On unintended consequences.

After our current president ordered the assassination of an Iranian general by drone, my class in jail discussed excerpts from Gregoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone.

Chamayou argues that drone warfare is qualitatively distinct from other forms of state violence. The psychological rift stems from asymmetry – one side risks money, the other risks life.

The use of drones keeps U.S. soldiers safer. But in Chamayou’s opinion (translated by Janet Lloyd, and slightly modified by me for students to read aloud),

If the U.S. military withdraws from the battlefield, enemy violence will turn against targets that are easier to reach. Even if soldiers are safe, civilians are not.

Drone warfare compels enemy combatants to engage in terrorism. They cannot shoot back at the soldier who is shooting them – that soldier might be sitting in a nondescript office building thousands of miles away, unleashing lethal force as though it were a video game.

I don’t mean to trivialize the suffering of U.S. soldiers who are involved in drone warfare. Pilots have an extremely high suicide rate – they are expected to placidly shift from the battlefield to the civilian world each evening, and this is deeply disturbing to most people.

But enemy soldiers cannot fight back. They could shoot down the drone, but the U.S. military would launch a new one. There’s no comparison between that and the drone shooting a missile at your family’s home.

An enemy combatant can only put U.S. lives at risk by attacking the general public.

Our policies don’t always have the outcomes we want.

Not unexpectedly, somebody in class mentioned the War on Drugs. Banning marijuana caused a lot of problems, he said.

Somebody else disagreed – he’s been in and out of prison on drug charges for seventeen years, but has high hopes that this next stint of rehab is going to take. “I still think marijuana’s a gateway drug. That’s what I started with.”

“It’s not pot, it’s the lying about pot. They say over and over that marijuana’s as bad as heroin. What do they think will happen once kids realize marijuana’s safe?”

“If people could’ve bought pot, maybe nobody would’ve invented spice. Like that K2 stuff was sold as incense or whatever, but everybody knew it was pot replacer.”

“You take this,” a guy said, holding up a sheet of paper, “spray it with spice, send it into prison. Two thousand dollars, easy. You get somebody to OD, then everybody’s gonna want some. People like that feeling, right at the brink between life and death.”

Somebody sighed. “I know. I’ve done a lot of drugs, and with most drugs, I could take it or leave it. But that spice, man. No offense to anyone, but I’ve never sucked cock for drugs. For spice, though, I’d think about it.”

“You just get so sick.”

“So sick! I’ve kicked heroin, and that feeling sick was bad. But not like this. There were weeks when I had to set an alarm, get up every two hours to take another hit. Otherwise I’d wake up puking and shitting myself. And I’d be in there, you know, sitting on the toilet with a bag, still taking my hit.”

“I got that too. I was waking up every ninety minutes.”

“Would you have started smoking spice if marijuana was legal?” I asked.

“I mean, yeah, now you’re gonna have people who would. Because everybody knows about it. Like you had that summer two years ago, people all along the street, up and down Kirkwood, smoking it right out in the open. But, like, before it all started? Nobody would’ve sat down and tried to invent spice if they could’ve sold pot.”

“I remember reading a review of K2 spice on Amazon,” I said, “must’ve been in 2008, before it was banned, all full of puns and innuendo. The reviewer was talking about how it made him feel so ‘relaxed,’ in quotes.”

“ ‘Relaxed,’ shit, I get that. I never touched the stuff before this last time I came to jail. But I’ve smoked hella marijuana. So somebody handed it to me and I took this giant hit, the way I would, and I shook my head and said, ‘Guys, that didn’t do shiii …’ and, BAM, I fell face first into the table.”

“You were so out of it!”

“It was like, WHOA, blast off. I was lying there, like flopping all over. That night I pissed myself.”

“That sounds … “ I said, “… bad. A whole lot worse than smoking pot.”

“But you can get it!”

And there lies the rub. With so many technologies, we’re playing whack-a-mole. We solve one problem and create another. But sometimes what comes up next isn’t another goofy-eyed stuffed animal mole – the arcade lights flash and out pops a hungry crocodile.

Since people couldn’t buy pot, they started smoking a “not-for-human consumption” (wink wink) incense product that you could order online. Since enemy combatants can’t shoot back at soldiers, they plant more bombs in subways.

As one American soldier explains, “We must understand that attempts to isolate our force against all potential enemy threats shifts the ‘burden of risk’ from a casualty-averse military force onto the populace. We have lifted the burden from our own shoulders and placed it squarely upon civilians who do not have the material resources to bear it.”

On white supremacist vegetables and watchful eyes.

Recently, my hometown of Bloomington’s farmers market has been covered Fox News and The New York Times. Not because the vegetables sold here are particularly deserving of national attention. The market was deemed newsworthy because one of the farm stands is run by outspoken white supremacists.

Although Bloomington is a fairly liberal college town, this region has a sordid history of hate. The national Klan headquarters is less than 30 minutes away – when I was in college, the campus diversity coordinators warned students not to stop in that town, not even to buy gas. Even right here in Bloomington, there was a fracas at the local high school recently because some students decided to honor a friend who’d died by using cremation ashes to print bumper stickers – but they printed stickers of the Confederate flag.

Teaching poetry in the local jail has made me much better at recognizing supremacist imagery. Most people know that the Confederate flag is bad news, but I’ve gotten to see a wider range of hateful symbols tattooed onto people’s flesh.

COs bring twelve people to each week’s class – often two to four will be Black (in a town where the total population is approximately 4% Black or African-American), and the rest are usually white guys. It’s pretty common for one or two of the white guys to have visible supremacist tattoos. Which doesn’t even include questionable stuff like the dude who got an poke and stick of the words “White Trash” in elaborate two-in-tall cursive letters during his time there. Tattooing runs afoul of the jail’s “no self mutilation” policy, but most COs studiously overlook the guys’ rashy red skin and burgeoning designs.

When I’m there, we often read poetry that directly addresses racial injustice. I’ve brought stuff by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Adrian Matejka, and Tracy Smith. Sometimes these lead to good discussions. Sometimes our class gets totally derailed.

In one of the poems titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Hayes pulls off a stunning trick. The same line is included twice, but the word “haunted” changes from a verb into an adjective after the language slides into a less formal diction. It’s a beautiful moment. The first time I brought this poem, we talked about the clinginess of the past, the way not only our own histories but also the histories of our forebears can stalk us through time.

The next time I brought this poem, several guys reacted by saying that Black people don’t talk right. Then they went off about sagging pants. All this from southern-accented white guys whose missing-toothed, meth-mouthed mumbles and guffaws I could barely comprehend.

We had to quickly move on.

Or there was the time when we read Betts’ “Elegy with a City in It,” a fantastic poem that uses a spare, stark set of words and sounds to simultaneously evoke both the deprivations of the inner city and the epic grandeur of The Iliad, which uses a similarly constrained lexicon.

Many gone to the grave: men awed

by blood, lost in the black

of all that is awful:

think crack and aluminum. Odd

what time steals,

or steals time: black robes, awful

nights when men offed in the streets awed

us.

If you read the poem aloud, you’re chanting the same phonemes over and over, but their meanings twist and turn as they spill from your tongue. That’s what I wanted to discuss.

Instead, a few guys latched onto lines like

Black,

Mario, Charles, they all blackened

the inside of a coffin …

and this offended them because “white people have it bad, too!” As though Betts could not describe Black pain without trivializing their own. Soon somebody was saying “All lives matter” and that he’d voted for our current president. This guy was in jail because he’d been caught selling heroin to support his own habit. The president he’d voted for had recently recommended executing drug dealers.

Somebody else shook his head and muttered, “y’all are fucking [stupid].”

We moved on.

In my classes, I work with a wide range of ages – sometimes guys as young as seventeen, sometimes men in their sixties. My spouse, as a high school teacher, works with younger people – anywhere from fourteen to eighteen years old. But ideology can set in early. My spouse has had students whose families were prominent in the Klan.

At the beginning of the year, she asks each student to fill in the paper silhouette of a head with words and pictures of what inspires them to succeed. She then posts these along the ceiling of her classroom. Several times, she’s had to ask kids to erase supremacist imagery.

So it isn’t terribly surprising that some farmers at our local market have hateful beliefs. Right-wing supremacist movements are major terrorist organizations in this country, and they do a lot of recruiting. As our nation has become slightly less horrible, though, many of these people learned to be circumspect. They maintain a divide between their private and public language.

People who rely upon public, liberal venues like our farmers market can’t be too outspoken with their hate.

Indeed, the white supremacist farmers who were recently outed tried to be circumspect. But they must have felt lonely, and they grew too careless. Under a pseudonym, they posted on the Identity Evropa message board. This is a website devoted to the ideologies that have inspired the vast majority of terrorism in the United States. Theoretically, this is a venue where people get to cultivate their hatred anonymously. But one of their compatriots was caught painting swastikas on a synagogue (see image below) and blew their cover. Sort of. The vandal was interrogated by the FBI, and his remark unveiling the farmers’ pseudonym was buried deep in a 200-page sentencing document.

Through assiduous work, a team of activists was able to prove that these farmers were white supremacists.

The activists who had worked so hard to gather evidence were obviously against hate. They wanted to take action. But the plan they favored wasn’t very flashy. They would organize a boycott of that farm stand. They also proposed that the city use the sellers’ farmers market fees to fund grants for people of color, with the understanding that our nation’s long history of racism has inequitably skewed the demographics of agricultural land holdings.

