#53  PERFORMATIVE CRUELTY

Deportation Barbie

Some of those at work forces
Are the same that burn crosses

–Rage Against the Machine,
“Killing in the Name”

I was having dinner with my friend Joe the other night at Sherpa’s, a Nepalese restaurant in Boulder.  It’s in a big old house on Walnut.  Conversation turned inevitably to the Trump administration, and we had a long back and forth on it.  He told me how his father had become furious at the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, and I told him I was glad.  It showed that who the Trump administration is has started getting through to regular people.

In the opposite corner of the room sat a tall, thin, blond woman in (I imagine) her thirties who seemed to be listening to us.  We talked on as we usually do, while she eventually sat there alone, looking our direction.  Eventually she rose and came over to us, saying she worked for the government and that she was a Republican, and called us out for hating all Republicans.

We both said adamantly that we didn’t hate all Republicans.  I could tell—and wish I had said to her—that she was a good person.  I asked if she voted for Trump.  She said, “Three times.”  She told us she had to go to the airport because she would be joining her church for some week-long event.  When we tried to probe her thinking, she asserted that other countries were taking advantage of us.  “But aren’t we the richest, most powerful country in the world?” Joe asked.  She agreed, and you could see just a little lever of sense trying to work its way into her logic.

We didn’t manage to follow it up with, say, a discussion of tariffs as a Republican tax on American consumers.  We failed to get into the complexities of international trade where each country has a different relationship with us, specific tradeable resources, security agreements, etc., making each situation unique such that you can’t evaluate the relationship purely on the basis of trade balance numbers.  We remained a long way from getting to the fact that the American president can’t legally impose tariffs to begin with.

And when I think about it, I had quite a few choice things to say about Jesus in relation to the Trump administration that probably would have quite upset her, so maybe it was best we never got into it.

I liked her.  I respected that she had the courage to talk to us, as she left to catch her plane.  Her level of ignorance remained enormous.

Which goes to show you how ignorance leads to suffering.  You never really feel the pain when you’re under its influence.  That comes on the backend.

Those three votes for Trump helped bring about the moment Renee Good got shot in Minneapolis.  Didn’t she feel uncomfortable with that act—a white mother of three, trying to deescalate and make peace as she tried to get out of the way—shot in the face behind the wheel with the family pet in the backseat?  Is that loving your neighbor as yourself?

Of course, you can’t blame someone for every bad decision the guy she voted for made.  But none of this surprises a liberal; we saw it coming all along.  Why didn’t she?

As I oscillate between calm resignation and apoplectic rage, I’ve managed to learn a new term from Rick Wilson, ex-Republican election operative and reliably articulate shredder of Trump and MAGA: “performative cruelty.”  That’s how he described the ICE agent’s assassination of Good.  Exactly how would this woman driving away from the scene have harmed the “work” those agents were doing?  What clear and present danger did she present to them or to the United States of America?

No, that masked, tax payer-paid thug stood there and put bullets in her face because he has carte blanche from the highest levels of the government—the head of Homeland Security, the Vice President, the President himself.  But what really does justify it?  Well, nothing, of course, even if it’s not such an unusual way law enforcement might have handled her if she was black.  It’s nevertheless endemic to our whole conundrum as a nation that both facts and legality don’t matter to our “leadership.”  They’re counting on a big swath of us not only believing their lies over what can be seen plainly with our own eyes, they’re doing it to engage the enthusiasm of their base.  That’s the performance in “performative cruelty.”  The brutality provided the whole point, and, after all, since ICE doesn’t bother to pursue undocumented criminals and seems to pursue anyone foreign-born of color, even that doesn’t matter any longer.

No, it’s thrilling to the MAGA base, ginned up on gun worship, decades of diligent demonization of the left, and Hollywood delusions of macho violence, that the ICE agent stands there geared up and armed, pointing his weapon.  You can practically hear his mind as it screams: EAT LEAD, YOU LIBERAL BITCH!

Keeping America safe from the threat of goodness.

You can imagine a lot of back-slapping and envy going on in all kinds of corners of the MAGAverse.  Wish I could do that!  Trump does it again!  (This is also why Kristi Noem made a point in her autobiography of shooting her own dog when it irritated her.  Doesn’t that proclaim how badass she is, handling an annoyance with definitive aggresion rather than, for example, patiently learning how to train a dog and applying herself to it?)

It’s precisely here that we’re starting to see ICE as the administration’s private muscle.  Yes, they’re a white supremacist regime out to crush non-white people in America.   Renee Good’s no immigrant; she was a middle-class, white American.  She’s not Tren de Aragua.  She’s anybody.  Her crime consisted of making a gesture against the actions of the current regime, as she had every right to do.

And very clearly, that’s where this is all headed.  Even if they occasionally manage to nab an actual criminal, that’s not the point.  It’s instead to look strong and overwhelming, to cut an intimidating figure unafraid to get blood on its hands, as putting state violence under the Trump’s personal control and turning it on dissent—regardless of who’s dissenting—will cement his ultimate power grab.

How does that nice Republican church lady who believes in Jesus explain this to herself?

Me, if I reach a point of freezing up in an anger so intense I can barely function, I find myself helped by Rage Against the Machine, whose song “Killing in the Name” still resonates as an anthem of principled refusal.  If I play it four or five times, while it’s not very Buddhist of me, I feel better:

You justify those that died
By wearing the badge, they’re the chosen whites

There are plenty of unchosen whites, as it turns out, and maybe they have more in common with the non-whites than they realized.

Killing in the name of
Killing in the name of

And now you do what they told ya, now you’re under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you’re under control
And now you do what they told ya, now you’re under control

But—and this is the good news—Renee Good may not have died in vain.  While the distress ICE has been visiting on communities has ramped up, suddenly this obvious murder of a regular American mother for no real reason that exists outside of the rightwing fever dream has galvanized the nation’s attention.  Enormous protests broke out all across America in its wake.

Sometimes a moment comes along that clarifies it all.  It makes you see where you stand, and it extends across the board.  Huge protests have swept Iran as the government has gunned down thousands, but you get the feeling that maybe they’ve reached the tipping point, and killing fails to dissuade them.  Trump, with his usual lack of irony and self-awareness, has threatened Iran with bombing for killing its own citizens.

What happens when the government, who by law must protect protest, starts to aim its weapons at anyone who complains?  We’re at the beginning of that now.  I’m afraid it’s only going to get a lot darker, as this highly unpopular administration sinks even lower in its citizens’ estimation.  All it cares about is power, and anyone who thinks like that isn’t interested in relinquishing it.  At the same time, finally America starts to see who they are.  With any luck, it’ll arrive at the cathartic climax:

Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me

Fresh Rage