"Monday or any Sunday in the Park with George," lyrics by Thomas Wolfe

Armed federal agents. some riding horseback, some pointing weapons, traversed the fields of grass. Military vehicles blocked the commons' exit. A helicopter hovered. Adults rushed children into a nearby building.

Joining the agents were masked Army reserve troops and camera crews — the propaganda tool most beloved by Kristi Noem, secretary of Fatherland Security and Public Enlightenment, minister without portfolio.

Damian Dovarganes/ AP

This was yesterday, Monday, or any given Sunday in the Park with Another George, lyrics no longer by Sondheim.

After three weeks of quiet, the "episode felt like an escalation" — an ironic top-down uprising, a preconceived malevolence by authority. Such was the impression (modestly reworded) of The NY Times' L.A.-based reporters.

The enduring calm had led California's governor to assume that Noem's secret police and federalized troops would soon depart. But he and city leaders "better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal,” said a regime official to Fox News.

"We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles," he added. Noem's ministry called yesterday's provocation an "operation" and confirmed by email that it's "ongoing" and occurring in more than one place.

"That should be a message in of itself [sic]," wrote also ironic "Security" HQ.

Message most definitely received, says the park area's population. It's been impossible to miss. Also masked, self-nonidentifying police agents are bemonstering their community by staging raids and tearing families apart.

"To many local leaders" — and, I should think, to every local — "the Monday march through MacArthur Park seemed designed to intimidate immigrants and residents, rather than to carry out targeted enforcement."

(Correction: Among local opinion there was no "seemed"; that just happens to be a verb immensely cherished and inexhaustibly deployed by the Times.)

"Small businesses have struggled as undocumented customers and workers have holed up at home," observed the Times. "Public spaces like MacArthur Park have been desolate on days when they would typically be bustling with vendors and celebrating families.

"[One businessman] said that everyone in the community was afraid of being picked up by immigration agents, including those who have legal status."

Escalation, secret police, authority's malevolence, staged propaganda, the eternally menacing: "[you'd] better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal, we will go anywhere" ...

"What George began to see was a picture of a great people who had been psychically wounded and were now desperately ill with some dread malady of the soul. Here was an entire nation, he now realized, that was infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations." —Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

From LawArt, editorial, 2021: "Wolfe’s intention was to record faithfully an episode that took place on a train in early September 1936 when he was leaving Germany, [the arrest of an 'undesirable'] that brought home to him more forcibly than any other personal experience the reality of Nazi oppression....

"[He] wanted ... his readers to make a metaphoric transference from this one example of Nazi oppression to whatever land or ruler tried to imprison people physically or spiritually." (Emphasis mine).