To stay at the farmers market, the supremacists would have had to support a cause they loathed … and they were making less and less money here. I was told that, during the boycott, the farmers had begun padding their bins, bringing fewer vegetables each week so that they could still appear to be selling out their stock.

Unfortunately, the tropes of social media have changed public discourse in our country. I assume it’s relatively uncontroversial to claim that social media prizes style over substance. Quiet, careful plans are at a disadvantage in the attention economy.

As word spread that these farmers were white supremacists, patrons demanded that they be banned from our market. People of color now felt unsafe in that space, for obvious reasons. There’s a difference between the perceived threat level felt by a pale-skinned activist and by somebody who is recognizably a member of a racial minority.

The mayor, whose spouse is a constitutional law professor, rightly argued that the farmers would be able to sue the city on a First Amendment case.

Still, people felt that we had to do something more visible. Passively allowing outspoken white supremacists to hawk their tomatoes at our market would seem to be tacitly endorsing their political stance.

Everybody has a right to believe whatever garbage they want. Do you sincerely believe that people of northern European descent have a genetic inclination toward greater intelligence? You’re wrong, and you’re a jerk, but you’re allowed to believe that.

The problem is that white supremacist organizations like Identity Evropa use terrorism to back their asinine beliefs. Implicit threats of violence, delivered by people known to stockpile military-grade weaponry, are different from “mere” hate.

If these farmers couldn’t be banned, then we’d hold signs in front of their booth. Eventually, a protester was arrested – the police had asked her to stand in a designated “announcements” area instead of in the middle of the market – and, as always happens following an arrest, her home address was published online.

She was soon inundated with death threats.

As coverage of the dispute increased, right-wing militia types were also drawn to our town. Three percenters, unaffiliated gun nuts, other supremacists – they began to support that farm, undermining the boycott. And these radical Protestant faux-constitutional terrorists made sufficiently credible threats of mass violence that our mayor had to shut down the entire market for two weeks at the height of the growing season. Other farmers were suffering.

Calm, careful behavior from the original activists – assiduously combing through those lengthy, dull documents, not to mention their efforts to infiltrate local supremacists’ in-person social circles – had undoubtably helped. Hateful ideologies were exposed, and efforts were made to impose consequences.

But then our visible protests made matters worse. We’ve helped the proponents of hate to make more money.

And, now that we’ve drawn attention to them, we’ve inadvertently connected these white supremacists with their allies. They will no longer need to post on public forums, which was the only reason that activists were able to prove that they supported these ideologies in the first place. Now these supremacist farmers are invited speakers at right-wing events.

As this whole struggle was unfolding, my spouse and I participated in a poetry reading. We shared poems written by people in our local jail. We were joined by one of the authors, a man who had just been released after five months inside. He described what it was like to write while he was there – breathing fresh air in the outdoor rec courtyard only nine times in five months, having access to a pencil sharpener only once each week, and feeling forced to confess to a crime that he swears he hadn’t committed because they promised to release him for time served.

Our audience clapped for the poems and stared aghast during our banter, which is probably as it should be.

We closed our set with a piece from M.G. This poem was written in February, before the public turmoil regarding our farmers market began. At a moment when so many of us were warily watching that space, it seemed important to remind people that there have always been watchful eyes gazing at the market.

The farmers market is just down the street from our five-story county jail.

MARKET

– M.G.

As I look out this window of bars

There’s a farmer’s market.

People coming and going.

I wonder if I have any friends over there.

The sun is warm and bright.

One day soon I will be at

That farmer’s market.

I hope to see my friends again.

On vengeance and Ahmed Saadawi’s ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad.’

We are composite creatures, the edifice of our minds perched atop accumulated strata of a lifetime of memories. Most people, I imagine, have done wrong; remembrance of our lapses is part of who we are. And most of us have been hurt; those grievances also shape our identities.

We struggle to be good, despite having been born into an amoral universe and then subjected to innumerable slights or traumas as we aged.

Goodness is a nebulous concept, however. There’s no external metric that indicates what we should do. For instance: if we are subject to an injustice, is it better to forgive or to punish the transgressor?

There are compelling arguments for both sides, and for each position you could base your reasoning on philosophy, psychology, physiology, evolutionary biology …

Intellect and reasoning can’t identify what we should do.

A wide variety of cooperative species will swiftly and severely punish transgressions in order to maintain social order. Misbehavior among naked mole rats is generally resolved through bullying and violence, which ensures the colony does not lapse into decadence. (As with humans, shared adversity like hunger generally compels threat-free cooperation.)

Archaeologists suggest that the belief in vengeful gods was coupled to the development of complex human societies. The Code of Hammurabi prescribed immediate, brutal retribution for almost any misdeed.

The compulsion to punish people who have hurt us arises from deep within our brains.

But punishment invites further punishment. Every act of revenge can lead to yet another act of revenge – the Hatfield and McCoy families carried on their feud for nearly thirty years.

Punishment is fueled by anger, and anger poisons our bodies. On a purely physiological level, forgiving others allows us to heal. The psychological benefits seem to be even more pronounced.

But forgiveness is hard. Sometimes people do terrible things. After her mother was killed, my spouse had to spend her entire afternoon prep period on the phone with a family member and the prosecutor, convincing them not to seek the death penalty.

The attack had been recorded by security cameras. Apparently it was horrifying to watch. The assailant’s defense lawyer stated publicly that it was “the most provable murder case I have ever seen.”

And incidents in which dark-skinned men hurt white women are precisely those for which prosecutors typically seek the death penalty; after my mother-in-law’s death, the only national news sites that wrote about the case were run by far-right white supremacists trying to incite more hatred and violence toward innocent black people. (I’m including no links to these, obviously.)

At the time, I was working on a series of poems about teaching in jail.

Correction (pt. ii)

My wife’s mother was murdered Saturday –

outside at four a.m., scattering birdseed,

smoking a cigarette, shucking schizophrenic

nothings into the unlistening air.

Then a passing man tossed off a punch,

knocking her to the ground.

He stomped upon her skull

till there was no more her

within that battered brain.

Doctors intubated the corpse &

kept it oxygenated by machine,

monitoring each blip of needless heart

for days

until my wife convinced

a charitable neurologist

to let the mindless body rest.

That same afternoon

I taught another class in jail

for men who hurt someone else’s mother,

daughter, or son.

The man who murdered,

privacy-less New York inmate #14A4438

with black hair & brown eyes,

had been to prison twice,

in 2002 & 2014,

caught each time

with paltry grams of crack cocaine.

Our man received a massive dose

of state-sponsored therapy:

nine years of penitence.

Nearly a decade of correction.

Does Victor Frankenstein share the blame

for the murders of his creation,

the man he quicked but did not love?

Or can we walk into a maternity ward

and point:

that one, nursing now, will be a beast.

Are monsters born or made?

My mother-in-law is dead, & our man is inside again,

apprehended after “spontaneous utterances,”

covered in blood, photographed with

a bandage between his eyes.

And we, in our mercy,

will choose whether

our creation

deserves

to die.

Victor Frankenstein becoming disgusted at his creation. Fronts-piece to the 1831 edition.

I have always stood firmly on the side of Frankenstein’s creation. Yes, he began to kill, but misanthropy was thrust upon him. The creature was ethical and kind at first, but the rest of the world ruthlessly mistreated him. Victor Frankenstein abandoned him in the laboratory; he befriended a blind man, but then the man’s children chased him away.

Victor Frankenstein’s fiancée did not deserve to be strangled – except insofar as we share blame for the crimes of those we love – but I understand the wellspring of the creature’s rage.

In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, a junk dealer’s attempt to honor the anonymous victims of Iraq’s many bombings gives rise to a spirit of vengeance. The junk dealer acts upon a grisly idea – most victims could not receive proper funerals because their bodies were scattered or incinerated by the blasts. But what if many stray pieces were collected? An charred arm from Tuesday’s explosion; a ribcage and lower jawbone from Wednesday’s; two different victims’ legs from Thursday’s. The city is so wracked by violence that there are plenty of body parts to choose from. And then the junk dealer could take his creation to the police and say, Look! Here is a body, victim of the attacks. Here is a dead man we can honor properly.

In truth, the junk dealer’s plan was never terribly well thought out. Once he completes the corpse, he realizes that using his creation as a locus for lamentation would be no better than all the empty coffins.

And then the corpse springs to life, seeking vengeance on any and all who wronged its component parts. In the creature’s words (as translated by Jonathan Wright):

“My list of people to seek revenge on grew longer as my old body parts fell off and my assistants added parts from my new victims, until one night I realized that under these circumstances I would face an open-ended list of targets that would never end.

“Time was my enemy, because there was never enough of it to accomplish my mission, and I started hoping that the killing in the streets would stop, cutting off my supply of victims and allowing me to melt away.

“But the killing had only begun. At least that’s how it seemed from the balconies in the building I was living in, as dead bodies littered the streets like rubbish.”

Soon, the creature realizes that the people he attacks are no different from the dead victims that he is composed of. He can chase after the terrorist organizations that orchestrate suicide bombings, but the people in those organizations are also seeking revenge for their dead allies. The chain of causality is so tangled that no one is clearly responsible.

Car bombing in Baghdad. Image from Wikimedia.

