sweet land of liberty

A granddaughter remembers:

“In the case of my grandfather, the tragedy was multiplied by the fact that he was a hero in the eyes of his children, a leader in the Japanese-American community of Hood River, and had always counseled his compatriots to be ‘200 percent American,’ ” Ms. Yasui said. “And look what it got him: arrested and dragged out of his house a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, transferred from one military prison to another for years, and not released until several months after the war was over.”

If only Mr. Yasui had been slightly more patriotic, perhaps his fellow citizens wouldn’t have locked him up for no reason at all . . .

I’m glad to see the patriotic traditions of racial profiling and arbitrary detention pioneered by the Greatest Generation are alive and well today.