Fire from then on...

 Early this week, Trump posted yet another snuff film online, showing what purports to be his extrajudicial execution of a boat-full of people traveling in the Caribbean sea. This video was—if anything—more ghastly than the first. The earlier video had been filmed in infrared. All one could see was the usual white blob of flame against a black background, as the ship exploded. 

This week's video—by contrast—was shot in color. The grainy quality of the images gives them the look of a found-footage horror film. This was a home-video type of snuff film. The short video shows a boat bobbing in the waves. Seconds later, it is suddenly overcome with flames. The three people on board were presumably reduced in those moments to charred corpses. 

one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings -
and from then on fire—as Neruda wrote of Franco's bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War. (Tarn trans.)

At least as of Monday afternoon, independent journalists had not been able to verify the footage. We don't know if it was an actual snuff film of three people the President just ordered executed without charge or trial. But the fact that Trump wants us to think that's what the video is, is quite bad enough. He wants us to think he's a murderer. 

He's proud of killing three people with no military justification, no argument from self-defense, and no legal process whatsoever to determine their guilty or innocence. 

Added to the similar boat strike shortly before this one—that brings Trump's recent body count to at least fourteen people. 

The President of the United States murders fourteen people in a matter of weeks. And he faces no legal consequences for it. We don't even have to dig to find out about the killings. Trump himself brags about it. He shows off his homemade snuff films. His main fear appears to be that we won't believe he really just killed fourteen people without cause or provocation; not that we will think he did. 

And whom, exactly, did he just kill? Who was on that boat? Were they really "drug traffickers," as the administration claims? And what of it, if they were?—does that give any government in the world permission to murder them without charge or trial? And what if they weren't drug traffickers—but just fishermen or civilians out on a jaunt? 

Those three charred corpses on the boat—their skeletons left to "stare in yellow surprise at the sun," to quote Richard Wright. Who were they when they were alive? 

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body? 

—as Harold Pinter once wrote in a poem—which he read aloud with passionate moral indignation, in his 2005 Nobel Lecture, in condemnation of George W. Bush's civilian casualties in the Iraq war. We need another Pinter today to express our disgust and outrage at a U.S. President that murders fourteen innocents at sea—and then boasts about it. 

Meanwhile, state prosecutors announced yesterday that they intend to seek the death penalty against the 22 year old shooter who allegedly killed Charlie Kirk. 

We seem to have a strange attitude to violence in this country. The President brags about murdering fourteen people—and faces no consequences. Meanwhile, a twenty-two year old kid murders one—and the government concludes that the solution to this murder is more bloodshed. 

As if one death would make up for another; as if the solution to one murder is to create another set of grieving parents. 

And so, the government intends to lead into the execution chamber a 22 year old whose "neck God made for other use / Than strangling in a string." (To quote one of A.E. Housman's poems denouncing capital punishment.) 

Of course—Kirk's neck too was also made for better use than to be shot through in an unprovoked assassination; but it's too late to call back that heinous action now. And creating another corpse in a legalized form of revenge will change nothing for the better. 

There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
Than most that sleep outside.

Who sleep in the White House, for example...