After the Murder Circus Leaves Town

Supposedly the Trump administration is again withdrawing its troops from Minneapolis. The “supposedly” part is necessary because of the “again” part. We’ll likely need a third qualifier if the New Homan Doctrine looks as much like the old Homan Doctrine looked like Greg Bovino’s roaming gnome troll job. Much like the “not involved in any human trafficking” shirt that only prompts questions already answered by the shirt, Homan added that “ICE is a legitimate federal law enforcement agency … not out scouring the streets to disappear people or deny people their civil rights or due process.” 

Maybe this was Infrastructure Week and Opposite Day.

How to approach an expanding siege in our accelerated strobe of a media environment is a tough proposition. We all get overwhelmed, and default to the habit of prioritizing news by novelty. This is why they “flood the zone with shit”: They know both the media and people in general are genuinely relieved to switch focus toward any new emerging crisis, and away from lingering scandals so crushingly self-evident that they propel us toward stark, unavoidable moral or legal conclusions. 

Keeping focus on Department of Homeland Security malfeasance requires fighting against its ubiquity as well as its normalization. The danger is that each new atrocity sets a standard that the next one must meet to trigger sufficient levels of dismay. One solution to this increasing degree of difficulty would entail the DHS killing a protester or legal observer in a major city every few weeks. Sadly, this is not a tall order, given an Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruiting pool that seems restricted to whatever Telegram channels and message boards contain the highest usages of both “fatherland” and “ephebophilia.” But asking a protester to die every month to prevent the media from slinking away to less ideologically fraught pastures is unforgivable, which is why we should make the Harper’s Letter signatories go first. 

Giving advice on harnessing this sort of attention is tough in any circumstance. It’s harder still to see what works best locally from a national perch. Usually, what people are doing locally already represents the meeting of the possible and the necessary. Locals, as always, should hound media of all sorts with free ideas and easy stories.

More importantly, the media ought to throw away the playbook, listen first and issue takes later. It is far too easy to hold up localities as symptomatic of systemic issues when it comes time to diagnose a problem, then evade the implications of that framework and devolve to an individual or municipal level when apportioning blame. Policing and racism are the problem when people march on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, but the culprit becomes runaway municipal fines when it’s time to clean up. Local responses and local groups in Minneapolis can do nothing to change the fact that the DHS is an all but explicitly white nationalist federal agency.

Americans largely understand how the Trump state functions already, learned at the feet of the only instructor Donald Trump has ever followed: television. From a narrative journalism standpoint, it is very easy to explain a police state to a people whose lives have been soaked in police procedurals. The big ideas are already there. Even if most broadcast television and newspapers don’t have the means or brief to regularly connect the dots, most people understand that the good guys can threaten the bad guy with “being put in the system” for a day on a BS charge, and they understand the leverage that makes such a threat work. The loss of revenue or opportunities from being locked up poses an existential danger to them or their families, whether violent or economic. What they haven’t been told is that rounding up protesters serves this same purpose — that, in this case, the erstwhile good guys are trying to economically extort people expressing their First Amendment rights and, if not, economically destroy them. If that doesn’t work, either prison conditions or prison violence will make the problem or the person go away. This kind of passive weapon has active voice and obvious agency if you have Mariska Hargitay or Sam Waterston wield it.

Television just isn’t built to handle hundreds of documented (and surely thousands of unrevealed) instances of DHS noncompliance with court orders. The prison door opens, and nobody comes out. There’s a reason it’s called “disappearing.” But even someone whose knowledge of the Holocaust comes exclusively from Holocaust denial knows, for example, that mass detention in the sorts of squalid and pestilential conditions found in Texas, Florida and formerly abandoned shipping-fulfillment warehouses across the country can lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Cynical or not, they also know that, as far as crimes against humanity go, it is extremely affordable. Further, no one but those paid to perform credulity is in any doubt that Trump’s ethnic cleansing czar, Stephen Miller, is aware of the bonus suffering and death created by managed indifference. 

Maybe all Miller has to do is make sure that detainees sleep in the cold and damp, have their medication taken away and access to medical care denied and eat rancid food already served in starvation-level portions. Regardless, someone goes home and disappears or someone dies and disappears because something didn’t happen. The key proposition remains the same: It’s harder to indict the trigger man for a gun that doesn’t go off and harder still for the death of someone you never saw, in a place you will never see.

They are betting they can enforce silence by jail, by caprice, by the threat of making your life a reimagining of Kafka as a ranting Yelp review. They are betting that what they cannot do with police and batons, they can do with the Justice Department and lawfare, externalizing Trump’s litigious id in the form of assistant U.S. attorneys. They will do the active version of suing you into compliance by kidnapping you and then drowning you in the legal bills necessary to fight off whatever charges they invent. They will tie you up in knots fighting them until you can’t fight for anyone else. 

They will do all this and hope that the outrage it spawns never exceeds the fear it induces, that the drawn guns, gas clouds, zip ties and vans will do the rest to keep the former from overtaking the latter. They will hope that you will be overborne by novelty and beguiled by the familiar — that one incident flows into another while the instruments of war are normalized as things you see on TV, something so normal even Tom Selleck might smile behind his mustache before ordering it. They hope every story will be so fast and so much like its predecessors that it becomes too workaday and repetitive to tell. The aggressors in this war have no faces, and they hope that if enough of them blur together, then so will the faces of the victims. Their perfect war is one without stories or people. No murderers and no murder, no victims, no defendants and no mourners. Just death and silence.