Our Weekly Discontents: September 14, 2020

Everything is on fire.

Shane here, author of Cruel and Usual. Though my newsletter is about crime, punishment, and media, I’m thinking mostly about wildfires this week as I see endless photos of orange-grey skies enveloping the normally idyllic landscapes of the West Coast.

Photo courtesy of my dad, taken sometime last year from his living room.

I grew up in California, and the smell of fire wafting in for a few days, the smoke, the raining ash I see on Twitter and Instagram is all familiar to me, even though I know it is not the same. Living on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, seeing landscaped yards and irrigated fruit trees meet dry brush, the threat always loomed. I instinctively knew from a young age that there would come a day when we would need to pack up and evacuate.

But there were no respirators and no days where an orange haze seemed to permanently replace the sky. I went home for Christmas weeks after the Thomas Fire blew through my hometown and it was hard to ride my bike around without choking on the lingering burnt air and ash left behind. I’d never experienced anything as bad before.

Life is different now. It’s worse. The thing they’ve been warning us about is here, and incrementalism is not going to save us.

Welcome to your weekly Discontents.

Cruel and Usual

This week, I wrote about what it has been like to practice in New York criminal courts with one of defendants’ most important fundamental rights suspended. Governor Cuomo won’t give people their speedy trial rights back, and the result is thousands of cases languishing in no man’s land, with people trying to go about their lives with the blunt coercion of having an open criminal case hanging over their heads. Remember this the next time the New York Post starts fear mongering about the ballooning number of criminals in the city.

It is also, in my opinion, a great week to revisit last year’s post on the current status of our very much still open military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

Foreign Exchanges

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It was a big week for Foreign Exchanges, as historian Daniel Bessner joined FX as its first regular columnist. His debut outing was a piece about US foreign policy and its insatiable need for an existential enemy, including this particualrly relevant (given the timing) passage about America’s “War on Terror”:

9/11 was a godsend for an increasingly adrift American Empire. The emergence of a “radical Islamic threat” allowed American foreign policymakers to return to the Schmittian logic that had triumphed during the Cold War: similar to the evil Soviets, elites argued, evil “jihadists” promoted a totalizing ideology and wanted to dominate the entire globe. The United States we live in today, with its domestic surveillance, its permanent mobilization, and its endless wars, is the natural outcome of a way of thinking that divides geopolitics into good versus evil.

Last week was, of course, the 19th anniversary of 9/11. As I wrote on its 18th anniversary last year, “if you’re in the US and still feeling the trauma of September 11, 2001, imagine how the rest of the world feels about it.” In retaliation for the almost 3000 lives lost that day, over the past 19 years the United States has waged war to a greater or lesser degree in at least eight countries, excluding transnational operations in parts of Africa), killing hundreds of thousands of people. We’ve assumed the right to carry out drone strikes virtually at will. We’ve tortured prisoners. We’ve created a massive and largely unchecked surveillance state. Contrary to Paul Krugman’s memory, many of us have lashed out at The Other, initially Muslims or anyone who “seemed” Muslim but now including virtually all non-white outsiders.

Last week we also learned that our post-9/11 wars have displaced millions of people. We can quibble over whether the Cost of War Project’s numbers are precisely correct, and there are legitimate arguments both that they overestimate and that they underestimate the true extent of the problem. But what is inarguable is the overwhelming amount of suffering the United States has inflicted on the world over the past 19 years, and there’s no reason to believe that’s going to change between now and 9/11’s 20th anniversary.

Welcome to Hell World

Journalist Sarah Kelly borrowed around $39,000 from one of her lenders for college. In the past ten years she's paid off $31,000 and yet now owes $47,000. We talked about the absurd predatory lending system many of us suffer under, and just how expensive it is being poor.

“I didn’t have a concept of what it cost to live at all. How could I? I worked at Dairy Queen. Minimum wage was $5.15. I didn’t understand that you could be paid so little that you literally can’t live. I guess I should’ve known that since my parents were poor, but… With a college degree I thought you made enough to get by. When people said journalism doesn’t pay well, don’t do it, I thought they just meant you won’t get rich.”

In another post for paid subscribers (go here for 25% off) I went back to Boston for the first time in a few weeks for a rally and noted how different it felt.

“A series of other speakers came up next and the music went on and after a while something dawned on me some lightness I was feeling and it was in part the infectious energy of the crowd but it was also this: For the first time I can remember at a protest or rally this summer or any other time for that matter there were no police anywhere in sight. It felt like at least for an hour or two a weight had been lifted.”

Also in that post I checked back in briefly with Bill Moro, the man who bowled a perfect game on 9/11.

