2017 Apr 26^th

A man named Tucker Carlson is the replacement for Bill O’Reilly on the Fox channel. We are told that his ratings are currently right up there with O’Reilly’s. I doubt that his appeal will approach O’Reilly’s long term.

O’Reilly presented a public persona that was superior, smug, above the fray and perhaps avuncular. Tucker Carlson comes across as simply very angry about whatever topic he has chosen for discussion. When I first heard him he was shouting, “You lie,” to some guest with whom he seemed to have disagreed. Perhaps he felt emboldened by Joe Wilson, the South Carolina congressman who yelled the same phrase at the president during a state of the union message. (Joe Wilson had “You lie” repeatedly yelled back at at him when he held a recent meeting of his constituents.)

Tucker Carlson has an interesting background. His father was ambassador to the Seychelles and was president of Public Broadcasting. His mother walked out on the family when Tucker was six years old; this event can hardly have been without effect. His father remarried the heiress to the Swanson Foods business and Tucker was sent to St. Andrews boarding school in Rhode Island. Graduates of the school include several Bushes, a number of Vanderbilts and other lesser luminaries. The boarding school tuition is now just over 58 thousand dollars a year. If Carlson was short on affection growing up, he was unlikely short of funds.

However this background has affected Carlson he does not seem to have much concern for underdogs. His idea of extreme vetting is not allowing any immigrants at all into the country regardless of their credentials. We aren’t just talking about refugees here, we are talking about no immigration period. Now that’s real xenophobia!

In his program he pointed out the terrible position Germany was in because they admitted over a million refugees. Crime among them is sky high according to Carlson. Carlson doesn’t mention that in many countries refugees are ghettoized, they are not integrated into the larger society. They come into the country with different customs, not fluent in the language and without the skills needed to earn a living in their new home. What a surprise that the crime rate among them is high. The refugees need to be educated but so do the people in the host population. Integration of refugees into a new society is not dependent solely on changing the refugees. The hostility of the larger population toward these strangers will have to be defused. Simply giving refugees an apartment and a stipend is not the answer.

We have a long history of hostility toward immigrants in this country, particularly those who look different. Refugees from the Irish potato famine got here to the land of the free wanting jobs to discover signs that said “No Irish need apply.”

You remember that founding father, old Ben Franklin. This is what he had to say about my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors newly arrived in the Pennsylvania he saw as his personal fiefdom: 

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the   English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as   to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our   Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” 

Old Ben was not exactly welcoming. Some things never change.