For many years I dismissed the idea of going out on New Year’s Eve as “amateur’s night.” Packed restaurants, overwhelmed staff, slashed menus, jacked-up prices. Who needs it? There are 364 other nights to eat in restaurants; Dec. 31 is for staying home, eating little hot dogs wrapped in dough and watching bad local television.
But Tuesday night we were lured into the city by old friends and — mirabile dictu — the night could not have gone smoother. Metra was on time and free. We caught the 156 bus at Union Station, entirely empty.
“We’re like rock stars!” my wife enthused, as our private bus lumbered into the Loop. We headed to Zanies on Wells Street. There we saw an impish young cast member from Saturday Night Live, Michael Longfellow. We grabbed a cab over to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, where the mood was festive, the food hot, the service good. Catching the 1:15 home — the trains held, thoughtfully, by Metra — we decided we might have underestimated this going out business.
Nobody murdered us — that was fortunate, though I didn’t think to be grateful when I finally got to bed about 3 a.m., a few minutes before Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove an F-150 pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 15 people and giving the American public a taste of what 2025 is going to be like.
Not the violence, necessarily — we already have plenty of that, living in a country where our fellow citizens routinely decide to throw away the lives of innocent bystanders, plus their own, based on mental illness or political extremism — and those two are harder and harder to tell apart.
But the reaction to the violence.
“Shut the border down!!!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., the MAGA stalwart, demanded on X, sounding a common theme, after Fox News reported that Jabbar had crossed into the country from Mexico two days earlier. But Fox was wrong. Jabbar hadn’t come from Mexico — the truck had. Apparently Jabbar rented it from Turo, one of those Uber-like companies that offer vehicles owned by private individuals.
Jabbar was a U.S. Army vet born in Beaumont, Texas. A fact hard to grasp by those who apparently can’t see past his name.
“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on X, hours after the news broke.
The notable part of that sentence is Trump giving the impression that he cares whether something supporting his prejudices is true. Remember, he’s the guy who imagined crowds of American Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11. That it never happened didn’t matter to him. He repeated his calumny rather than renounce it.
Nor did I notice a chorus of reprimand, urging our once and future president not to politicize a tragedy. I guess that only happens when schoolchildren are slaughtered at their desks by a white person.
I bailed out of X weeks ago, but dipped a toe in to take the temperature of right-wing reaction to the New Orleans massacre.
Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, tweeted a video of himself warning about terrorists pouring over the border:
“I HAVE BEEN SOUNDING THE ALARM FOR YEARS,” he wrote. “The devastating terror attack in New Orleans has left many Americans asking a sobering question: has the enemy already infiltrated our borders …?”
Who does he mean by “the enemy”? Texans? Veterans? Divorced men? Guys driving pickup trucks? No, he means people with names like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who in the MAGA calculus of course are terrorists, just as Barack Hussein Obama of course was a Muslim born in Africa.
The thing to remember is, it’s a symbiosis. You know, the clown fish clean the sea anemone, and the sea anemone protect the clown fish. Terrorists want to dismantle our liberal, tolerant society because they rightly see it as a threat to their harsh, religious fanaticism. And the right wing boosts them by suggesting, shamefully, that all immigrants are terrorists. A Muslim name? Say no more!
They share the same goals. Both embrace a morality and political philosophy based on the urgent need to get rid of certain people. Only their methods differ — one uses violence, and the other capitalizes on that violence to promote their own fanatical vision of a native-born Christian white-bread America that is far, far from what our nation is, was, or ever will be.