“ICE the Wall!” “Abolish the build!”

“ICE the Wall!” “Abolish the build!”
by David Benjamin

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984

PARIS — I’ve never put much stock in slogans. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy them. It’s just that the best slogans ever conceived have nowhere to go. The thrill you get from bellowing a favorite slogan, wearing it on your chest or sporting it on an ugly red cap more visceral than cerebral.

Worst of all, it leaves you where you started.

“Occupy Wall Street,” for example, was a slogan that morphed into a leaderless, incoherent freezing-cold urban campout that ended with a whimper and a lot of sympathizers, like me, asking what the hell was that all about.

Wait, wait! Don’t tell me. I know what Occupy Wall Street was supposed to be all about. Hey, I bought the t-shirt. But the message, when it was all over, was about the political impotence of just about any “movement” whose guiding principle is a three-word imperative.

I go all the way back to the halcyon days of “Burn, Baby, Burn,” “Off the Pig,” “Power to the People,” End the War” “Ban the Bomb,” “Free Love,” etc. Among these, the only one that resulted in visible political action was the first.

Black folks in Watts, D.C., Detroit, Newark actually did burn down a few blocks of ghetto. What they got for this, in terms of legislative action to uplift the lives of the urban poor was, of course, a lot of scorched housing projects and not a red cent to rebuild them. They also got The Kerner Report, which proved to all future generations that you can’t solve a major social crisis by understanding it.

Otherwise, the protest movements that shouted these slogans, in unison, with four-part harmony — and feeling — killed few, if any, policemen, empowered few people not already powerful, ended no war and banned no bombs. And love? Well, I pay the price for that every day of my life.

The yelling, in every case, is the main thing. Catharsis.

I spotted my favorite slogan, which I have yet to figure out, on a telephone pole in Cambridge, Massachusetts around 1970. It read: “All Power to the Collective Imagination!” Brilliantly vague, no catharsis.

A truly cathartic slogan, like “We Shall Overcome,” is self-explanatory and bold. Its simplicity makes it infectious, emotional, even — if only for the moment — powerful. Once in a great while, there’s a slogan that cuts all the way to the conscience.

“I Am A Man.”

The cardinal sin for any slogan is to pose a question, or a bunch of questions that its authors are clueless to answer. For example, back in ’72, the winning campaign slogan was “Nixon’s the One.” The Committee to Re-Elect the President was obviously proud of this nugget and plastered it on every blank surface that could take the glue. But millions of us read the poster and asked, “One what?” “When did Nixon become One?” “Can I be One, too?” “Who’s the Two?” Etcetera.

“Make America Great Again” poses even more questions, of significantly deeper import. For instance, “When did America become Great the first time? “What was Great about it?” “When did Great go down the tubes?” “Whaddya mean, Great?” “Who? Us?”

The biggie, of course, is “Okay, how?”

We’re still waiting, after three years, for an answer to that one.

The worst slogans are those that imply, in two or three words, pat solutions to complicated issues. “Build the Wall,” for example, is not just an idiotic policy idea. It trashes the very foundation of the United States as a beacon of hope for the tempest toss’d of other, lesser, crueler nations than we.

Lately, we have a counter-slogan. Ever since Trump’s gestapo started kidnapping little kids and herding them into concentration camps, we’ve seen “Abolish ICE” suddenly popping up on a million mindless pasteboard signs.

This sounds ominously like an anarchist scheme to wipe out America’ entire immigration service. Abolish ICE? To be replaced by… what? Questions abound.

“Build the Wall” and “Abolish ICE” are slogans of the same coin. They don’t demand an attainable goal. Neither will America build a 2,000-mile wall, nor will the U.S. Congress even entertain the folly of completely deregulating immigration.

Each of these blissfully dumb slogans bespeaks an aspiration. But there is a difference. One can be done, sort of. The other can’t, at all.

“Build the wall” is both impossible and unAmerican. It fosters the faith that a nation — deranged by fear of strangers — must drive every seeker of the dream back from our borders, into the sea, into the deserts, into the hands of the tyrants and butchers who sent them fleeing in the first place toward our City on a Hill. “Build the wall” says “No vacancy” where there is ample vacancy. It says that the Golden Door now bristles with padlocks and gun slits.

“Abolish ICE” is a more complicated couplet, because it could happen, with a lot of work. ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement — emerged from the hysteria that swept America after the attacks of September 11, 2001. One of the blunders the Bush administration committed in a panic-stricken flurry of policy initiatives was to create an entirely new Cabinet-level department — bigger than almost any other — Homeland Security.

With DHS, the federal bureaucracy vastly expanded. It duplicated jobs already being done by other departments. We did not need another federal investigative service to piggyback on the FBI, CIA, DIA, NCIS, NSC, NSA, Secret Service, etc. But we got one anyway.

DHS also absorbed many functions that weren’t broke and didn’t need fixing. Among these was the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), previously part of the Department of Justice. Once folded into DHS, the new Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) became an adjunct of national security. Among its three components is ICE, focused on “investigation, enforcement and removal.” Under the INS, we only had the Border Patrol for these jobs. But those guys were mean enough already. We didn’t need to double down on the cops.

The accurate perception among ICE’s critics is that it has swiftly evolved into a menacing legion whose depredations have discredited Americas’s immigration services and stained America’s reputation as a refuge. ICE has become the snarling face of an organization whose main job is to guide and welcome legal immigrants and to offer hope to asylum seekers. Since 9/11 we’ve circled the Statue of Liberty with an army, and that army is ICE.

The first step toward either taming or obliterating ICE would be a simple slogan edit, from a demand to a titillating question: “Who needs ICE?”

Once this sinks in, we might move on to posters and t-shirts that read, “Who needs DHS?” This might eventually get us around to the notion that patching together the Department of Homeland Security was a dumbass move that could be corrected by putting all its pieces back where they were before 9/11.

I know. Pandora’s box and all that.

Meanwhile, well, I have a slogan:

“What? Me Worry?”