United States forces have been inadvertently killing innocent civilians ever since invading Iraq … an attack that was launched in retribution for the actions of a small group of Afghani terrorists.

Some people thought that this sounded reasonable at the time.

To seek vengeance, we need someone to blame. But who should I blame for my mother-in-law’s death? The man who assaulted her? That’s certainly the conclusion that the white supremacist news sites want me to reach. But I sincerely doubt that this poor man would have hurt her if a prosecutor hadn’t ripped him from his friends and family, condemning him to ten years within the nightmarish violence of America’s prisons, all for participating in a small-scale version of the exact same economic transaction that allowed Merck to become a $160-billion-dollar valued company.

Do I blame the racist white legislators who imposed such draconian punishments on the possession of the pure amine form of cocaine, all while celebrating their pale-skinned buddies who snerked up the hydrochloride salt form?

Do I blame myself? As a citizen of this country – a wealthy citizen, no less, showered with un-earned privilege – I am complicit in the misfortunes that my nation imposes on others. Even when I loathe the way this nation acts, by benefiting from its sins, I too share responsibility.

I have inherited privilege … which means that I also deserve to inherit blame, even for horrors perpetrated well before I was born.

Forgiveness is hard, but revenge would send us chasing an endless cycle of complicity. The creature in Frankenstein in Baghdad is flummoxed:

In his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill, and as fast as the list shrank it was replenished with new names, making avenging these lives an endless task. Or maybe he would wake up one day to discover that there was no one left to kill, because the criminals and the victims were entangled in a way that was more complicated than ever before.

“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.” This sentence drilled its way into his head like a bullet out of the blue. He stood in the middle of the street and looked up at the sky, waiting for the final moment when he would disintegrate into his original components. This was the realization that would undermine his mission – because every criminal he had killed was also a victim. The victim proportion in some of them might even be higher than the criminal proportion, so he might inadvertently be made up of the most innocent parts of the criminals’ bodies.

“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.”

Header image: an illustration of Frankenstein at work in his laboratory.

On violence and gratitude.

Although I consider myself a benevolent tyrant, some of my cells have turned against me. Mutinous, they were swayed by the propaganda of a virus and started churning out capsids rather than helping me type this essay. Which leaves me sitting at a YMCA snack room table snerking, goo leaking down my throat and out my nose.

Unconsciously, I take violent reprisal against the traitors. I send my enforcers to put down the revolt – they cannibalize the still-living rebels, first gnawing the skin, then devouring the organs that come spilling out. Then the defector dies.

800px-CD8+_T_cell_destruction_of_infected_cells — CD8+ T cell destruction of infected cells by Dananguyen on Wikimedia.

My cells are also expected to commit suicide whenever they cease to be useful for my grand designs. Any time a revolutionary loses the resolve to commit suicide, my enforcers put it down. Unless my internal surveillance state fails to notice in time – the other name for a cell that doesn’t want to commit suicide is “cancer,” and even the most robust immune system might be stymied by cancer when the traitor’s family grows too large.

Worse is when the rebels “metastasize,” like contemporary terrorists. This word signifies that the family has sent sleeper agents to infiltrate the world at large, attempting to develop new pockets of resistance in other areas. Even if my enforcers crush one cluster of rebellion, others could flourish unchecked.

800px-How_metastasis_occurs_illustration — How metastasis occurs. Image by the National Cancer Institute on Wikimedia.

I know something that perhaps they don’t – if their rebellion succeeds, they will die. A flourishing cancer sequesters so many resources that the rest of my body would soon prove too weak to seek food and water, causing every cell inside of me to die.

But perhaps they’ve learned my kingdom’s vile secret – rebel or not, they will die. As with any hereditary monarchy, a select few of my cells are privileged above all others. And it’s not the cells in my brain that rule.

Every “somatic cell” is doomed. These cells compose my brain and body. Each has slight variations from “my” genome – every round of cell division introduces random mutations, making every cell’s DNA slightly different from its neighbors’.

The basic idea behind Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is that each of these cells “wants” for its genome to pass down through the ages. Dawkins argued that familial altruism is rational because any sacrifice bolsters the chances for a very similar genome to propagate. Similarly, each somatic cell is expected to sacrifice itself to boost the odds for a very similar genome carried by the gametes.

Only gametes – the heralded population of germ cells in our genitalia – can possibly see their lineage continue. All others are like the commoners who (perhaps foolishly) chant their king or kingdom’s name as they rush into battle to die. I expect them to show absolute fealty to me, their tyrant. Apoptosis – uncomplaining suicide – was required of many before I was even born, like when cells forming the webbing between my fingers slit their own bellies in dramatic synchronized hara-kiri.

28407608404_84b3c64433_h — Human gametes by Karl-Ludwig Poggemann on Flickr.

Any evolutionary biologist could explain that each such act of sacrifice was in a cell’s mathematical best interest. But if I were a conscious somatic cell, would I submit so easily? Or do I owe some sliver of respect to the traitors inside me?

The world is a violent place. I’m an extremely liberal vegan environmentalist – yet it takes a lot of violence to keep me going.

From Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s The Human Advantage:

Animals that we are, we must face, every single day of our lives, the consequences of our most basic predicament: we don’t do photosynthesis. For lack of the necessary genes, we don’t just absorb carbon from the air around us and fix it as new bodily matter with a little help from sunlight. To survive, we animals have to eat other living organisms, whether animal, vegetable, or fungus, and transform their matter into ours.

And yet the violence doesn’t begin with animals. Photosynthesis seems benign by comparison – all you’d need is light from the sun! – unless you watch a time-lapsed video of plant growth in any forest or jungle.

The sun casts off electromagnetic radiation without a care in the world, but the amount of useful light reaching any particular spot on earth is limited. And plants will fight for it. They race upwards, a sprint that we sometimes fail to notice only because they’ve adapted a timescale of days, years, and centuries rather than our seconds, hours, and years. They reach over competitors’ heads, attempting to grab any extra smidgen of light … and starving those below. Many vines physically strangle their foes. Several trees excrete poison from their roots. Why win fair if you don’t have to? A banquet of warm sunlight awaits the tallest plant left standing.

And so why, in such a violent world, would it be worthwhile to be vegan? After all, nothing wants to be eaten. Sure, a plant wants for animals to eat its fruit – fruits and animals co-evolved in a system of gift exchange. The plant freely offers fruit, with no way of guaranteeing recompense, in hope that the animal might plant its seeds in a useful location.

But actual pieces of fruit – the individual cells composing an apple – probably don’t want to be eaten, no more than cancers or my own virus-infected cells want to be put down for the greater good.

A kale plant doesn’t want for me to tear off its leaves and dice them for my morning ramen.

But by acknowledging how much sacrifice it takes to allow for us to be typing or reading or otherwise reaping the pleasures of existence, I think it’s easier to maintain awe. A sense of gratitude toward all that we’ve been given. Most humans appreciate things more when we think they cost more.

We should appreciate the chance to be alive. It costs an absurd amount for us to be here.

But, in the modern world, it’s possible to have a wonderful, rampantly hedonistic life as a vegan. Why make our existence cost more when we don’t have to? A bottle of wine tastes better when we’re told that it’s $45-dollar and not $5-dollar wine, but it won’t taste any better if you tell somebody “It’s $45-dollar wine, but you’ll have to pay $90 for it.”

Personally, I’d think it tasted worse, each sip with the savor of squander.

On asymmetry and ‘The Hatred of Poetry.’

In The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner posits that many people dislike poems for falling short of an ideal. We hold a vision of the glory that poetry could be: we want crackling verses that would, per Rilke, inspire us to change our lives; we want phrases that speak to all without resorting to postcard platitudes; we want poems to be universal, yet firmly rooted in a particular writer’s lived experience.

But the particular is never universal. The catacombs of memory ensure that words convey slightly different meanings to us all; the best poems revel in this private language. And we, the readers, are stubborn, inertial creatures. It is unlikely that any page’s worth of written words will change us, no matter how magnificent.

And so actual poems fail. The ones we read seem little different from any other set of words. As do those we write – if you are one of the few people who reached adulthood yet still writes poems. All children do, just as all children draw, but the world trains us to slough off artistic expression as we age. What’s worse, many of us are taught in elementary school that poetry – the ideal again – is the deepest possible expression of self. Language is the medium of thought, and poetry is the art of language. Lerner suggests that, in giving up on poems, there comes a nagging sensation that we are giving up on ourselves.

Why wouldn’t we hate an art that hurts us this way?

In Lerner’s words,

Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did. … one thing all these demands share is that they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems. Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry, and the jeremiads in that regard are defenses, too.

I can understand why a published poet like Lerner would put forward these arguments. But I don’t agree, in large part because most people I’ve talked to sincerely enjoy poetry – ever since graduating from high school, that is, when poems were hated for being foisted upon us. Among adults, I’ve found a dislike of poetry to be exceedingly rare.

Not many people gravitate specifically toward lyric poetry, though, especially not the sort that is featured alongside Lerner’s bio for the Poetry Foundation website. But I believe the unpopularity of this type of poetry, with lines like “Emulsions with / Then circled the lake like / This is it.” (from Lerner’s “[By any measure]”) or “jumpsuits, they have changed / painting, I / behind the concertina wire / can’t look at it anymore …” (from Lerner’s “[jumpsuits]”), is not caused primarily by dissonance between actual poems and a reader’s pedestaled ideal. I’d add an asymmetry of trust to the litany of offenses of which poetry stands accused in Lerner’s monograph.

