So Many Horrors

 Another eruption from the Zeitgeist landed in my inbox yesterday. I had just finished publishing my post about Brecht's "To Those Born Later"—which includes the quotation, "What kind of times are these, when a talk about trees seems almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors." And then, seconds after I post it, a friend sends me a screenshot from Ezra Klein's latest podcast episode: 

"We're in a time," writes Klein, "when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors [....] And then many of us look up from our screens into a normal spring day. What do you do with that?" As Brecht would put it: "Truly, I live in dark times." 

Outrage Machine

 Last week over on my other blog, I wrote yet another scathing denunciation of the Trump administration's policy of kidnapping innocent people and deporting them to indefinite confinement at the hands of El Salvador's dictator. 

I asked a friend what he thought of the piece. He said he had seen it flash across his inbox—but had immediately archived it. "Not for me," he had thought. The angry tone was not his jam. "It's too much a part of the social media outrage machine." 

"Aggressively Revoke"

 The focus of the Trump administration's free-floating xenophobia seems to have shifted this week from international students protesting the Gaza war to Chinese students specifically. Marco Rubio's statement on this yesterday was profoundly sinister. (And of course, it was meant to sound that way. Administration officials take a perverse pride in their bombastic cruelty and lying—the more obvious the lie, the better; because it shows just how much integrity you are willing to sacrifice for the boss. "Look, daddy, there's no limit to how low I'll stoop!")

Here's how Rubio phrased it: the State Department is going to "aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," he said. Note how it's not "Chinese students with connections to," etc. It's "Chinese students" tout court; "including"—but not limited to—those who have these suspect ties. In other words, Rubio just patently announced a policy of nationality discrimination. People are to be treated as presumptive spies simply because they are Chinese nationals, and for no other reason. 

Being Right

 If you had described to me years ago the era we would come to inhabit—I would have said it sounded awesome. Why? Because I finally got to be right about everything. 

What would have appeared to be the great advantage of our present political moment—in the eyes of my younger self—is that the Left now has all the good ideas. 

A Reverse Refugee Crisis

 One of the statistics Trump loves to cite is the fact that border crossings have actually fallen in the U.S. since he took office. A New York Times article yesterday sheds light, though, on exactly why. It quotes a number of Venezuelan migrants who are now fleeing south—away from the United States—because they have heard stories of innocent people being rounded up and sent to a gulag in El Salvador, just for having tattoos—or being separated from their children. 

In other words, Trump's human rights violations have become so egregious that a growing number of people would rather return to a brutal dictatorship in Venezuela than take their chances in the United States. In a matter of months, the United States has become the sort of authoritarian country that people flee from, rather than try to get to. "They flee from me, that sometime did me seek"—as the poet Thomas Wyatt once put it. I hope we're proud of ourselves. 

Baggage

 There's a classic This American Life segment that I recall hearing on the radio as a kid. The raconteuse was telling another story about her notoriously hard-ass father. When she was growing up, as she tells it, he never had a fun bone in his body. 

He pinched pennies with a morbid intensity, she says. He placed unrelenting pressure on her and her siblings to succeed academically. As she put it, he "believed all three of his children should get PhDs in engineering, or else they would starve in the street."

As in a Cell...

 Trump's latest tactics for making life hell for immigrants appear to have taken on a specifically financial form. It's not enough that the administration has threatened people with such medieval horrors as deportation to a Salvadoran torture-dungeon—or to a sprawling migrant detention complex in Libya where trafficking, sexual violence, and enslavement are rampant practices. Now, the administration is also putting the screws on people by taking away the money they have earned through work. 

This effort starts with taxing remittances—the small payments that people are able to send home to their families abroad, and which are often critical props of support to local economies in Central America and elsewhere in the Global South. But the financial thumb-screws don't end there. Now, the administration is also proposing to fine people for every day they are in the country unlawfully. If people can't or won't pay, the White House proposes to "garnish their wages," put liens on their property, etc. 

