You can’t be sanitary or safe as a human being if you can’t sleep
A normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do
Hello thanks for being here maybe you missed this paid-subscriber-only post from the other day it’s a real fun one.
Everything is so bad all the time but one thing I like to think about is ol’ Donnie Deals going ah wait I don't feel so good and then he grabs onto the tablecloth at the roast beef carving station and the little dome they have for the roast beef clangs down onto the floor but it doesn’t make a sound because the dining room is wall to wall carpeted and he goes down on one knee and he looks around in panic unsure of what’s happening and everything is silent and the roast beef is getting cold and the bags of Lays potato chips and Heinz mustard packets sit untouched as the harried staff run but not that fast to find a doctor and Donnie slumps and slumps down further onto the floor and Don Jr. is there and he doesn't move for a full minute. The owner of something like Premier Volvo in Overland Park, Kansas jumps into action and tries to perform CPR but he doesn’t know what he’s doing so he’s humping away at his chest futilely. He’s a car dealer not a doctor what does he know and all the doctors that are there are plastic surgeons and they haven’t saved anyone’s life in thirty years and so he's trying to save Mr. Trump and Mr. Trump makes a stinky mud pie in his 75 inch waist pants and one of the turds falls out the leg of his pants and rolls under the table of the owner of a successful racist nail salon and Donnie can't hear the commotion in the room over his pulse it’s pounding so loud and it's so hot the room is so hot now and why is his tie so tight and he cries out with everything he has left inside of him to god or whoever is listening and he says I love the Bible very strongly and no one loves the Boblr more than me I can tell you that and he thinks I’m not ready to go and finally Don Jr. runs up to him unsure of what to do and all he can think of is to shake his father’s hand because that’s the only way they’ve ever touched and his hand is very cold.
Did you read the E. Jean Carroll story about the time the president assaulted her? It’s hard reading and deals frankly and explicitly with rape so don’t read it of course if that is something that would be bad for you to read at this particular time but my god it’s harrowing but it’s also weirdly funny? One thing I cannot recommend is that you read any of the responses to the story from anyone you don’t already know because you will be very disappointed in what you see. Not surprised in the least but disappointed. Why did she wait this long to come forward and she’s just trying to sell a book they say and my god this one I just saw says she was too ugly for a rich guy like Trump to rape.
Here’s what Carroll said about why she never said anything until now:
Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?
Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward.
She’s right about all of that because that’s going to happen and is happening right now but she’s wrong about the last part.
Here’s something I can’t stop thinking about which is that Trump is of course not the first president to be a rapist or to assault women. I imagine many of them did certainly Thomas Jefferson and probably Bill Clinton too. But it’s honestly still strange to me that Trump has been credibly accused by something like twenty women of sexual assault and he has openly boasted about doing it himself but he gets to keep being president like it’s nothing and all his supporters fall in line to deny it all on his behalf. I probably shouldn’t find that strange they did the same thing for Jefferson believe it or not and and his supporters said it was an attempt at character assassination which is the same trick we use to this day.
So no E. Jean Carroll is not a coward here is a what a coward looks like it’s a woman named Sarah Fabian who is a lawyer for the Justice Department who appeared before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit this week to argue that it’s not the government’s responsibility to provide toothbrushes or soap or sanitary sleeping conditions for the migrant children we are holding in our children prisons and letting die in our children prisons.
Fabian the coward was there to argue against a 2017 ruling by U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee that the conditions in which migrants were being held during the Obama administration because Trump didn’t invent this shit he just made it worse violated a 1997 settlement known as the Flores Settlement Agreement. Flores required immigrant children in the custody of the government be held in “safe and sanitary” conditions.
Fabian and the Trump administration’s argument here is that Flores never explicitly said anything about toothbrushes or towels or soap or sleep. Who is to say what “safe and sanitary” means in other words it could mean anything.
One thing a fascist government is very good at doing and perhaps one of the most necessary things they need to do in order to achieve their goals is to convince the people that nothing means anything anymore.
Marsha Berzon one of the three judges told Fabian about some of the conditions in which the children have been kept in the children prisons including around the clock light and sleeping on cold floors with only aluminum blankets for warmth.
“You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of ‘safe and sanitary’ conditions?” she said. “You’re not really going to say that, right?”
Fabian stammered not able or willing to answer the question honestly before Berzon interjected.
“You can’t be sanitary or safe as a human being if you can’t sleep,” she said.
Fabian said that sleep was not technically guaranteed under the ruling because the word sleep was not actually mentioned.
“One has to assume it was not enumerated by the parties because either the parties couldn’t reach agreement on how to enumerate that or it was left to the agencies to determine,” she said.
Maybe that is the case indeed or maybe they didn’t explicitly outline that children prisoners need sleep because it is “obvious enough that if you’re putting people into a crowded room to sleep on a concrete floor with an aluminum blanket on top of them, that that doesn’t comply with the agreement,” Judge William Fletcher said.
