Butchery

 This week certainly did not lack for more hideous news. The Trump administration yesterday reportedly moved an aircraft carrier into position in the Caribbean—yet another show of military force, threatening a potential action against Venezuela—as well as a sign that the administration means to double down even further on its current drone war in the region—which has now, as of this week, killed more than 40 people. 

Meanwhile, human bodies are reportedly washing ashore in Trinidad. No one is quite positive where they come from—but they have all been hideously mangled and burned and chewed up like something out of Gottfried Benn's "Morgue" poems. The most likely explanation is that these are victims of the Trump administration's extrajudicial killings by drone. 

Trump is a serial murderer at this point—the results of whose butchery are now washing ashore as belated evidence, just as they would in some potboiler crime thriller. Even if we believe the administration's claims of having "intelligence" about the boats they are targeting (and I don't)—after all—these are still murders. 

You can't just kill suspected drug traffickers on sight—without charge or trial or a chance to face their accusers. Honestly, you still shouldn't be able to kill people after all that due process either—since I don't believe in capital punishment for anyone; still less for nonviolent drug crimes—but we're not even talking about that level of procedural justice here. We're talking about flagrant state-sponsored murder and terrorism. 

Trump not only carries out these unlawful killings—he also can't help but cackle with sadistic glee whenever he thinks about them. He has all the delight in contemplating the subject of a bullying schoolboy crowing over his supine victim: "it is violent and it is very — it’s amazing, the weaponry," he recently said. (I am reminded again of Harold Pinter's satire on the crude military triumphalism that followed the first Gulf War: "American Football.")

As the administration is amping up its campaign of extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean and the Pacific, meanwhile, it is also doing all in its power to increase the number of judicial killings in this country as well. At the start of this term, Trump instructed the Justice Department to lobby state officials to try to maximize the number of death sentences they carry out. And just yesterday, Alabama executed another man by nitrogen gas—a hideously protracted death that caused his body to writhe and heave for more than 15 minutes. 

That's what we're getting up to still as a society, at the hands of our "professedly Christian" political leaders—to borrow a phrase from Hugh MacDiarmid, in a poem he wrote in condemnation of capital punishment. As the man executed yesterday put it before his death—this is nothing but crude "vengeance"—in a society that has supposedly rejected the principle of vengeance. "After two thousand years of mass/ We've got as far as poison gas," as Thomas Hardy once mordantly observed.

As I think about this administration's relentless butchery—about their moving a massive aircraft carrier and fleet of warships into position in the Caribbean to carry out even more of these killings—about Trump's reported plans to create a new class of Navy warships, presumably to carry out still more of this unlawful butchery ("it's amazing, the weaponry!")—and Trump dubbing himself a "king" while doing it—I think of the words of Vachel Lindsay, in his poem "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight"—

What would Lincoln say, Lindsay wondered, if he could see "the dreadnaughts scouring every main"? The phrases come easily to mind in this moment: "It breaks his heart that kings must murder still." "Too many homesteads in black terror weep." And: "who will bring white peace / That he may sleep on his hill again?"