Wars of Future Past

All weapons are built by people. Sometimes, even, by people who had no intention of building weapons. In “Labor, Force Revisited,” the subscriber-exclusive for Wars of Future Past, I returned to an old Tomorrow Wars essay about the complicated relationship between coders in Silicon Valley and the Pentagon’s desire to bend that code towards war. That the same technology might power an education augmented reality experience or a soldier’s targeting cameras in a heads-up display complicates any notion of a clean distinction between tools and weapons.

In today’s public issue of Wars of Future Past, I talk about what, exactly, it means that the United States has spent the last twenty years in a quixotic search for security through violence abroad. In a narrow sense it means simply this: while fire ravaged the Pacific coast, helicopters that could have fought the fire were instead deployed abroad in the last weeks of year 18 of a seemingly endless war.

Discourse Blog

Discourse Blog had a huge week with some pretty personal writing from everyone. Rafi wrote about navigating a strange heart procedure, I wrote about my hometown burning in the west’s wildfires, and Sam wrote about the legacy of police violence in her community and what it says about the rest of the country. Along the way we still found time to tell Bob Woodward to fuck off, because he’s a miserable hack who withheld potentially life-saving reporting to sell books. Go polish your Pulitzer somewhere else, Bob. As an aside, Bob Woodward was also a union-busting scab in the 70s. On that note, we also published a roundup of our best labor journalism so far. Subscribe to us, we’re much cheaper than Woodward’s latest useless book.

A Lonely Impulse of Delight

You’ve wanted revenge. There was a time when you wanted to get even with someone who wronged you. Maybe it was a schoolyard bully, maybe it was your boss, maybe it was someone who quote-tweeted you. You wanted them to feel pain, even if you knew their pain would mean nothing. (If you haven’t wanted this, congrats on being well-adjusted, and I question how you ended up reading this.)

Revenge is the subject of my latest installment. Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin is in the running for the purest revenge narrative I, your humble correspondent, have ever seen. It inspired me to write a piece about how revenge might be the straightest possible motivational arrow for fictional characters. This one seems to have gone over well, but in case you’d rather read me writing about another Saulnier movie, here’s one I did on the sublime Green Room. Saulnier has become one of my favorite directors, and it’s likely I’ll write about the rest of his oeuvre fairly soon. What will I do for next week? I’m thinking of watching that new Charlie Kaufman film here in a sec. Or maybe I’ll write about Bruce Sterling. Or maybe I’ll write about Charlie Baxter. Sign up to find out…

Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future

Who were the first farmers? Our world is dependent on agriculture for food, but for the vast majority of the human past, nobody was tending livestock or sowing seeds; instead, people hunted, fished, foraged, and collected their food. Why in the world would anybody start doing this weird series of unfamiliar things, and how did it happen? That was my topic this week on Perspectives, part of my ongoing series on the depths of prehistory. This coming week, I’ll have an essay focused on the present day, looking at the property-owning American gentry class and how they shape and influence American politics.

Air Gordon pt. 2

Imperious white nerds have infiltrated many parts of society, including the majority of NBA media. That’s strange when you remember basketball is the only major American sport whose overarching culture is predominantly driven by Black athletes, and I wrote about my personal experience of reading different styles of white-centered basketball writing over the last decade, and how a lot of it gave off a vibe of entitlement over a game and kind of life the writers could analyze but never really understand. If you don’t care much about sports I can’t help you here, but the dynamic I wrote about bleeds into other realms, such as rap media and politics.

The Insurgents

This week we’re speaking with Twitch personality Bad Bunny about the way we all know America needs to confront the multiple intersecting crises threatening the future of the country and the entire planet: voting for the Democratic Party and that’s all. There’s also some sports talk, the longest gaming segment in the history of the show, plus Jordan and Rob try to sell intern Nicole on their masterplan to bring young people onboard the Biden campaign using Avengers memes.

BORDER/LINES

Among all the other overlapping calamities of our contemporary life, one that has somewhat faded into the background is the administration’s ratfucking of the decennial census, a count that will impact Congressional apportionment, trillions of dollars in public spending, and the way we fundamentally understand the makeup of our society for the next decade. Last week, we broke down a court ruling against one of the Trump camp’s most ambitious and blatantly illegal efforts, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count. The legal arguments were so laughable that a district court panel granted summary judgement, enjoined any federal personnel from working to carry out the presidential memo, and ruled the memo itself to be unlawful.

Still, to an extent the broader damage against the count is done, with even failed initiatives like this and the ill-fated citizenship question, as well as ostensibly unrelated policies like the public charge rule, having discouraged untold numbers of people from participating. We also took a quick look at a whistleblower complaint about politicized practices at the Department of Homeland Security (shocker), how technology has depersonalized immigration proceedings (courtesy of a great story by Gaby in The Verge), and the goings-on with the stalled Diversity Visa program