As for soap Judge Wallace Tashima who fun fact was actually held in an American internment camp during World War II on account of his Japanese heritage said that it is “within everybody’s common understanding that if you don’t have a toothbrush if you don’t have soap, if you don’t have a blanket, it’s not ‘safe and sanitary.’ Wouldn’t everybody agree to that? Do you agree to that?”
“Well… I think it’s… I think those are… there’s fair reason to find that those things may be part of ‘safe and sanitary,’” Fabian replied.
“Not ‘may be.’ Are a part,” Tashima said. “Why do you say ‘may be’? You mean there are circumstances where a person doesn’t need to have a toothbrush, toothpaste and soap? For days?”
Who is to say what safe and sanitary means I guess it could mean anything. Does this sound safe and sanitary to you because some lawyers visited an overcrowded facility in Texas recently and here is what they found according to the New York Times:
Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.
Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.
“There is a stench,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, one of the lawyers who visited the facility. “The overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since they crossed the border.”
…
Ms. Mukherjee said children were being overseen by guards for Customs and Border Protection, which declined to comment for this story. She and her colleagues observed the guards wearing full uniforms — including weapons — as well as face masks to protect themselves from the unsanitary conditions.
I don’t know what to think about the people working in places like this or people like good old Ms. Fabian arguing about soap rights but one thing I can advise is to please not fantasize or muse or speculate about doing anything rude to them were you to come across them in say a restaurant because that sort of thing is frowned upon by polite society.
Here’s a quote I was reminded of recently from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett:
“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”
Some people are just doing their job and maybe Fabian thinks that she is but sometimes there are reasonable excuses for why you can’t do your job like last year when a deadline for thousands of children to be reunited with their parents was approaching and a judge asked her if she would be available over the weekend to work on the matter and Fabian said she could not because she had to go home to dog-sit.
There has been a good amount of information going around about what people who are at risk of being arrested by ICE can do to protect themselves but I haven’t seen too much about what the rest of us can do so I asked in this thread and most of the responses seem to be to simply record the interaction if you see it and report it to local immigrants rights organizations and that doesn’t seem like enough but I don’t know what else to do because I am a coward.
Here is some information about immigrants’ rights from the ACLU and some other resources they recommend:
If you need more information, contact your local ACLU affiliate.
A Toolkit for Organizations Responding to Mass Worksite Immigration Raids
Sometimes I ask for book recommendations and people tell me lots of books to readand sometimes I’ll even read one of them.
I’ve been reading a book called Palaces by Simon Jacobs this week thank you to Matthew for the recommendation and I am not entirely sure if I can tell you you should also read it. It’s dizzying and sickening and beautifully written but it’s also somewhat slow and opaque. I’m almost finished with it and I would have expected more to have happened in terms of plot by now but maybe the idea of meandering around in a suddenly changed world that seems newly alien and menacing at every turn is enough.
I may also be chafing at some of it because it’s written in a feverish sort of stream of consciousness and I’ve been mired in editing the Hell World book and a feverish sort of stream of consciousness is my bit buddy. In this case he uses a lot of punctuation though and as I’ve been reading it I can’t help but be tripped up by the hateful commas and dashes and semicolons it’s like driving down a stretch of road littered with speed bumps and potholes to me. Also I think it’s about the end of the world (?) but the narrator spends most of his time crying about his girlfriend leaving him which I guess is another kind of more common and relatable end of the world.
In any case here are two passages I highlighted while reading before bed last night. Sometimes I do that and I wake up the next day and I’m like why the fuck did I highlight that mess like I just dragged a big yellow tarp over a hole with nothing in it and sometimes I go back and look and I think well shit that is some writing.
The narrator and his girlfriend are migrants of sorts I guess you could say walking from place to place finding sustenance and shelter where they can which in this case happens to be a series of deserted mansions outside of a large city. They find a frightened and starving young girl and one of them says of course they have to take care of her now and the other the man isn’t so sure that this girl is their problem. Eventually he ends up on his own wandering around marveling at the wreckage of the world and of his own life.
The clearing isn’t natural. Around me, across a diameter of maybe a hundred feet, the smaller trees have been imperfectly downed, and the tops of those surrounding are missing at erratic, choppy angles, as if wildly scissored away by a giant, spinning blade. As the thing resting at the center of the clearing has one long remaining strut projecting from its top like a single finger pointing at its own wake. It’s a downed helicopter.
Apart from the blade, the rest of the machine has burned and warped torturously together into a single, twisted mass of charred matter. The shape of it still reads “helicopter,” its general structure intact, but the body has burst, and the entrances on its sides, the windows at either end are stuffed with its half-ejected human contents, as though the helicopter had been packed as full as possible and then, interrupted mid-flight, just barely touched down when it exploded from the inside, propelling its passengers out through any available space. Through the rear window, facing me, someone’s back half has been forced mostly out, while someone else’s arm reaches pitifully into the air, pinned by the bulge of the other body into the corner of the window, like a strand of clay extruded through a press. From the cockpit window, half of a masked body outfitted in uniform black lies on the nose among the glass of the shattered windshield. Between the front and tail ends, the insides of the helicopter’s cabin spill en masse onto the forest floor like garbage, at least a dozen bodies, a wreck of tangled limbs in a pile as if awaiting mass burial, a mix of uniforms and silk suits and dresses, summer clothes burned away. Shreds of fabric waft in the breeze in clouded colors. Scattered further into the clearing, around the mangled helicopter and its dead passengers, overturned suitcases lie among the wreck of the forest, burst open, like a luxury cruise washed deep inland. The fallen branches, splintered trees are arrayed around them in vibrant destruction, revealing their orange and yellow insides, the charred bark like reptile skin. The ground goes alternately gray, black, brown, and green. The smell—of smoke, for one, and of bodies rotting in the sun for days—blankets everything without warning.
