Is This That World?

 Trump spent part of his day yesterday issuing a new executive order about regulating shower-heads. Yes, as in, the normal shower-heads that we use every day to wash ourselves. Trump declared that Biden's policies had made shower-heads too weak, and that intervention was needed in order to restore "strength" to shower-heads. "Make America's showers great again," as the executive order reportedly put it. 

Reading about such actions, one can see why so many Americans just can't bring themselves to see this man as an actual threat to democracy. He is so utterly bombastic and unserious that people for the most part manage to laugh him off. The public's view of Trump becomes that he is something of an Archie Bunker—a comic figure who says outrageous, silly things that shouldn't be taken too much to heart. 

But then there's the fact that—even as he issues these hilariously trivial and preposterous executive orders about shower-heads and plastic straws—Trump's administration is also deporting real people to torture and indefinite confinement in El Salvador. These individuals "face lifetime incommunicado sentences in one of the most notorious prisons in the world"—as the ACLU put it in a recent court filing. 

People right now are waking up every day to this living nightmare—this hell on Earth—because of the actions of our government. Our government not only willfully deported them to El Salvador—on the express understanding that they would be subject to these horrifying conditions—the government is also paying Salvadoran authorities to confine them. This is all happening on the taxpayer's dime. 

At the same time, the administration throws up its hands and claims in court that it has no power to ever get people out of this dungeon, once it has sent them there. Even though we are paying the Salvadoran officials to hold them (and the Secretary of Homeland Security just toured the facility)! One would think that—if the administration actually wanted to get people out—cutting off these funds would be a start.

These disappearances to a black hole in El Salvador are so completely outré and evil that one struggles to fit them into any kind of sense of reality. Could this be happening in the same world, under the same administration, as those patently silly and innocuous executive orders about shower heads and plastic straws? Is this that same life? "Is this that world?" (Leopardi, Galassi trans.)

When trying to wrap one's head around the horror of what our government is doing to deported Venezuelan asylum-seekers in El Salvador right now, one is forced to reach for analogies to distant times and shores—the horrific abuses of the ancien régime. Justice Sotomayor, in her recent dissent on the case regarding these deportations, describes some of the conditions in this prison: 

El Salvador has boasted that inmates in CECOT “‘will never leave,’” ibid., and plaintiffs present evidence that “inmates are rarely allowed to leave their cells, have no regular access to drinking water or adequate food, sleep standing up because of overcrowding, and are held in cells where they do not see sunlight for days."

It's that bit about not even seeing the sun that really gets me. For comparisons to this horror, one would have to think of Bashar al-Assad's underground torture chambers, from which people were recently released due to the change of government in Syria. Or, further back in history, to Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon"—chained up in a sunless dungeon for the rest of his life. 

Can these things really be happening in the same country that brought us the laughable, good-humored absurdity of the shower-heads order? "Are such things done on Albion's shore?"—or America's for that matter? (Blake). 

I think most Americans would disapprove of locking up innocent people in a sunless dungeon for the rest of their lives if they knew about it. They wouldn't want their tax dollars going to such a purpose. But I think the contrast it poses with the normal, silly, trivial world we see around us every day is so glaring that people just can't wrap their heads around it. They can't believe it's actually happening, even though it is. 

In his book about the fire-bombing of Germany during World War II, the author W.G. Sebald describes the astonishing human ability to simply repress and ignore things that are too horrific to reconcile with any sense of normality. When something occurs in our presence that is simply too awful, we have an extraordinary capacity to just proceed as if it weren't there. 

That seems to be what's happening with these El Salvador deportations. The fact that the U.S. government is doing this to people is open and notorious. The administration is not trying to hide it—they are openly boasting about it on social media. The Secretary of Homeland Security toured this torture chamber and live-streamed her visit on broadcast television. It's obviously happening. 

But still, we can't reconcile it with any sense of normal human experience. And so, people just don't see it. Apathy results. People go about their day—looking up occasionally just to laugh about Trump's latest outburst or absurd order on shower-heads. And so, people remain stranded in these ungodly conditions—"Because of the unconcern of men and women," and Hugh MacDiarmid once put it. 

We have to start believing it. We have to see through the mask of the absurdity of the shower-heads order to the real-world violence and depravity of this administration. As Brecht once put it, in his Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: we have to "see the horror in the heart of farce." And if we could just do so for once, he wrote—perhaps "we wouldn't always end up on our arse." (Tabori trans.)