I do not mean to impugn asymmetry in general. For instance, consider this beautiful passage from Jana Prikryl’s “Thirty Thousand Islands”:

Because the moon’s mass is a considerable fraction

of the earth’s, it exerts a gravitational force

on oceans as it orbits overhead, producing the

tides, or put another way, you can stand

on the shore twice daily and witness the very

water flinging itself upwards.

This verse is secretly a paean to asymmetry. Water has an electric dipole moment – it is asymmetric – with oppositely-charged ends attracting each other like so many microscopic magnets. This allows water to move and flow cohesively, one molecule tugging the next along their shared path. But the physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Warren Anderson, who made great advances in our understanding of asymmetry, writes that, as a graduate student, “this seemed very strange to me, because I was just being taught that nothing has an electric dipole moment.”

Anderson elaborates:

“The professor was really proving that no nucleus has a dipole moment, because he was teaching nuclear physics, but as his arguments were based on the symmetry of space and time they should have been correct in general.

“I soon learned that, in fact, they were correct (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say not incorrect) because he had been careful to say that no stationary state of a system (that is, one which does not change in time) has an electric dipole moment.

…

“In quantum mechanics there is always a way, unless symmetry forbids, to get from one state to another. Thus, if we start from any one unsymmetrical state, the system will make transitions to others, so only by adding up all the possible unsymmetrical states in a symmetrical way can we get a stationary state.”

According to the laws of physics, the world should be symmetric. And in the long run – on time scales that leave us dead and the Earth barren and the sun cold, impossibly far from any other source of light – the world is. At any moment, however, objects may exhibit a temporary asymmetry (with this temporary state sustained perhaps for billions of years). This asymmetry gives us our world. Water that flows. Water capable of “flinging itself upward” with the tides.

The very stars in the sky depend upon asymmetry. According to the laws of physics, the Big Bang should’ve birthed equal amounts matter and antimatter, rapidly coalescing into nothing. And yet, in our universe, matter predominates. We live.

But asymmetry in human relations can be harder to bear than the (world-enabling) asymmetries of nature. At first blush, we thought the internet would be a great equalizer, giving a voice to all. Instead, the increasing quantity of stuff out there has served to concentrate attention further on a dwindling number of foci. So many in the modern world flail, shouting into the void, aspiring to fame. The Orlando shooter checked Facebook during his crime, verifying that his humanity (at its worst) had finally been recognized. For a moment – gun in his hand, eyes on his phone – he was as important as Beyonce.

This asymmetry is stark in poetry. The greatest poets use language in idiosyncratic ways: they bend the rules of grammar, they use words as though their definitions were somewhat skew to those organized dissections found in dictionaries. And readers of these poems work to understand why. Readers at times treat great poems as puzzles: told that this combination of words is beautiful, a reader might dust and scrape with the care of an archaeologist, searching for the wellspring of that beauty.

Consider the lines I quoted from Lerner’s own work above, with constructions like “emulsions with then circled the lake” and “they have changed painting, I behind the concertina wire can’t look at it anymore.” This is not the grammar of high school English teachers.

Lerner, of course, has reasons for employing these constructions. Just as Jack Gilbert had reasons for his choice of the adverb “commonly” in the line, “commonly I prepare for death” (from “In Between Poems”). Just as William Shakespeare had reasons for inventing language when no existing words fit his needs.

But if average people – the uncredentialed readers of poetry – were to use words in these ways, their choices would be considered mistakes. They are taught to trust established poets, to presume positive intent and tease out why a published poem sounds the way it does, but their own idiosyncrasies would not receive the same presumption.

This seems especially true for the people with whom I read poems most often. Twice a week, some dozen inmates at the county jail join a co-teacher and me for poetry class. Not every poem we bring has immediate, intuitive appeal. But even when discussing difficult material, the men work to understand why a piece might have been written the way it was. Then, when given paper and pencils, these men pour themselves into their own writing, for reasons Lerner well understands:

I also received multiple letters from prisoners who felt poetry publication was their best available method for asserting they were human beings, not merely criminals. I’m not mocking these poets; I’m offering them as examples of the strength of the implicit connection between poetry and the social recognition of the poet’s humanity. It’s an association so strong that the writers in question observe no contradiction in the fact that they are attempting to secure and preserve their personhood in a magazine that no one they know will see.

Incarcerated writers do dream that their words could allow someone to see them as human. During one of our recent classes, TC told me that he’d seen a commercial on the jail television showing caged dogs in the pound with a voiceover saying “No animal deserves to be treated this way.” He looked left, looked right, and started wondering: where is our commercial?

And I’m by no means arguing that the poems written by men in jail are all great, or even good. Drug addiction in southern Indiana has swept up all sorts, but people with money can bond out, lawyer up, and fight their cases from the outside. They tend to win, landing treatment instead of time. Our pay-to-play criminal justice system reserves jail for the poor. Given the paucity of services our nation offers to impoverished children, and the underfunded state of our public schools, shunting un-aided kids straight from uncomfortable desk to uncomfortable cell, jails are full of luckless individuals who never had much scholastic success.

When inmates write, many of their poems are utter clunkmonsters, vague and sloppy and misspelled. The men force rhymes, having conflated the concepts “poem” and “children’s book.” Sometimes they’ll pour out saccharine repentance as though my co-teacher and I were allied with the state, rather than volunteering our time simply because this country inflicts mass incarceration on our behalf and has made us feel ashamed. And it can be a battle convincing dudes who’ve been told over and over again “You’re bad!” that when we suggest they revise a poem, it means we liked it.

But sometimes their work is lovely.

On a Friday afternoon last August, the men were in a particularly rotten mood. Technological doodads break in the jail just like anywhere else, and a security camera on the fritz meant they’d been on lockdown all week. Usually they have access to a common area and can play cards or pace back and forth, but “lockdown” means being confined to those little cells twenty-four hours a day.

Tensions were high. And when we decided to take a few minutes for a writing prompt, they snapped.

“Nobody’s gonna read anything I write! This won’t change shit!”

Grim. And arguably untrue. But…

“They’re not gonna do anything till we pull some ISIS shit, start taking off people’s heads!”

At which point my co-teacher flipped: “Fuck you, man, no. You say shit like that, they’re gonna cancel this class. And it’s not even fucking true. I mean, look at this… we’re here, right? And Frank and I are here because of shit we read. You write it well, people will read, it will change things.”

I was nodding, although I have to admit: there’s a lot out there to read. It’s hard for any writer to be noticed, let alone somebody pegged as an uneducated fuck-up – a criminal from southern Indiana – right off the bat. The battle for attention can be nightmarish, giving rise to phenomena like that Orlando shooting… or the election of Donald Trump.

I have to admit: even if people do read the poems written by incarcerated men from our classes, nobody will work to understand. These men are forced to write with one hand behind their backs, so to say. Linguistic flourishes that would seem striking from another would be considered mistakes.

A reader must extend trust to be willing to work. But if we trusted these men, they wouldn’t live like they do: mired in cages not fit for dogs. Then booted out broke, job-less, home-less, med-less, into a probationary existence with far more rules than other citizens must abide by.

And yet these men dig poems.

Lerner is correct: they’re not always keen on the abstruse lyrical sort. That distaste seems fair. I pray that they can one day write compelling narratives that will help change the world. But if these uncredentialed, MFA-less men wrote tricksy lyrics, flaunting rules like Lerner does? Then they’d be right. Nobody would read their shit.

In their shoes (lace-less orange crocs, hosed down and issued to some new sap straight from the off-putting feet of the recently released), I too might hate lyric poetry.

On radical religious terrorists targeting the United States.

I was named after the doctor who delivered me, a friend of my father’s from medical school.

Dr. Curtis is a gynecologist who has written several popular books about pregnancy. When a woman asked for a tubal ligation after her tenth delivery (two of her children had died in infancy, but by then she was raising eight, ranging in age from a high school sophomore to her newborn), he performed the surgery.

This woman’s husband had given his grudging permission before she came in, but he later decided that irreversible sterilization must be against the will of God. He began to harass Dr. Curtis. He convinced his wife that she had done an evil thing. The couple became so distraught that the hospital forgave their medical bills, hoping to stave off litigation.

This angry man never did bring a lawsuit against Dr. Curtis or the hospital. Instead, he convinced his wife to give him back his guns – she’d hidden them as his rants became increasingly vitriolic. But she caved.

Fully armed, he drove to the hospital, planted enough dynamite to level half a block, and stormed inside to find the doctor. Dr. Curtis noticed him, called the police, and left. The angry man took hostages – nurses, mothers with infants, pregnant women – whom he threatened at gunpoint as he searched the hospital.

One of these hostages – a recently-hired nurse – saw an opportunity to wrest his gun away. She pulled the shotgun from his hands and ran. He pulled out another gun and shot her in the back, killing her.

Three hours into the crisis, one woman delivered her baby – the newborn began life as a hostage. Fifteen hours into the crisis, the police had found the dynamite and began to negotiate. The angry man wanted the police to escort his wife and Dr. Curtis into the hospital, so that he could murder Dr. Curtis in front of her.

The police declined this offer.

alta view.PNG — Movie poster from a film made about the incident.

