Stephen Miller has had a bad week, not as bad as he deserves but bad, nonetheless. His lies about the Alex Pretti murder have backfired. After being excluded from an Oval Office meeting about immigration strategy spin, Miller crawfished on his baseless assertion that Pretti was an assassin.

Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, has suggested that federal agents “may not have been following” protocol before the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, after days in which he and other Trump administration officials portrayed the shooting as justified.

 

Mr. Miller said in a statement that the White House had provided “clear guidance” to the Department of Homeland Security that federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown be used to protect “arrest teams” from people he described as “disruptors.”

There’s nothing clear about Team MAGA’s Minnesota invasion except that it’s about intimidation, not crime. The only criminals involved are the Felon-In-Chief and his  Border Patrol brown shirts. Their goal is wear people down and keep them off the streets.

The pushback is working. It has set MAGA maggot against MAGA maggot: Cosplay Kristi blames Miller for her inflammatory language. What’s happening is not a pivot but it’s significant. A de-escalation beats the hell out of an escalation. Is it real or the bastard offspring of Nixon’s Vietnam de-escalation? The only way to be sure is for the protests to continue.

The spotlight on Miller reminded me of a 2020 post in which I use a Richard Thompson song to illuminate Miller’s state of mind, such as it is. I should probably rewrite the post, but I have good trouble and MAGA mockery on my mind, so we’re going hybrid.

Set the Wayback Machine to 4/29/2020.

While we’ve all had our eyes on the pandemic, despicable White House aide and self-hating Jew Stephen Miller has kept busy. You can detect his hand behind President* Pennywise’s immigration “ban.” It was, of course, devised to distract attention from the regime’s supremely inept pandemic response. They’ve tried lying their way through it and it’s blown up in their pasty, white faces or in Trump’s case, orange.

The other reason I’m plagued by thoughts about Miller is a Slate piece by Jeremy Stahl that reminds us of Miller’s racist malefactions. It’s part of a series about Trump administration malfeasance. This post is full of M-words. Here are two more: Miller is a malodorous motherfucker. That felt mighty, mighty good.

You’re probably wondering what I’m on about with the post title. It’s down to Richard Thompson-Edward Hopper month at Saturday Odds & Sods. I’ve been listening to RT’s back catalog a lot of late and one song in particular strikes me as relevant to this moment in time. Time is still on my mind as you’ll see later today. I’ve also thrown one more Hopper painting into the mix as the featured image. Never enough EH or RT.

The exact point-of-view of the 1979 Richard Thompson song, Civilisation, remains somewhat murky; something the songwriter is unlikely to clarify other than to state it doesn’t reflect his own political views. I’ve always interpreted it as a narrative tune with a far-right xenophobic protagonist spouting bigoted bile and nonsense about immigrants. Hence my idiosyncratic connection of it with far-right racist and xenophobic Trump aide, Stephen Miller. There’s occasionally method to my madness.

Civilisation is the opening track of the penultimate Richard and Linda Thompson album, Sunnyvista. It rocks like crazy and, as you might have gathered, has disturbing RT lyrics:

They’re not human, they’re with the Woolwich
They eat food I wouldn’t give to my dog
They’re hygienic, medicated
They wouldn’t live next door to no wog
They’re not human, where do they come from?
I don’t know what they’re living here for
They don’t belong here, on this planet
What are they doing in the house next door?

 

Wife’s tranquilized, milk’s pasteurized
Kid’s hypnotized by the t.v.
Dad’ll beat you, dog’ll eat you
They’ll treat you like family

 

All across the nation
It’s civilisation

 

They’re not human, they’ve got a new car
They’re going to polish it all the day long
Got a brand new rubber woman
They’re going to blow her up all the night long
They’re not human, it’s a double cross
They sold out for a handful of beads
They sold everything for nothing, just a
Headful of dreams and a handful of greed

 

Keep ’em happy, keep ’em drinking
Keep ’em laughing, no thinking
No dying, no weeping
Keep ’em hypnotized, keep ’em sleeping

 

All across the nation
It’s civilisation

 

Pack you off to school, get working
Get a steady job, no shirking
Get to sixty-five, get a handshake
You’re a vegetable with a heartache

All across the nation
It’s civilisation

I hear the sound of Stephen Miller clapping and nodding his head.

There’s an overly literal interpretive video of Civilisation on YouTube by a dude with a handle that I originally thought was German, Mehefinheulog. It turns out to be Welsh. He uses images of movie space aliens and includes frequent nods to Sir Kenneth Clark’s genteel and erudite teevee series, Civilisation. RT’s protagonist may be wordy but he’s neither genteel nor erudite.

Stephen Miller and his ilk believe they’re stalwart defenders of Western civilization instead of malevolent bigots. I assume his family remains ashamed of him. They should be mortified. That’s the last M-word of this post.