Puerto Rico and garbage

An Archbishop put to the test

On Sunday, Trump held a rally in the heart of New York City, in the iconic Madison Square Gardens.

One of the warm-up sets to keep the crowd entertained before the actual program with speakers began, was comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Wikipedia tells us about this comedian the following: “Hinchcliffe is known primarily for roast comedy, having been on the writing staff of the Comedy Central Roast series, and appearing at the All Def Digital Roast of Snoop Dogg in 2016 and The Roast of Tom Brady in 2024.”

We all love a good roast, but if you ask me, most comedians take comedy and humor itself too far, and the subgroup ‘roasts’ is no exception. I’m picky, I suppose. Either way, the Trump Campaign added Hinchcliffe on the roster for the MSG rally. During his set, he made the following joke:

Of course, a whole host of offended reactions broke out. Trump’s rally itself was likened to a Nazi rally. MSNBC took the cake on that one, airing a segment shamelessly blurring the line between the October 27, 2024 rally by Trump at MSG and a February 20, 1939 rally by the German American Bund, an American-German organization that was pro-Hitler.

Back to Puerto Rico.
The condemnations came immediately, as did the reactions and apologies.

Even Archbishop Roberto Gonzalez Nieves of San Juan, Puerto Rico, was outraged. The next day he penned an open letter to Donald Trump, demanding he personally apologize for those comments by Hinchcliffe.

A good friend of mine shared that letter on social media, and when someone commented in a way that applied the negativity directly to Trump, he nuanced immediately: ”I'm trying to stay off commenting on either candidate themselves, save to say, this letter was about something a presenter said at the rally, not the candidate himself. Similar issues have occurred at nearly all rallies on all sides. Reasonableness and charity and dignity seem to be set aside during election seasons anymore.”

Except, we have our current president himself call half the nation 'garbage'...

Which was a remark he delivered himself, and not something a comedian known for tough and often over-the-top roasts said, who called the state of Puerto Rico 'garbage'. As I understand, that was a clear reference to the deep waste management problems and corruption scandals around garbage disposal on the island that DO plague the people there... Which is something very different.

As such, that joke did not 'insult or denigrate the dignity and sacredness of people', at all. Nor did it 'not just provoke sinister laughter but hatred.' Even with only cursory knowledge of Puerto Rico, I understood the reference (I had read some articles a while back on corruption in the aftermath of a hurricane, with relief goods, and the garbage issue was brought up, too, even if only in passing). Even a cursory internet search confirms that garbage is indeed a huge problem on the otherwise indeed beautiful island.

In May 2022 EcoRich published an article “Puerto Rico Landfill Problems: All You Need to Know”. It summarized the problem by referencing an EPA study: “According to a study commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and conducted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Puerto Rico could run out of landfill space in 2-4 years. This long-identified capacity issue has been exacerbated by tonnes of debris left behind by two back-to-back hurricanes that devastated the region in 2017.
However, at least two big Puerto Rican waste companies believe that insufficient capacity is not the underlying issue. The largest sites claim that they can probably take in the trash for more than 30 years. They claim that the problems are primarily related to compliance and poor management, which seem to be the result of limited resources. Continue reading to learn more about the landfill issues in Puerto Rico.

Randy Jensen, president, and CEO of EC Waste says, “There is an absolute landfill crisis in Puerto Rico, but it’s not air space. It is that we still allow 22 unlined dumps to accept waste. While we do have regulations, enforcement on the island is not consistent. I believe more consistent enforcement needs to occur across all waste receiving sites.”

It seems that the good archbishop allowed himself to be swept away in the torrent of 'offense' that some love to brandish about.

Maybe I am not to be taken as "standard, run-of-the-mill American", and perhaps I am able to nuance such language immediately within a wider context, away from people, towards politics and politicians, who generally are more than deserving of harsh roasts. Maybe my assessment is only true for myself. Yet I have seen several reactions of Haitians themselves who did not seem to be all too bothered by those statements (here and here, for example). Again, anecdotal, I know.

Earlier this week, Puerto Rico’s Republican shadow senator Zoraida Buxó endorsed Trump for President, seemingly unfazed by the comedian’s jokes that Sunday.

Do I feel the need to 'defend' those remarks? No. The comedian himself seems to have taken that back, and that is enough for me. If we are now going to demand people who hire comedians apologize for what such comedians might have said that was 'unacceptable', we're in a bad state of mind as a country…
Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance was not apologetic. In an interview with NBC he said “I’m just — I’m so over it. I’ve heard about the joke, I haven’t actually seen the joke that you mentioned, but I think that it’s telling that Kamala Harris’ closing message is essentially that all of Donald Trump’s voters are Nazis, and you should get really pissed off about a comedian telling a joke."
On CNN, Vivek Ramaswamy said: “George Lopez made a joke at Kamala Harris' rally over the weekend about all Mexicans being thieves. Are we attributing that comment to Kamala Harris or querying all of her proxies? No, we are not. I think we need to get off our high horses and acknowledge that a bad joke was told. It was bad because the joke wasn't funny. The audience didn't find it funny, the guys told other funny jokes in other places.”