I vomit just shy of my shoes—I make a point to avoid them, I careen away at an awkward angle. My body seems to make a concerted effort to bring up the last thing I consumed, and so it’s the acidic sweetness of the pasta sauce that fills my mouth, somehow undigested pasta that I spit onto the forest floor, held onto for days out of spite, refusing breakdown into anything useful. I stay on my knees for a long while, because the smell is actually better down there, closer to the ground, and because, I realize, I can hear birds again.
I’m not sure if that’s a metaphor for anything.
Speaking of the end of the world this is a song I listen to sometimes and I just thought of it because the guy who wrote it has a song on a commercial they play all the time and people seem to like that song. I’m not sure what it’s called but this one is called “Kids on the Run” and it could be the song they play on the closing credits to the movie version of Palaces if such a thing were ever to be made.
No we have never grown a day from the poison we shared
And we're walking our crooked backs home
But will we ever confess what we've done?
Guess we're still kids on the run.
And no we will never be a part of the pictures once taken
When we're feeding fire with the flames til no memories gone
And the cold sky will write us a song
But will we ever confess what we've done?
Guess we're still kids on the run
And the reflections in their eyes
Sure could paint us as killers
Oh, I'll be there.
The Democrats are not going to save us or save anyone whether it comes to the lives of migrants coming to America to escape poverty and violence or preventing America from subjecting other people to our own brand of violence which we call freedom. Here’s a good piece on the run up to the war we’re having (?) with Iran presently.
On a day when U.S. war tensions with Iran have reached the point of actually launching military strikes, the editorial board of the New York Times, which can serve as well as anything in the media world as a proxy for “the voice of the establishment,” is focused most closely on the bureaucratic process by which war is authorized. They write that “cooler heads must prevail—and Congress must be consulted—as American and Iranian forces inch closer to open conflict in and around the Strait of Hormuz.”
…
This insane, unnecessary sham war of a discredited ideology must be properly authorized, you see. We must have our paperwork in order before we start raining missiles down on Iranians who have already been economically destroyed by our sanctions. If the New York Times editorial board were babysitting your kids, they would make sure that they signed each and every release form before they let them go play in traffic.
This is how it happens. This is how the press becomes complicit in war. The mainstream press does not call for the war outright; they simply allow themselves to be dragged along into war by more cutthroat actors, insisting the entire time that the paperwork must be in order. This happened in Vietnam, and it happened in the buildup to the disastrous Iraq war, and you can see it happening again now. It is as if we are cursed to get into the same car wreck once per decade, watching it all play out in front of our eyes in dreadful slow motion, paralyzed and unable to stop it.
Here’s Chuck Schumer offering a solution to another pressing issue which is that migrants should simply file their own specific paperwork in a more orderly fashion:
Last year I interviewed a young man who had fled El Salvador because gangs were threatening his father. He explained the fear they felt and the arduous journey he took to make it here.
“I didn’t want to come over here. To go to another country. You know you have to walk, cross the river, sleep in the woods in the night. You don’t even know what’s going to happen. But you got two choices, go over there, or stay here and let’s see what happens to you. You die,” he said.
“America is really famous because everybody thinks America is a country that’s going to take care of you, and make you secure,” he said and he’s right America is famous for that but who’s to say if it’s true or not. Who is to say what anything means.
Here’s another passage from the Simon Jacobs book I have been thinking about. I don’t know what it means.
I remember a beach trip my parents and I took up to Connecticut to visit my grandparents, at least a decade ago. Over the course of the morning we dug an enormous hole in the sand, my dad and I, deep enough that I could stand inside of it, up to my eleven- or twelve-year-old shoulders. Afterward, my dad went out into the water and dragged a neon-orange bucket back and forth until he scooped up a wayward jellyfish. He wandered back to the beach, the bucket overflowing, I clambered out, and we dumped the jellyfish into the hole. I shoveled sand on top of it while he went back to the shore to find another. The process repeated: we kept layering them like this until the hole was entirely filled in. The thrill of it lay in the pacification of the jellyfish at my hands, that isolated in this mass grave the jellies were no longer dangerous to me, the natural aquatic environment where they acted as predators to carefree swimmers switched out for another that they weren’t suited for (where they couldn’t even move!), and I was enamored of my role in this, in their relocation and burial, in making these fearsome, nebulous creatures harmless. (The thought didn’t occur to me at the time—or to my dad, apparently—that someone else might later dig in this same spot and be stung by the buried jellyfish, that their poison lingered, their tentacles wound through the sand.)