A Cold Unjust Walk

 It's a beautiful day here in Iowa City. The sun is shining. The air is balmy. I give thanks for this green grass and this blue sky and all I see. 

And yet, when I turn to the news, all is changed. I see the Associated Press photos in my inbox of men our government has entombed alive in black site prisons in El Salvador. I see the guards with their masked faces and weapons holding them prisoner without charge or trial or conviction. 

And I am overwhelmed by the contrast. I think—how can these two things both be in the same world? How can there be light, here, while innocent men weep with futile despair in darkness there, because of the deliberate actions of my government? 

How have the heavens not broken open and wept? How does the grass not whither and die from its roots?

I thought of a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid, the great Scottish modernist and one of my personal poet-heroes, about a similar impossible contrast: 

Here under the radiant rays of the sun, he wrote

Where everything grows so vividly,

he was suddenly assailed by remembered images of men in prison, being prepared for the death chamber. 

MacDiarmid was writing of capital punishment, but his words apply just as well here, to the U.S.'s new illegal rendition program to El Salvador—especially since who knows for how many of them this policy may prove a death sentence?

I read about the Salvadoran officials frog-marching the Venezuelan deportees into buses. I read about them forcing the men to bend double as they went, purely to humiliate them. And I think about how this is all happening without the slightest pretense of legal process or conviction of guilt. 

As MacDiarmid wrote: I think again of men as innocent as I am 

Pent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars

I read about the videos of Salvadoran officials—acting at the U.S. government's behest—shaving these men's heads in order to brand them as criminals in the world's eyes—regardless of the truth—and to render them indistinguishable amidst the country's prisoners. 

[T]heir hair cut for the cap, wrote MacDiarmid. 

But how did they get there? MacDiarmid answers: 

Because of the unconcern of men and women

Respectable and respected and professedly Christian 

I think of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt always wearing that conspicuous cross necklace during press briefings, at the very moment she is defending the administration's deportation and humiliation and imprisonment of innocent people. 

I think of all the blow-dried hypocrites and silver-tongues in this administration who claim Christian beliefs—Vance, Hegseth, and all their kind—while simultaneously doing all in their personal and political power to ensure the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. 

And all at once—MacDiarmid concludes—he is overwhelmed by the contrast. The incompatibility between a world of flowers and beauty, on the one hand, and a world of such hypocrisy and cruelty and ugliness and injustice, on the other. 

I am suddenly completely bereft, he writes

Of [the great friendship of created beings]

The unity of life which can only be forged by love.