Eighteen hours into the crisis, the angry man surrendered. He was taken to jail and charged with murder – the nurse he’d shot in the back – amidst other crimes. He took a plea for thirty-five years because the prosecutors said they’d seek the death penalty.

In jail, he extolled the other inmates with his virtues. He was better than them, he said. His plan was righteous.

The other inmates beat the shit out of him. Repeatedly. It seems they had a difference of opinion as to who was better than whom.

The angry man tried repeatedly to escape. He was transferred from state to state – he’d be transferred after altercations with fellow inmates, botched escapes, and suicide attempts. During one of the botched escapes, he fell from a fence and broke both his legs.

His lawyers recommended an appeal – he was not in his right mind when he pled guilty, they said. That much I agree with, I suppose. I’m not sure he was ever in his right mind. But I think it’s likely he would have attempted murder again if he was released.

Shortly before his appeal hearing, he succeeded in breaking his own neck with a sheet tied to the wall with shoelaces. (Inmates at Bloomington’s jail wear lace-less orange crocks. Less risk of suicide that way … although there have still been several in the past few years. Jail is a miserable place to be.)

It’s not clear to me how a tubal ligation could be against God’s will but suicide was fine. Maybe the angry man knew that his logic was faulty. His defense attorney said that “One of his biggest regrets is that they didn’t kill him at Alta View Hospital.” Just like the members of ISIS, Christian terrorists would rather lose their lives in action.

This country has a long history of Christian terrorism. Numerous seemingly respectable people support the murder of doctors who enable women’s right to choose when to have children. In Danny Davis’s The Phinehas Priesthood: violent vanguard of the Christian Identity movement, he writes that:

Many Christians will be surprised to discover that similar beliefs and moral values are present in the Identity worldview. In some denominations, the only initial difference will appear when the idea of a biological Israelite heritage to present day European Anglo-Saxons is seen.

These terrorists believe that human life begins when a sperm cell fuses with an egg to form a zygote with a full compliment of chromosomes. Given this belief, they think that abortion is murder – especially later in a pregnancy, when the developing fetus begins to look like a miniature human. Because a gynecologist might perform several abortions each day, they believe that God would want them to murder the doctor.

(Human life does not begin at conception. A large number of zygotes – probably between fifteen and twenty percent, but possibly higher since women do not always realize that they ever were pregnant – will self-abort due to chromosomal abnormalities. Also, although most miscarriages are caused by blameless genetic problems, the rate of miscarriage is higher in women who are overweight. Why do Christian terrorists not target McDonald’s? Their food probably terminates more pregnancies than any gynecologist.)

mcds — Obesity & ill health terminate pregnancies, but I’ve never seen pro-lifers protesting at McDonald’s.

Davis also writes that:

In his book, Mix My Blood with the Blood of the Unborn, Paul Hill details his public defense of anti-abortion shooters Michael Griffin and Shelley Shannon. Shortly after Griffin’s attack Hill penned a very articulate letter “describing such murders as ‘justifiable homicide.’ ” In the same letter he gave his Biblical reasons against abortion and explained the need for “Phineas actions” to protect the unborn.

Christian theology has a long tradition of defending awful behavior that supposedly fulfills the will of God. In Fear and Trembling, nineteenth century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes (translated by Walter Lowrie):

It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialectical consequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form of problemata, in order to see what a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming a murder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there where thinking leaves off.

Fear and Trembling has the beginnings of a lovely work of philosophy. I have always enjoyed Kierkegaard’s description of the sort of person he considers second best in the world, the knight of infinite resignation. This sort of person, according to Kierkegaard, accepts that our efforts are guaranteed to be fruitless – Camus would later argue that this is true of all of us, since we are all guaranteed to die, and eventually humans will go extinct, the universe will become a frozen void, and all trace of our existence will have dissolved into an entropic nothing – but doesn’t stop striving even when though failure is inevitable.

[The knight of infinite resignation] does not give up his [doomed] love, not for all the glory of the world. He is no fool. First he makes sure that this really is the content of his life, and his soul is too healthy and too proud to squander the least thing upon an inebriation. He is not cowardly, he is not afraid of letting love creep into his most secret, his most hidden thoughts, to let it twine in innumerable coils about every ligament of his consciousness – if the love becomes an unhappy love, he will never be able to tear himself loose from it.

That’s great, Kierkegaard! But then why would you also write that “The paradox of faith is this, that the individual is higher than the universal”? Abraham does not need your defense. Whatever he believed God to have said, stabbing your son is wrong.

According to the King James translation of the Bible,

Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

Because Abraham believed it was God’s will, he was ready to murder. And so set Kierkegaard off on his convoluted reasonings, arguing that when the faithful believe themselves to be fulfilling the will of God, their vile actions should be seen as righteous.

Oops.

At least the story of Abraham ends with the man refraining from murder. Not so the story of Phinehas, patron saint of violent white supremacists. In this story, God was angry because the Israelites were marrying foreigners, which might lead them to eventually abandon their religious traditions. Rather than let them drift away, God figured he should smite his chosen people. But Phinehas patched things up with God by murdering.

Again from the King James translation:

And, behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, who were weeping before the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from among the congregation, and took a javelin in his hand;

And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel.

And those that died in the plague were twenty and four thousand.

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake among them, that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy.

Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace:

And he shall have it, and his seed after him, even the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God, and made an atonement for the children of Israel.

In the United States, Christian terrorists have referenced the story of Phinehas to justify murder. In Matthias Gardell’s Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, he writes that:

In 1990, hardcore Identity ideologue Richard Kelly Hoskins suggested that individual zealots could atone for Israel’s transgressions by assassinating homosexuals, interracial couples, and prostitutes. Hoskins believed such zealots belonged to an underground tradition of racial purists, the Phineas Priesthood, and traced its history into antiquity.

After all, most of the Bible does depict Yahweh as a bloodthirsty god. Yahweh himself murders a lot of people. He was initially worshiped with animal sacrifice. And he has a chilling disregard for the lives of women and children – in the story of Job, for instance, his wife and children are killed, but all is made right again when Job receives a new, better wife and new, better children. These people are simply possessions, and only Job’s suffering has moral weight.

And this book is supposed to be the wellspring of American values?

On isolation.

The physicist Richard Feynman was insatiably curious. He was an enthusiastic artist, musician, teacher, biologist, philosopher, lockpicker, epistoler. And he was puzzled by his own mind: it was made of inanimate matter, and yet there he was, thinking. He decided to investigate himself:

I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that.

We now refer to these devices as “sensory deprivation tanks.” Inside the dark, soundless chamber, a person floats effortlessly in densely-salinated, body-temperature water. In theory, all external stimuli vanish: the mind is free to roam as it will.

Within the tank, Feynman surmised, he would be left with only his mind and could reflect upon its workings. He turned his attention toward the phenomenon of human memory, and one day felt he had a breakthrough: he could see clearly that memories were encoded by a long series of linkages, each episode encoded by references to other experiences we’ve had.

I felt pretty good about this discovery … [but] about forty-five minutes after I came out of the tank … I suddenly realized … I hadn’t the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain: all I had was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain!

Deprived of the world, Feynman realized, our speculations become unhinged.

The sensory deprivation tank was invented by neurologist John C. Lilly.

Lilly was a provocateur. By now, most scientists are aware that experiments can be difficult to interpret if the researcher is on psychedelics, but Lilly dosed himself and captive dolphins with LSD to test whether the two species could thereby communicate.

For another experiment, Lilly confined a 23-year-old female volunteer in a small facility with a male bottle-nose dolphin. The volunteer was isolated from other humans for a period of ten weeks. In this way, she’d teach the dolphin to talk.

The dolphin did not learn to speak. The dolphin did use non-verbal communication to request a sexual relationship with the human volunteer. Eventually, she offered manual release.

In total isolation, we change. Our brains atrophy. Our inhibitions wane. Kept constantly indoors, our eyesight goes.

The hand job she gave was reluctant, but, after weeks away from humanity, must have seemed reasonable enough.

Neither of these experiments – drop acid with cetaceans – confine a woman and dolphin for two and a half months together – would be approved by contemporary IRBs. Applying for funding would be a nightmare – several members of a grant reading committee soberly considering a proposal that states in this way we’ll teach dolphins human speech, a goal ten or twenty years away.

For scientific experiments, a wide variety of social animals are kept in isolated cages. These housing conditions seem to affect their minds. When Dr. Harry Harlow and colleagues took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and housed them in isolation, the animals developed strong attachments to the blankets in their cages. These blankets were their only friends; the babies became extremely agitated when the blankets were removed.

Dr. Bruce Alexander and colleagues dosed rats with morphine and then housed them in either isolation or in social environs. The animals who lived in open playgrounds with toys and other rats subsequently decreased their consumption of morphine-laced liquids. The animals living alone, in cages, drank more. From the research publication:

A possible explanation for the environmental effect is that for the isolated rats the reinforcement value of morphine ingestion was enhanced by relief of the discomfort of spatial confinement, social isolation, and stimulus deprivation.

Opiates are highly addictive. But opiate use is also correlated with other troubles. Our nation’s current opiate epidemic is linked to the economic crisis.

And among the rats? These are social animals. Isolation is painful for them. They’ll attempt to numb that pain with drugs when given the chance.

