Letters

Accompanying the pandemic is a second viral invasion of life — the endless, self-perpetuating robocalls. Always intrusive — with quarantining, they are pervasive — calling people, interrupting their thoughts, stopping what they are in the midst of doing to answer the insistent ringing (or at least stopping to look at the identity of the caller, always just a series of numbers).

Most insidious are the calls, one after the other, which mimic local area codes and seemingly familiar numbers. You answer, only to get the pause to alert the perpetrators that a real person is on the line — and then the unctuous sales pitch begins.

The National Call Registry is a joke, like a Model-T trying to track the path of supersonic rockets. You are warned not to pick up or give in to the irresistible urge to let loose a stream of words not suitable for TV. Do so and you enter the algorithmic universe that has skewered you. And the phone rings again.

In defiance of this directive by a tech-savvy, tech-supporting government that is incapable either of stopping or defeating freelance pests operating out of Romania, I decided to pick up on the latest invader, hoping it might be a miraculous call to verify a vaccination appointment. Instead, it was a pitch for a company called Frontier Protection, which sounds more appropriate to guard places where tumbleweed tumbles.

A quick look online identified Frontier as the domestic arm of the parent company owned and operated by Erik Prince, the brother of the simpleton Betsy DeVos, whom Trump installed to undercut the Department of Education. While she was being routinely vilified, her brother was becoming infamous as head of Blackwater, and running from charges that his hyped-up personnel killed 17 civilians in Iraq (including, as always, children).

This Prince, along with Prince Mohammed bin Salman (who kills at will and murdered Jamal Khashoggi), are heroes in the dirty fairy tale written by Trump in which he is the once-and-always king, and they are his para-military knights, along with royalty like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

However, Prince Erik, who is punctuating your reveries by his phone intrusions, is now being sanctioned by the United Nations for illegally trafficking in arms sales to “a Libyan commander attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government” and forming an assassination team.

Where is the investigation by our government, which spared no allocation of time, money and vitriol persecuting Hillary Clinton for Benghazi errors? And where are the criminal charges? And how is he evading the law here? Think of the charges against a kid who illegally sells a gun.

Disney promised: “Someday your Prince will come …” He’s here! Calling you!

Frances Genovese

Southampton