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." 

Klein's observation is the stuff of great protest literature. For generations, people confronting injustice have felt that the comfort and ease of their own lives has been a kind of reproach to them. When others are suffering injustice and horrors, we feel guilty about enjoying a new green day with clear skies. Talking about trees seems a kind of crime, when one could be talking about the horrors. 

Klein immerses himself in the evils of the world, brought to him by the news. But then he looks up, and is astonished at the contrast with the beautiful, leafy-green world that surrounds him. "Many of us look up from our screens into a normal spring day."

I am reminded of Thomas Hardy's poem in which he looks up from his writing to see the moon reproaching him for his indifference. When the world is at war (the Boer War, in Hardy's case), and innocent men are being "slain in brutish battle"—the moon asks him: what sort of person is it "who wants to write a book / In a world of such a kind"?

Hugh MacDiarmid was struck by the same contrast: how, he wondered, could rank injustice and beauty coexist in the same world? Why did not all nature and the heavens cry out against it? When he thinks of "men as innocent as I am," he wrote, jailed on death row—and then looked up and saw people in their gardens—he felt "bereft," he wrote, of "the great friendship of created things." 

Every day, likewise, I am reminded that there are still hundreds of innocent people locked up in a forever-prison in El Salvador on the orders of my government. 

They did nothing wrong. They were kidnapped off the streets. "Men as innocent as I am"—a delivery driver carrying a McDonalds dinner, who made a wrong turn on a Michigan bridge and ended up in Trump's tropical gulag simply because he had tattoos and came from Venezuela. A makeup artist who remains captive, tormented, and confined incommunicado to this day—their stories are all like this. 

And yet, you look up from this horrendous news—and life seems "normal" here in the United States. The sun is shining. You'd never guess by the look of the streets that Trump was president, and that he was abducting innocent people and sending them to a foreign prison to be held in torturous conditions where their friends and relatives and loved ones could never even find them. 

But they say that even in Auschwitz, you could hear classical music wafting over on the breeze. They kept the grass trimmed and neat. You'd never guess, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, at so much as the existence of the crematoria. 

But this window-box beauty at the camp was—as the Polish writer and camp survivor Tadeusz Borowski put it—"a monstrous lie, a grotesque lie, like the whole camp, like the whole world." (Vedder trans.) 

So too with the beauty of this America. So too with the beauty of this spring day, and with these trees, and with this garden. This is all a lie, so long as innocent men are still chained up in that gulag. So long as the tropical gulag exists, the gulag is the truth, and this is all a falsehood. Anything we do to distract and entertain ourselves in the meantime is self-deception; even if we have little choice but to practice it. 

So long as those men are still confined there, without charge or trial, without hope or redress, without any ability to contact their families or lawyers or receive any ray of justice from the outside world—that is the reality, not this beautiful green world. 

And we should never fail to look up from our screens and be overcome by the contrast. Hardy's moon still reproaches us from above. We should still ask ourselves who would write a book in a world of such a kind. We should—every time we see the "respectable" people in their gardens, as MacDiarmid put it, feel no less bereft than he of what he called the great fellowship of created things.