Confining social animals in isolation is a form of torture. Juan Mendez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has argued that prisoners should not be extradited to the United States, as the U.S. routinely holds prisoners in solitary confinement.

After 15 days in solitary confinement, much of the psychological damage caused by solitary confinement becomes irreversible. Mendez argues that solitary confinement for over two weeks is clearly torture.

In the United States, attempts to change prison policy such that solitary confinement not be used for over 90 days have made little progress. Throughout the country, many people have been held in solitary confinement for years at a time. For some, decades.

Large protests have been held outside of prison walls. Inside, inmates have refused to eat, hoping to draw attention to their plight. Guards are authorized to pin these men to the ground, shove long lubricated tubes into their nostrils, and pump nutrients directly into their stomachs.

Many of the men in my classes have been held in solitary. One, a teddy-bear-shaped guy whom the others invariably describe as “humble,” was put in for nine months. “I get through it okay. I got myself a system. This much time I spend thinking, this much time I spend walking in place. I get to the point, I don’t even want to go nowhere for the exercise.”

“But dude,” I said, “you need the sun!”

“Oh, yeah yeah yeah, if I’m out I go outside, I’m outside all the time. But for rec time? You can’t see the sun no how. You just in a different box.”

According to ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern, “You can’t get reliable information from torture. But torture works beautifully if you want unreliable information.”

A young Muslim man named Syed Fahad Hashmi was held in solitary confinement by the United States for three years before his trial. Per his constitutional rights – innocent until proven guilty – he was an innocent man. He was decidedly un-dangerous.

From Jeanne Theoharis’s essay, “Torture of a Student,”

The charges against him stemmed from allowing a friend, Junaid Babar, to use his cell phone and to stay for two weeks in his London student apartment with luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks (the “military gear”) that Babar later allegedly took to an Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan. Subsequently picked up, Babar became a cooperating witness for the government in numerous terrorism cases in exchange for a reduced sentence, and is now a free man.

Torturing an innocent man before his trial seems ethically suspect. Theoharis:

Citing extensive research on the health impacts of prolonged solitary confinement and the impact these conditions imposed on Fahad’s ability to participate in his defense, the defense requested a set of modest changes. The judge was unmoved, stating for the record that the measures were “administrative not punitive” and therefore constitutional.

But the torture is often “successful,” if we define success by the number of people whom we are able to lock away:

These conditions of prolonged isolation are designed to induce acquiescence. Because the government holds control over the defendant’s conditions and the courts have been loath to intervene, the SAMs [special administrative measures, which can include solitary confinement, censoring of mail & all reading materials, etc.] rig the contest, weakening a person’s ability to participate in his own defense. The number of plea bargains in the Justice Department’s roster following years of prolonged pretrial solitary confinement suggest the success of these practices.

In this case as well, our government won. Syed Fahad Hashmi was tortured before his trial on behalf of all United States citizens – which is to say, on my behalf – and he broke. One day before his trial began… one day after his judge granted the government’s request that this man – who allegedly aided & abetted the transport of ponchos & raincoats! – be tried before an anonymous jury… he accepted a plea.

After three years of torture, during which time he constantly proclaimed his innocence – are we confident, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he knew there were ponchos in his friend’s luggage? Are we confident, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he knew these ponchos were bound for Al Qaeda? – he “confessed” that he was guilty of “conspiracy to provide material support.”

He was sentenced to 15 years of solitary confinement in ADX.

ADX – full name, “United State Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum” – is in Florence, Colorado. Some four hundred men are held there, tortured by the most brutal isolation of any prison in the United States.

A former warden referred to ADX as “a clean version of hell.”

Jesse Wilson – who received a five year prison sentence at the age of 17 – is now at ADX. This dude, shunted into a world of extreme violence while still a child, quickly conformed to the expectations of his environs. He “misbehaved” and was moved from prison to prison until reaching the worst in the state of Mississippi, where he got into a fight and killed a man who was being held on death row.

That’s when Wilson received a life sentence and was transferred to ADX. From his essay describing the place:

We as a country are blind to the reality of our prison system.

It has become normal. And we the inmates are voiceless. Our voices are not heard. If they are heard, the things we say are thought of as lies. I heard the head of the Bureau of Prisons testifying in Congress (on radio), saying they do not have insane inmates housed here. This is what should be thought of as a lie. I have not slept in weeks because of these nonexistent inmates beating on the walls and hollering all night. And the most non-insane smearing feces in their cells.

This place is horrific with the solitary, and the lack of communication outside these walls. I’ve been in prison without release for more than twelve years, and eight of them I’ve been in a cage walking around in circles. So I am pretty in tune with the concept of solitary. Prison. Cages and craziness.

Out my window I see into a concrete yard surrounded by red brick walls. There is a drain in the middle of it and out of it weeds are growing. I thought they were weeds until a few blossomed into these beautiful yellow and brown flowers.

Every now and then a pair of owls roosts on the security lights. This spring they had two babies. We watched them grow up and fly away. On any given day the sky here is breathtaking. The beauty out my window stays in my mind. I look around this cage at plain concrete walls and steel bars and a steel door, a steel toilet, and I endure its harshness because I am able to keep beauty in my mind.

The window helps greatly.

I’m in the hole so there is no TV. Books help me escape better than my words could ever explain. But most of all it’s the love of my family, the memories of beauty, and the knowledge of humanity.

Loneliness is a destroyer of humanity.

The essays by Theoharis and Wilson – and many others – appear in Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement, edited by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd.

You should read this book.

If you are human, you will cry.

If you are a citizen of the United States, you should know: we’re doing this for you. The men and women whose essays appear in Hell Is a Very Small Place are being tortured on your behalf.

Mayhaps you should do something.

On the Bush years, from the perspective of the 45th.

In Ghostbusters II, the parapsychologists learned that certain words were dangerous. A strange pink slime burgeoned beneath New York City, bringing with it a wide variety of malevolent spirits. Every vile, hateful thing that anyone said caused the slime to grow in power. Let slip too many insults and the muck might expand to engulf the world.

Similarly, our nation is currently helmed by an erratic figurehead that seems to draw strength from every intonation of his name. During the primaries, and then the general election, much of what was said about our 45^th was bad. But content was irrelevant. All that mattered was the name. After all, the name is his key asset. In the business world, most of his ventures folded, and the empire rebounded from bankruptcy on the value of the name alone, a crisp, bold, status-conferring word to adorn crassly gilded buildings.

And so, even though there is obviously more to write about the state of our nation, K (with the help of some lovely letters to the editor) convinced me to stop using the name.

I’ve also been binging Eliot Weinberger’s essays on my Netflix lately. (Clarification from K: “By ‘Netflix,’ he means his library card.”)

Until I picked up his Ghosts of Birds, I’d never read anything by Weinberger. This is tragic, because he’s been publishing phenomenal essays for decades. “The Falls,” from Karmic Traces, is a brutal compression of three thousand years of racism. An Elemental Thing is gorgeous throughout its two hundred pages. Written Reaction is riddled with wry snark and lovely poetry recommendations.

And then there’s 2005’s What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, which has proven invaluable to me as I attempt to make sense of our nation’s current political situation.

From the opening page:

Al Gore received some 540,000 more votes than George W. Bush. Presidential elections, however, are determined by the archaic system of an Electoral College, to which each state sends representatives who vote according to the will of that state’s voters, nearly always on a winner-takes-all basis. An 18^th-century invention, the College was a last-minute political concession to Southern slave owners when the Constitution was written. Representatives were apportioned according to population; slaves, of course, could not vote, but they were considered to be three-fifths of a human in the calculations, thus increasing the populations of the slave states and the number of their representatives.

Enlightened now, we have done away with slavery. We’ve kept the electoral college, though, which continues to suppress the voice of populous urban areas. And we’ve kept the system of counting voice-less black bodies to inflate the votes of their oppressors: we build prisons in white, rural, Republican-leaning districts. The prisoners count toward the local population – not the population of whatever district they lived in & will return to – but are not allowed to vote while there.

Stealing representation from prisoners’ home districts matters most for the composition of congress. But the basic premise of the electoral college – intentionally undercounting urban votes – subverted the will of the American people in 2000, when Gore won by half a million votes, and more egregiously in 2016, when Clinton won by two million.

Awarding the presidency to the losers was constitutional. Somewhat less so in 2004, when clownish Supreme Court justices with clear conflicts of interest prevented the state of Florida from accurately awarding their votes, but constitutional nonetheless: in Weinberger’s words, “Our Founding Fathers had a limited enthusiasm for democracy.”

After the inauguration, though, it didn’t take long for the constitutional egress to begin. Bush tortured innocent Muslim men. 45 keeps attempting to ban them from our country. Bush practiced an obscene cronyism. Here’s Weinberger:

If you drill into Bush’s skull, what you mainly find is a pool of oil. It’s difficult to understand Bush – especially when he speaks – but it is somewhat easier if one realizes that he sees the whole world exclusively in terms of the production and consumption of oil.

…

But if you drill to the core of George W. Bush’s being, there is something else, something that seems so hyperbolic, that so smacks of the cliches of old Communist propaganda, that it is hardly believable. And yet the evidence of his term as the Governor of Texas, and the daily evidence of his presidency, proves that it is true. Once one clears away the rhetoric that he is handed to read out loud, it is apparent that Bush believes that his role, his only role, as President of the United States is to help his closest friends.