Hypocrisy, Falsity, Callousness

 In the course of his interview with Ross Douthat earlier this week, J.D. Vance at one point starts railing about the "premodern brutality" that he claims prevails in immigrant-majority communities. Douthat—to his credit—doesn't let this slide without comment. "Shouldn’t this barbaric medieval landscape that you’re describing show up in violent crime statistics?" he asks (study after study—after all—has documented that immigrants tend to commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens; not that aggregate group-based statistics of this kind should have bearing on how we treat individuals anyway). 

In response to this, Vance says, in effect: well, no, because the FBI is captured by elites and so they lie about crime statistics. Then he pivots, and says: anyway, he was really talking about fentanyl overdoses—which he falsely links to immigration. So when he said, "a migrant community [...] the level of violence, the level of I think truly premodern brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to"— that was really a metaphor for drug overdoses? That's what he was saying? (Vance plainly would rather stick to the topic of the Pope gifting him a Vatican-themed necktie.)

Hume, Naturalist

 We tend to assume that Deism arose in the 18th century because it was the only available position for an enlightened skeptic to take. Outright atheism was, at the time—we suppose—virtually unthinkable; and not only because of the social opprobrium against it; but also because of the argument from design. In an era before the Darwinian theory of evolution, people could not frame any account of how lifeforms in the universe had come to be so well-adapted to their environment; unless—that is—they had been made that way, by some sort of wise, watchmaker deity who had set the whole thing in motion. 

I was reading Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for the first time, however (or maybe not for the first time—perhaps I attempted this in college; I can't really remember—at any rate, I got a lot more out of it this time)—and I discover that Hume (speaking through the voice of his skeptical agonist Philo in the dialogue form) actually foresaw roughly how an evolutionary account of the formation of well-adapted life might go. Here—a century before Darwin wrote his great works—Hume already gestured toward the principle of natural selection as an explanation of animal adaptation. 

Demon of Mechanism

 Well, hello there, Zeitgeist—fancy meeting you here! No sooner had I turned in my recent post about AI job loss, than an op-ed appears in the New York Times suggesting that it is already upon us. The piece, written by a LinkedIn executive, argues that entry level jobs in white collar and professional services may already be disappearing into the maw of automation. 

In short, we are back in the same situation that Thomas Carlyle diagnosed two hundred years ago—as I discussed a few posts back: "The huge demon of Mechanism smokes and thunders, changing his shape like a very Proteus; and infallibly at every change of shape, oversetting whole multitudes of workmen [...] hurling them asunder, this way and that[.]"

Indifference

 In a recent court filing, the government recounted an episode during their current mass deportation campaign, when a group of prisoners slated for removal to El Salvador's CECOT prison staged a short-lived revolt. The effort wasn't violent—the prisoners merely barricaded themselves inside a dormitory and tried to flood the unit by clogging the toilets and shower drains. No officers were actually endangered by this incident. Nonetheless, the government used it to try to paint the prisoners as dangerous. They climbed onto their high horse of affronted authority to say that they needed to protect their agents. 

But let us keep in mind—the government was confining these men specifically in order to deport them—in violation of federal court orders and U.S. and international law—to a forever-prison in El Salvador. What exactly were these men supposed to do? Which of us would not try to defend ourselves in the same situation? The government expects them to go quietly like lambs to the slaughter. But if you or I knew that we were about to be loaded onto a plane with no way to retrieve us—to spend possibly the rest of our lives in one of the world's most notorious prisons—would we not risk clogging a few drains? 

Work Requirements

 The GOP is currently tying itself into knots over the new "work requirements" for Medicaid that it is trying to include in its budget deal. Now—in a morally sane party—this debate would be over whether or not to add such "work requirements" at all. But in today's Republican Party, the argument is instead over how soon they should kick in. 

The original draft of the bill starts the clock on the work requirements in 2029 (conveniently timed—from Mr. Trump's perspective; if not for the rest of his party—for right after he leaves office). But now, "hard-line" conservatives in the party are holding up passage of the bill because they want these requirements to kick in immediately. 

