 99% of applicants to a program to forgive the student loan debt of public service workers. I’m not sure where the following the money gets us with regards to this issue,

But revoking 72 guidance documents of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services which outlined the rights of disabled students under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Rehabilitation Act would fall under the category of sadism to me. As does revoking guidelines for the reporting of sexual assault on college campuses. Like much that this administration has done and promised, there’s no effort to put in place something that would be more successful at alleviating harm, just effort after effort to undo any effort (especially if that effort was made by the previous administration) to do less harm to the general populous.

That, it seems to me, is a textbook definition of sadism. And it sickens me more each day.

And I haven’t even started with the detention camps. A few people on different sides of the discussion have taken issue with the phrase ‘concentration camp’. Before 1945, this wasn’t so loaded a term, but there’s a valid argument that that term belongs solely to the Nazis. Fine. We’ll call them detention centers. The reports about the suffering inflicted on migrants held in the various centers, the separation of children from their parents, the lack of hygiene. These are all bad enough, and reflect something awful at the heart of the current iteration of the American system. The diversion of taxpayer money to the Trump donors who are running these camps (or who are the major investors in the companies running these camps – the degrees of separation simply make the handwashing more sickening) is also bad enough. I feel like I’m easing into a bad parody of Dayenu. There’s a certain sadism at the heart of the entire operation, that those tasked with holding these people while their applications for asylum go unprocessed feel that they must hold them in such sickening conditions. What will follow me to my grave is the image of Vice President Mike Pence nodding his head when shown hundreds of men behind a chain link fence who had no access to shower facilities or cots to sleep on. A cursory look at Pence’s history as governor of Indiana shows that suffering is easy to stand by and not worth bothering to stand against. Actively trying to prevent Syrian refugees from settling in Indiana and declining to declare an area poisoned by lead and arsenic a Superfund site. (Does the East Chicago, Indiana’s 51% Hispanic/Latino and 35% African American population have anything to do with it?) His stoicism doesn’t seem to be a facade; he may not actually care. Is that sadism or just offhand cruelty?

Another thing about the detention centers is that this isn’t a new practice for the US – we did it in 1942 and we’ve been doing it to the folks who should have tossed our forefathers back in the ocean for 200 years. That’s not a new thought, but we’ve gone for several decades (those of us who don’t live too closely to the Res) not thinking too hard about Native Americans and their various detentions in the US and thinking that Japanese relocation was an aberration we were rightly ashamed of. As such, we could point to other countries’ use of detention and say, ‘We Americans don’t do that – we’ve moved beyond such horrible things.‘ We could claim (as long as one didn’t look too closely at the topography) a certain moral high ground with regards to folks like the Chinese, who are (claiming to be) backing away from detaining up to a million Uighur in camps in the Xinjiang region. Whether they’re actually doing it is a different matter, but from a PR perspective, Beijing wants the moral high ground.

For those in the detention centers, in Kushner’s apartment buildings, or shouldering student loan debt, the line between sadism and offhand cruelty is very fine. If the US were claiming something like political reeducation, I’d address that too, but that doesn’t seem to be part of the current plan with regards our detention centers.