And yet, somehow, 45 has taken this practice further. Rather than presume that his role in office is to help his friends make money, 45 acts only to help himself. He uses the presidency as an advertising platform; he badgers corporations that threaten his family brand; he reaps membership fees from wealthy individuals purchasing the opportunity for political contact; he bestows favors on nations where he owns significant properties (note, for instance, which nations were left off his executive orders on immigration).

Of course, neither Bush nor 45 could act alone… but Weinberger has you covered here, too. Despite being over a decade old, his “Republicans: A Prose Poem” is still tragically relevant. If anything, a reprise would be even more grim. The piece is charming, though. And a lot of fun, with lines like:

George W. Bush, President of the United States, is a Republican. To demonstrate personal sacrifice and his determination to win the War on Terror, he gave up desserts and candy a few days before he announced the invasion of Iraq.

And yet Bush, despite his unpopularity and incompetence – nominating a governor from a wretchedly polluted state who believed in “voluntary compliance” to run the EPA; inundating the public with lies and misinformation (Weinberger: “Reagan, as everyone knows, was the master of transforming Washington into Hollywood, with his photo opportunities and careful scripts. Bush has taken this one step further: Whereas Reagan’s scenarios were advertisements meant to promote what he was doing, Bush’s are often heartwarming television vignettes that are the opposite of his actual policies. Thus we have had Bush in the forest extolling the beauty of the national parks, while opening them up for logging and mining, Bush reading to schoolchildren (as he was yesterday) while cutting the budgets for libraries. Or, my favorite Bush moment: a speech he gave to something called the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, a community-service group, calling them exemplary of what makes America strong and free. The next day, his administration completely eliminated their government funds.”); selecting a racist, hateful white southerner to serve as attorney general – was elected to serve a second term.

It’s unlikely Bush could have won in 2004 (after all, he’d lost in 2000, before people even realized what a mockery he’d make of our government) if the 9/11 terrorist attacks had not occurred.

And we’re in a similar situation now. From Mark Danner’s “What Could He Do”:

… we must see the likelihood of a crisis as the vital springboard of a [45] presidency, especially an increasingly shaky, unpopular, and unstable one. The lower his poll numbers, the more outlandish his lies, the greater the resistance from opponents within the bureaucracies, the thicker his scandals and chaos, the likelier he will be to seek to use a crisis and all the opportunities it offers to lever himself from a position of defensiveness to that of dominating power.

To maintain power, 45 needs the United States to be attacked. From that perspective, his foreign policies are totally reasonable. In Danner’s words:

If, as the Islamic State has asserted, the goal of its attacks in the West has been to “eliminate the gray zone” … then [45]’s immigration ban goes far toward accomplishing the same thing: isolating Islamic communities, placing them all among a besieged minority whose travel is restricted and whose loyalty to their adopted countries is put into question. … If one sought to design a policy to encourage radicalization, it would be hard to suggest a better one.

Similarly, why not deliberately offend every other nation. 45 cannot guarantee that his belligerence against Muslims will prompt the attack he so sorely needs. Every possible “other” who might be molded into a threat is worth pursuing: Muslims, Mexicans, Koreans, Chinese… our own citizens who happen to have more epidermal melanin than 45 himself does… hell, even Australians… any attacker who is not a good white Christian American would do.

But at least we have Eliot Weinberger, writing to warn us. His words from January 2001, months before the attack:

“If the economy sinks, as it probably will, a return to Iraq will certainly be the most expedient distraction.”

And Weinberger’s words from September 12^th, the day after the attack:

…the logic of George Bush’s seeming cowardice has received some ingenious explication. Today, administration officials claimed that the terrorist attack was actually an assassination attempt, that the airplane that struck the Pentagon was intended for the White House (but hit the Pentagon by mistake), and that the plane that had crashed in Pennsylvania was somehow supposed to crash into the President’s jet, Air Force One. I happened to watch these pronouncements on television with a group of 13-year-olds; they all burst into derisive laughter.

…

That in a time of national crisis – a moment when, amidst waning government powers everywhere, government actually matters – the country is being led by a man laughed at by children may create psychic wounds as severe as those caused by the attack itself.

And, from 2003’s “Poetry is News,” collected in Weinberger’s Oranges & Peanuts for Sale:

The good news about the monstrosity of the Bush administration is that it is so extreme and so out of control that it has finally woken up the left…

On fear.

We recently visited my brother and our Auntie Ferret in Chicago. Traveling with two young kids was difficult, but not impossible. N held my hand while we strolled down the sidewalk and we did the five-hour drives to and from the city while she and her brother were sleeping in their car seats.

When we returned to Bloomington, I excitedly regaled staff at the YMCA “play and learn” childcare area with our adventures: we went to Restaurant Depot! A grocery store where you can buy a six-pound tub of chili garlic paste! It was magical!

One woman shuddered slightly: “Chicago? I’m afraid to go there.”

Based on that statement alone, I’d bet large sums of money that she voted for Donald Trump.

Which isn’t such a bad bet. He lost the popular vote, and Bloomington is a liberal isle in the midst of southern Indiana, but… this is southern Indiana, after all. Trump garnered a lot of votes here.

And he campaigned on fear.

It’s not the best emotion, fear. It’s no hope, for instance. I’d say fear is far worse than whatever emotion best characterizes the recent Clinton campaign, even though I’m not quite sure what that emotion is… scorn? Which isn’t good, but I’d swallow my pride and vote for smarmy self-satisfied scorn over fear any day (as in fact I did).

We’re already seeing the awful consequences of fear: an executive order barring immigrants and refugees from a few (poor, Trump-property-less) countries that people here fear. Yes, it looks like children are drowning as families flee the civil war (sparked by climate change from our pollution). But what if those deaths are all part of an evil ploy by ISIS (not Daesh, not ISIL) operatives to infiltrate the United States?

The ban is misguided and heartless, obviously. But it’s hardly the worst that fear can do. Because fear inspires attack.

Which is a fascinating research finding. Terrifying, yes, given our current political situation. But still fascinating. You get it all here: mind control… senseless violence… and… killer mice?

Back in 2005, Comoli et al. found that hunting seemed to activate a pattern of neurons in the amygdala, the brain region responsible for fear in a wide variety of mammals, including humans.

So… what would happen if you suddenly activated those neurons?

Usually, neurons are activated only when we think. Our thoughts are patterns of neuron activations, and they cause further activations, which means we get to keep thinking, on and on as we learn and grow… until we die. Then the activations stop.

Each of these “activations” is a flow of electricity from one of the cell to the other. Neurons are lined by “voltage-gated ion channels,” and these let signals flow. Ions entering through one gate cause nearby gates to open. After a gate opens, though, it takes a while to recharge, which causes the current flow in a single direction.

And that’s how you can create a Manchurian candidate. Instead of hypnosis – conditioning Sinatra to flip when he spots a playing card – you infect neurons with new ion channels that open when you shine laser light on them. Make a recombinant virus, load it into a syringe, and plunge that needle into the brain!

The laser causes your new ion channels to open, and then, once they do, all the others respond, creating a flow of current. The signal becomes indistinguishable from any other thought. Except that whoever holds the laser is in control.

Wenfei Han et al., for the study “Integrated Control of Predatory Hunting by the Central Nucleus of the Amygdala,” took some mice and infected their amygdalas with these light-activated channels… and found that they’d created killing machines. In their words:

When a non-edible item was placed in the cage, laser activation caused the otherwise indifferent mice to immediately assume a ‘capture-like’ body posture and seize the object, which was then held with the forepaws and bitten. Behavior was interrupted immediately upon laser deactivation.

Light on… attack! Light off… whoa, what was I doing?

From Han et al.:

Generally, upon laser activation, mice readily seize, bite, and often ingest, non-edible objects, an effect that was modulated by internal state. Laser activation also abolished natural preferences for edible over non-edible items.

When left to their own devices, mice will hunt crickets (although it’s worth noting that “Consistently, by employing the cricket-hunting paradigm, [laser activation] shortened the time needed for mice to capture and subdue their prey. Captured crickets were immediately eaten.”), but the mind-control lasers cause them to hunt anything.

Well, almost anything.

Activation did not induce attacks on “conspecifics,” that is, their fellow mice. But human psychology seems to allow great flexibility in distinguishing between our own kind and others. When a mouse sees a mouse, it’ll know it’s a mouse. But we are so tribal that when one Homo sapiens sees another, the knowledge of shared humanity is often clouded over. Instead of recognizing a human, we might see a Syrian, or a Muslim, or an “illegal,” or a Republican, or a criminal.

A mouse won’t hunt another mouse, but we humans are great at attacking our own.

Of course, we don’t know for certain that humans would attack so single-mindedly if we activated neurons in the amygdala. We conduct only voluntary research on humans, and it seems unlikely that many people would sign up for an experiment involving the injection of viruses into the brain (which causes the infected neurons to become light-activated), intentional lesions between various brain regions (to isolate activities like hunting and eating – a quick slice lets researchers permanently uncouple those thought patterns), and euthanasia (to dissect the brain at the experiment’s end).

The mice used in these studies – or any other research studies, since mice aren’t even considered “animals” for the purposes of the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act – did not fare particularly well. Far worse than the impoverished or imprisoned Homo sapiens whose “voluntary” research participation is induced by the offer of a piddling amount of cash or less mistreatment inside.