Humane Jeremiahs

 Noah Smith was responding the other day on Substack to a number of progressive writers who have made a seemingly intuitive point. In so many words, all these left-wing commentators have been making a version of the same argument: "We all agree that Trump's tariffs are bad policy. They won't actually solve any of the problems they purport to address. But, we shouldn't make fun of the basic idea that America's blue collar communities have suffered from globalization. Changes to the manufacturing sector really have 'hollowed out' the middle class in recent decades. People are right to be angry." 

Smith quotes from a tweet thread that makes this point: working-class Americans really have lost good jobs over the past several decades; the author suggests. The service sector jobs that replaced them really were crummy and inadequate. They never allowed people to recover the middle class lifestyles they had enjoyed before. Wages have stagnated. Life expectancy has fallen or plateaued.

The Disease of Nationalism

 Well, India and Pakistan appear to have backed down for now from the military conflict last weekend that seemed poised momentarily to spiral out of control. But that doesn't exactly mean we should relax. Strangely, last weekend read to many of us as almost a slow news cycle—but it really shouldn't have. Two of the world's nuclear-armed powers were—for twenty-four hours at least—fighting an actual hot war. And, as Noah Smith pointed out on his Substack, that means that four of the world's nuclear-armed powers are now engaged in some sort of active military conflict (Israel, Russia, India, and Pakistan). 

We are definitely living this week, then, amidst the "chafe and jar / of nuclear war," as Robert Lowell put it. If we aren't quite "talking our extinction to death" this time—the way people did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Lowell—perhaps we should be. It is weird that we have become inured to the risk of nuclear conflict—and barely bat an eye when two nuclear-armed powers are suddenly at each other's throats, if they are far enough away—because—really—the threat it poses is as grave as ever; and the underlying causes that risk its outbreak seem just as present as they were seventy years ago. 

Hunger and Fear

 The New York Times reported yesterday that Israeli authorities have started to warn internally that Gaza is at imminent risk of starvation. This is, of course, no more than the easily-foreseeable consequence of the Israeli government deliberately shutting off all access to humanitarian aid in the enclave. And since the goal of this action is to put pressure on Hamas, it's pretty unmistakeable by this point that we are dealing here with an effort to collectively punish a civilian population—a war crime, in short. 

What excuse exactly could one make for Israel's actions? To be sure, Hamas shares in the guilt here. They have proven themselves willing time and again to sacrifice their own civilian population in order to cling to power. They can and should end this tomorrow by agreeing to release the remaining hostages. 

My Brother's Keeper

 Perhaps the only thing that has partially redeemed the last few weeks of Trump administration madness is that Elon Musk, at least, seems to have slunk off the scene (at least for now). 

Despite being hailed variously as a "genius" and a "titan of industry," etc., all Musk seems to have accomplished during his few weeks in Washington is to kill starving children in Africa by withholding life-saving food aid; generate billions of dollars in excess legal costs for the U.S. taxpayer, due to litigation stemming from his unlawful terminations of various government agencies; torpedo the stock price of his own publicly-traded company by single-handedly toxifying its brand; and annoy everyone who ever had to sit in the same room with him for longer than five minutes. 

Moloch

 The Trump administration is currently pursuing a battle in court over the fate of the "lesser prairie chicken." Predictably, the White House—along with the fossil fuel industry and big ranchers—want to eliminate the bird's protections under the Endangered Species Act. Biodiversity and environmental advocates want to preserve its habitat, and argue that the bird is one of countless species around the globe that are increasingly at risk of annihilation due to human activities. 

In one sense, the episode is tailor-made for a Fox News segment. The lesser prairie chicken sounds and looks silly. It's a perfect opportunity for conservatives to cast liberals as a bunch of out-of-touch tree-huggers whose hearts bleed so much for a rare type of chicken that they are willing to sacrifice cheap energy costs for the rest of us. (Conveniently left out is how Trump's climate policies are actively subsidizing dirty industries that aren't even the cheapest alternatives anymore.)