Either way, that debate about the remarks themselves is not that important, I think. I can easily surrender the point, accept that it was unacceptable to some (not all, that should be accepted as well), and even accept that in the current climate a word by Trump to counter a possible misunderstanding about the people of Puerto Rico, who are anything but garbage, might be helpful. Not the hill I want to die on.

Such hill I would die on, the reason I am writing this post, would be something like this, in line with what Ramaswamy pointed out:

If the archbishop now writes a similar letter to President Biden (actually, an even stronger letter, since there the culprit is not a comedian, but the president himself!), I would be able to take his desire to safeguard a nation and society founded on 'liberty and justice for all' serious, and fully support it. Notice that there is a sizeable number of Puerto Ricans who support Trump, and are thus called garbage by Biden.

I am tired of one-sided 'open-letters', which are most often written to people 'on the right' and 'in the conservative camp', if anything because they hold themselves to a higher moral standard, and are held to such higher moral standard (which is not a bad thing). But that creates a very curious double standard. We talk about Trump's series of marriages, and his hot mic remarks in an unguarded moment about grabbing women by a particular body part. And with at least some reason: multiple marriages are not a good mark (ask Paul, as he wrote in his letter 1 Timothy 3 a whole list of characteristics to gauge a morally upstanding man, fit to be bishop, elder or deacon, and it includes ‘husband of one wife’, as opposed to ‘husband of many wives’, in line with the teac), and such talk about women is not something we should generally accept.
But we forget immediately any such trespasses by politicians and leaders on the other side. Harris and Brown, anyone? Or Montell Williams? Bill Clinton and his long, long list of 'conquests', and the horrible treatment they got (Hillary was far worse in suppressing those women when they came out accusing Bill)? Biden who showers with his daughter at an inappropriate age, and his 'sniffing' and grabbing of young children?

No, I don't bring that up as a 'tu-quoque' to justify any misdoing by 'my side' (I technically have no side, as I am still a registered independent), but to point out glaring double standards. And I am tired of it. THAT is what is divisive. Double standards create an ‘us versus them’. Those who are allowed to do things, and those who are not allowed to do things. It is so commonplace, most people don't even notice it anymore. Look indeed at the difference between the reaction to a bad joke by Hinchcliffe during a Trump rally and a bad joke by Lopez during a Harris rally, as Ramaswamy pointed out. (No, don’t try to explain that you can make offensive jokes about your own group, but not about other groups: makes no sense.)

From an archbishop I expect more. (And having a press release dated to the 26th of October, when the rally and the offense happened on the 27th of October? Sloppy, but I notice such details. It typically raises questions, if anything about the carefulness of the source. Here, I think it is indeed just sloppiness, and nothing else.) If he is going to write an open letter, a week before an important election, to call on one candidate to apologize for unacceptable comments made during one of his rallies that stigmatize and dehumanize a group of people, 'to disavow these comments as reflecting in any way [his] personal or political views', I expect him to also and just as quickly and openly condemn Biden's remarks, as sitting president, demanding that candidate Harris apologize, as his Vice President, similarly 'to disavow these comments as reflecting in any way [her] personal or political views.'

If he doesn't, his point about Trump and the remarks by that comedian still stand for what it’s worth, of course. But his own credibility will be shot. He won't be a shepherd to all, nor concerned about a society built on 'liberty and justice for all', but will be unmasked as caring only for his own people. Not even ALL of his own people, but only the non-Trump supporting part of it. Rather ironic, in this context.

Now, I write this the night Biden made those remarks, and I am willing to give the good Archbishop another day to respond to Biden and Harris, as well, just as much time as passed between the MSG remarks on Sunday and his Open Letter on Monday. Is it a real concern he had, or just politics?

I sincerely hope I jumped the gun here, and that he actually cares, in a fair and even-handed way, about all Americans, not just (part of) his own group. We will see today.

Either way, I am tired of the double standards, and tired of the one-way street indignation. It undermines potentially valid concerns, through a partisan application. And it is amazing to note how fast attempts to pin Trump down fizzle out nowadays.

Meanwhile, the media realizes already that this is another huge blunder by Biden, with a very bad impact on Harris.

CNN admits that Biden was ‘benched’ by the Harris campaign, to limit the damage he could do. Yet at the same time Harris was speaking in DC in front of the White House at the Ellipse, giving her closing arguments for her campaign, Biden again took to the airwaves to send out his own message, co-opting the spotlight from Harris. And what a horrendous statement he made. No longer was he ‘president for all Americans’, but he showed strong contempt for at least half the American population. No surprise, in a way, after all the open talk about not only Trump, but also his supporters being Neo-Nazis. One has to wonder about Biden’s uncanny timing.

After the media had a field day denouncing calling people ‘garbage’ and how dangerous that was, demanding Trump take ownership of what was said during his own rally and apologize, they are suddenly confronted with Biden calling millions more ‘garbage’. Will they call out Harris, demand she apologizes for what her own president, to whom she is the vice-president, has said?

Republican commentators on CNN point out the obvious, and the panic of the regular panel is palpable.

Meanwhile, memers are having an absolute ball:

and

and

OF course, the insult is immediately taken as a badge of honor, as expressed with this social media profile picture frame:

A ‘Guezennaam’. Very effective in combatting such personal attacks. One more week to go before the elections, and tensions rise everywhere. Stay calm, keep your cool, and go vote. Early, or on the 5th itself.