But now we know. Inspire sufficient fear, trigger attack. We’ll find an other – edible or not, deserving or not – and try to kill it.

People who felt afraid voted for Trump… and he has been using his social media megaphone to inflame their fears further ever since… and if we don’t calm those fears, war is coming.

Terrorism is scary. But can we get a little more “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” around here?

On my own attempt to understand what motivates people to join the terrorist organization Daesh.

Until recently, I was unaware of the existence of Rojava, the Kurdish quasi-state that’s made more successful overtures toward gender equality than any other modern nation. Their constitution is based on contemporary philosophy, whereas our own was written by people two centuries less informed about reality than we are.

For instance, the moral equality between men and women stated explicitly in Rojava’s constitution. Every role in their government is bifurcated such that a male and a female hold equivalent posts. Whereas the writers of our own constitution were primarily seeking to protect the rights of landed white men, considering blacks, women, and the poor to be more or less value-less.

I learned a lot about Rojava from the pair of articles that appeared almost simultaneously in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine (you can read all of the latter even without a subscription — and you should!). It’s clear that the place isn’t perfect. Not just because the entire region is shackled by seemingly ceaseless horrific violence, although that seems to be the root cause of the other problems. The apparent cultish devotion to an imprisoned man named Ocalan seems suspicious to me. And the standing army of Rojava may have committed some horrific wartime atrocities of its own, although it’s difficult for me to judge them too harshly for this. I (luckily!) have no experience with the psychological consequences of constant fear.

But the good parts of Rojava sound lovely. The equality. The commitment to religious freedom. The efforts to regain a strong sense of community in a modern urban environment. The opportunity for all people to work toward a university education.

That’s why it seems so sad that Rojava might not survive. The nation of Turkey has been subtly threatening to squelch it for a while, but it seems that collaboration between the U.S. and Rojava makes direct military action from Turkey unlikely.

More worrisome are the constant attacks on Rojava perpetrated by Daesh.

unnamed (2) — Art by dessinateur777 on Deviantart.

(Until I sat down to type this post, I planned to use the term “ISIS” for the terrorist organization beleaguering Rojava. I’m using the term “Daesh” instead per recommendations that I learned about from translator Alice Gurthrie’s lovely blog post. Although “ISIS” and “Daesh” are both acronyms that mean the same thing, acronyms are much less common in Arabic, which makes more explicit a speaker’s refusal to use the entire grandiose name purporting dominance and statehood. Also, the term “Isis” in English calls to mind the ancient Egyptian goddess: the acronym sounds vaguely portentious. Whereas the Arabic acronym “Daesh” apparently sounds like words used during the dark ages, the way nonsense words like Lord Dunsany’s “gnole” or Jack Vance’s “erb” sound vaguely like medieval creatures to English ears. The closest-sounding word in Arabic is “daes,” meaning a thing that tramples — conjuring up something like a burly troll throwing a temper tantrum?)

Members of Daesh are attempting to terrorize the inhabitants of Rojava … and France … and the U.S. Which is why it seems urgent to understand what motivates people to join Daesh. Indeed, many people far more informed than I am are working on this question. There have been several New York Times articles on the topic in the last few months — for instance this article from June about pathetic friendless individuals from the U.S. joining via internet chat rooms, hoping to finally fit in with a community.

A murderous misogynistic ill-educated community, sure. But a community nonetheless.

After reading several such profiles, and making a cursory attempt to survey the (very, very extensive) literature on Daesh membership in the Arab world, I’ve decided that one way to frame why people join the organization would be to read Kent Russell’s essay “American Juggalo” from his collection I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son.

I’m obviously not saying there’s any equivalence between listening to rap rock and filming beheadings, or going on shooting sprees, or setting off explosives that kill hundreds. Rap rock, when listened to alone, hurts no one.

unnamed (3).jpg — Art by Gir510 on Deviantart.

My thought is only that there may be a parallel in the societal and psychological forces that compel people to fall in with the norms of those two communities. Consider these three snippets from a passage at the beginning of Russell’s essay:

“I did the whole Gathering last year,” Sandy said. “I’m not staying past sundown tomorrow. I hope you brought something green, or an orange.” Justin slalomed around shirtless juggalos. Seen from behind, most had broad, slumped shoulders and round, hanging arms. They were not stout. These people were grubbed with fat. They looked partially deflated. You think I’m being cruel, but these were the most physically unhealthful people I’d ever seen. “Because if not, you’re shit out of luck. Unless you especially love carnival burgers, or fried curds from out the back of someone’s RV.”

. . .

No more than twenty-four inches in front of us sat twin girls on the rear bumper of a white minivan. They couldn’t have been a day over fourteen or a biscuit under 225. They wore bikini tops, and the way they slouched — breasts resting on paunches, navels razed to line segments — turned their trunks into parodies of their sullen faces.

. . .

The twins screamed, “Show us your titties, bitch!” at Sandy. A tall guy with a massive water gun screamed, “Man, fuck your ride!” and sprayed us with a stream of orange drink the pressure and circumference of which made me think of racehorses. A “FUCK YOUR RIDE!” chant went up and around the crowd, and garbage was thrown. I would describe what kind of garbage, and how it felt to be the object of such ire — but I had so much garbage thrown at me at the Gathering of the Juggalos that showers of refuse became commonplace, a minor annoyance, and describing one would be like describing what it’s like to get a little wet on a winter’s day in Seattle.

Now, I don’t blame you if you find Russell’s mean-spirited tone to be a little off-putting. In the context of this piece, though, I think the tone works well. That mean-spirited tone helps reinforce a message about why the juggalos behave the way they do toward Russell.

Genetics obviously has a big impact on eventual behavior, but brains are sufficiently plastic that life experiences matter more. Nurture can have a larger influence than nature.

Very few children are born mean. Some have troubles with impulse control, sure. And just about anybody will lash out when in pain — maybe some children are more predisposed to suffer than others. Evolutionary forces had no inclination to select for people who would feel comfortable. A shame, really. If that sort of evolutionary pressure had existed, maybe teething wouldn’t be so horrible.

unnamed (4) — On the prowl for screaming children …

(I should point out that this is a very self-centered way to think about evolution. The words “evolutionary pressure” don’t sound so foreboding, but hidden behind those neutral-seeming words is a long history of night-stalking predators that would’ve mauled children who cried out in their sleep. For a negative trait to be removed from a population, there have to be specific forces that either kill bearers of that trait or otherwise prevent them from breeding. Our good genes are abundant only because tragedy upon tragedy befell those with other patterns in their DNA.)

So I’d posit that a long history of suffering underlies the behavior of people who threw garbage at Russell during the Gathering. That’s why I think Russell’s mocking tone works so well in the essay. When he mocks participants at the Gathering, it becomes easy to imagine that these people were also mocked by their classmates, their teachers, maybe their parents and neighbors, even.

unnamed (5) — Friends don’t let friends eat garbage. Unless they’re broke. Then this farm-bill-subsidized crap might be all they can afford.

(The latter two are slightly less likely, because a lot of Russell’s mockery is tied up with these people being poor. Poor people are often heavier because the U.S. government subsidizes awful food. The places where poor people live are typically less safe for pedestrians than wealthier neighborhoods. Poor children are more likely to be left in an apartment alone while both parents are out working, meaning they have even less opportunity to run around. They can’t afford the local soccer league or YMCA basketball or gymnastics or dance class or martial arts. And poverty is stressful. Stress itself causes a litany of crummy physiological effects, again predisposing people to weight gain. It’s hard to exercise when you feel ill-rested, when you sleep on uncomfortable mattresses or couches, when your gastrointestinal tract feels awful from the terrible food you have to eat.)

I’d argue that most people don’t feel much schadenfreude unless they themselves are suffering.

What I took away from Russell’s essay is that it probably took years of being treated like garbage for the juggalos to want to throw garbage at him.

Obviously throwing garbage is less horrible than the atrocities committed by Daesh. But the terrorists have absorbed very different cultural norms. Many have lived in perpetual war. Horrific violence, including violence sponsored by the U.S., is endemic to that part of the Middle East.

I don’t think many (any?) children are born with a desire to behead journalists, rape wantonly, detonate their own selves in order to murder strangers. I imagine it took many years of feeling worthless for those to seem like attractive choices. Then it probably took the alchemy of lifelong PTSD and constant immersion in state-sponsored violence combining with that sense of being devalued by the world for members of Daesh to want to load an AK-47 with bullets instead of a Supersoaker with orange Faygo.

Not that this is in any way intended to excuse or rationalize murder. Sure, pervasive unemployment and poverty and the sense that one’s way of life is under siege is crummy, but it’s clearly not okay to respond to that sense of aggrievement by terrorizing innocents.

But I think it does suggest that bombs will make a pretty terrible long-term strategy to combat Daesh. Shoveling money into the region to provide meaningful jobs would work far better. We’re too late for this to be easy — trying to set up work opportunities amidst such violence sounds like an awful task.

I can’t think of any other workable solutions, though.

Oh, and, in the face of that type of seemingly nihilistic philosophy, I think it’s imperative to be nice. Any attendees of the Gathering, after reading Russell’s essay, probably felt quite justified in having thrown garbage at him. He was a jerk after all, they could think. He deserved it.

In the case of Daesh, by refusing to take in Syrian refugees, we reinforce the suspicion that the U.S. is a nation full of callous jerks.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: terrorism