The Thing is Daily Done

 A friend accuses me of always responding to his cries of existential despair by quoting from some poem. He finds this distasteful, he says, because he thinks it shows that I merely want to pontificate, instead of actually trying to help him. Or, at best, I may be trying to help, but am doing so in a high-handed manner—as if I were gazing down on him from the clouds and bestowing some poetic wisdom upon a mere mortal. Instead of meeting him on his level—that is—and sharing in his pain as a gesture of solidarity, I "intellectualize" the matter. "It's like you're examining my pain as a specimen in a lab." 

I thought there was some fairness in this reproach. But I wasn't sure what to do instead.

About That "Prayer for Victory"

 In the notorious Signal thread that senior Trump administration officials accidentally shared with a journalist in March, J.D. Vance at one point reassures everyone—with his usual pious cant: "I will say a prayer for victory." Shortly thereafter, Mike Waltz declares that a U.S. airstrike just demolished a building, which has "collapsed." The officials on the chat all cheer. J.D. Vance—fresh from his prayer—responds to the news of the destroyed building with one word: "Excellent." 

I wondered at the time how many people were in that building when it collapsed. And who were they? Do we have any evidence they were all Houthi fighters? Was this a civilian structure? Did any of these officials even care how many noncombatants they had just slaughtered?  

The Weavers

 There has apparently been a back-and-forth playing out on social media in recent days over the fate of the American textile industry. A once-thriving sector of American manufacturing, the unions representing U.S. garment workers were still running ads as recently as the 1970s trying to convince people to buy American-made clothes. But over the years, the business dried up and the jobs largely moved overseas. Today, most of the clothes we wear are made in the Global South. 

Since Trump's idiotic trade war went into effect, some liberals have made the defunct garment industry the butt of their attacks on Trump's woefully shortsighted policy. They have apparently been mocking the tariffs online, for instance, with "cartoon memes of Americans sowing cloth"—the point being that U.S. workers probably would not want these kinds of manufacturing jobs if they actually came back. 

Who But the Lord?

 When the news came down yesterday that the officers involved in the death of Tyre Nichols had been acquitted, I watched for the first time the body cam footage that the whole nation saw a couple years ago.

I probably should have watched it earlier, but somehow I managed not to follow this case closely, when it was in the headlines in 2023. Seeing the news about the results of the criminal trial yesterday was the first time I had paid any serious attention to the details. 

Cherish

 In his bizarre, meandering interview with NBC over the weekend (the same one in which he said openly he "wasn't sure" he would uphold the U.S. Constitution—despite his oath of office), Trump also went off on a characteristically creepy tangent about annexing Greenland. He wouldn't "rule out" an act of unilateral unprovoked military aggression in order to seize the island, he said; "We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security." 

I'm sure the Greenlanders are very relieved to hear that Trump proposes to "cherish" them. One is reminded of the similar promise William McKinley (one of Trump's avowed models for his neo-imperialism) once made to the people of the Philippines: to "uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace to do the very best best by them[.]" To which Mark Twain, in essays like "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," gave the only possible riposte: namely, that this "civilizing" mission seemed to take the form strangely often of firing on villages, murdering innocents, and starving children. 

Something to Expiate

 A while back I wrote a post on this blog devoted to the concept of "little hells"—by which I mean those small episodes of intense, burning shame from our past that have a way of arising to our recollection unbidden at awkward moments. They could strike one at any time—but they most often come when one's attention is undefended: in the shower, say; on a walk; while driving, etc. 

I quoted Dostoevsky's passage on the subject, from The Idiot: "This sometimes happens with people: unbearable, unexpected memories, especially in connection with shame, ordinarily stop one on the spot for a moment." (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.) But the term itself I took from a novel by Klaus Mann: "Such memories are like little hells into which we must descend from time to time." (Smyth trans.)