Nation of child killers (or maybe *just* their souls)
At least Ayn Rand was honest about her admiration for murderers.
1.
Shall I at least checkmark the relatively good news that occurred this week before I launch into darkness? As I write this on Monday afternoon, the FBI is executing a search warrant on Mar-A-Lago and Donald Trump is flipping his lid. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
I don’t want to dwell in delicious celebration for too long; I’m certain Trump remains as dangerous as ever. With every significant “win” on the side of justice and accountability, he gets to keep feeding his election-denying cultists the twisted justifications they need to commit more political violence. That said, let us rejoice for this brief standout moment in the FBI’s long, sordid history of targeting the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
Also: may I walk back a small bit of last week’s pessimism about legislative horse-trading? I’m going to allow the possibility that Paul Krugman1 is right—that the new bill that just passed the Senate is a powerful step in the direction of mitigating climate disaster, despite concessions given to the fossil-fuel industry via their best blue-ish buddy Joe Manchin III.
Finally, on a personal note—and specifically for those who’ve been following my family-of-origin drama for the past year—here on my last full day in Southern California, I’ve come to some peace about my dying mother, some gratitude that I ended my seven-year estrangement in order to help her through this last stage, and some relative softness of heart. It’s nice to remember that there are much worse things in the world than personality-disordered mothers who unintentionally damage their daughters.
Here’s the thing. Because of said mother, I’ve spent long years contemplating what happens to children and adults who sustain emotional and verbal abuse, whether within their family households or out there in their schools, religious communities, sports teams, or general hometown cultures.
I know that a steady stream of even such “subtle” personal incursions as name-calling, belittling, mocking, neglecting, bullying, ignoring, gaslighting, scapegoating, and so forth can lead to profound damage—damage that can take a lifetime to heal, or not heal, as the case often is.
I have marveled at some of the small yet vastly consequential cruelties perpetrated upon the young by the adults who claim to love them.
But then I take a step back from my personal investment in understanding these mundane violations and remember the larger context: a world, and more specifically a nation, that murders children, or at least murders their psyches, as a matter of common practice. Sometimes as a matter of explicit policy.
2.
There is now a detailed, nightmarish report2 in The Atlantic by investigative journalist Caitlin Dickerson, who announced its publication yesterday in a Tweet:
The article—30,000 words long, practically a small book—is impossible to summarize. It is being described as a full accounting, a masterclass in journalism, and one of the most important moral documents of our time. I ask that you find the time to read it, even if it makes your eyes swim and your brain bleed.
It is a dense tale of bad government at every level: unaccountable power shifted from the legislature and agencies to the White House, bureaucratic chaos, manufactured ignorance, paranoid careerism, unasked questions, lies, profiteering, and then—from the very top to the very bottom—perverse intentional cruelty to children and their parents.
In federal court cases, several parents whose children were taken away allege being taunted by agents who said “Happy Mother’s Day!” And parents say they were told that their children would be put up for adoption or that they would never see them again. Others recount being threatened or ignored when they asked where their children were. Perhaps to avoid physical altercations, some agents began deceiving families in order to lure them apart, or pulling children out of holding cells while they and their parents were asleep. Bash reported to DOJ headquarters that two plaintiffs in his district said they had been told their children were being taken to have baths and then never saw them again.
There is a direct line between Jeff Sessions saying out loud: “We need to take away children” and the morally untethered men and women just following orders. (It must be said, not everyone jumped on task; many front-line case workers tried very hard to question what was happening from their powerless positions.) We who were paying attention knew all of this, of course. Now we have the receipts. Horrifying stacks of them. Although still mostly off-the-record. Even Biden administration officials didn’t want to talk to Dickerson about it.
Here’s one of the few people who came out by name to offer a first-hand account of the actual separations.
Neris González, a Salvadoran consular employee charged with protecting the rights of migrants from her country in U.S. custody, was stationed at a CBP processing center in McAllen when she read about Zero Tolerance. “In my little mind,” she told me, “I thought they were going to separate the families” by putting parents in one cell and children in another. “I never thought they would actually take away the children.”
But when she walked into the processing center for the first time after Zero Tolerance was implemented, she saw a sea of children and parents, screaming, reaching for each other, and fighting the Border Patrol agents who were pulling them apart. Children were clinging to whatever part of their parents they could hold on to—arms, shirts, pant legs. “Finally the agent would pull hard and take away the child,” she said. “It was horrible. These weren’t some little animals that they were wrestling over; they were human children.”
Dickerson’s story includes more zoomed-in accounts about specific incidents and specific violated families. I don’t need to repeat them here. You’ll remember them from reports at the time, and the Atlantic article will remind you. I’ll admit I’ve never understood why so many people can’t extrapolate from the horror of a general principle—let’s rip babies out of parents’ arms if they try to seek safety, work, and food in our country—and only begin to be moved by individual accounts. I guess we wouldn’t need a term for “moral imagination” if it were an inbuilt feature of all people everywhere. As a lifelong student of the more subtle forms of abuse I mentioned up top, I am nearly overwhelmed to calculate the fear, anguish, and long-term psychic damage done in these very unsubtle stories. Human beings do not recover from cruelty like this.
3.
Then again, what’s new? Why be horrified? This is a nation born in and built upon the practice of buying and selling humans like livestock, stacking them like shackled cordwood in the hulls of seafaring coffins, tearing their children away, refusing to recognize children as children. Jeff Sessions is de facto Confederate in the same way Stephen Miller, great grandson of Holocaust survivors, is de facto Nazi. The reluctant but hardly refusenik John Kelly (who comes off a bit too benign in Dickerson’s account, IMO) is no different from any war profiteer or crisis capitalist of any era, having joined the board of one of the major companies that built and operated child warehouses with millions in taxpayer dollars. These people are ghouls. Those who want to qualify or hedge here have lost their moral compass or never had one in the first place. But severing parent from child, wife from husband, sister from brother, is a time-honored American tradition. Interring Japanese-American children in detention centers with their families, kidnapping Native-American children to be adopted and Christianized by force, and, to this day, virtually re-enslaving poor African-American children by all economic, geographic, social, environmental, and judicial means possible. Silly of us to think we’ve matured or evolved in the brief space of four centuries, I suppose.
Do I need to point this out? The “We need to take away children” people are also basically the same people who approve of government-ordered forced birth. Because, you know, all lives matter.
4.
In early May the indispensable Thom Hartmann published a piece3 about the libertarian roots of the current Trumpist GOP, and specifically its gleeful willingness to overlook (or actively court) death and suffering among American citizens in all its brutal policies and anti-policies over the last 40+ years.
Of course, many of us have wondered what exactly is up with the grand old party’s embrace of death-cult behavior. Many of us are baffled when certain actions—e.g., Republican denial and downplaying of COVID-19, even when their voters are among the likeliest to die of it—seem insane on the basis of simple electoral math. Killing your constituents can’t possibly be a winning play, except maybe in times when voter self-interest has been separated by delusion, fear, and racist propaganda from anything resembling reality. Still, it doesn’t quite add up.
The widespread rightwing adulation of Ayn Rand—one of the worst so-called writers and thinkers ever to have been labeled with those honorifics without sufficient cause (what I mean is, on the page she’s atrocious in every way, wooden sentences, cartoonishly good or evil characters, robotic dialogue, all of it worse than the pulpiest, most self-parodying bodice-ripper of her era)—Ayn Rand, cult leader, former crush of Alan Greenspan, namesake of Rand Paul, favorite writer of tech elitists Elon Musk, Travis Kalanik, Peter Thiel—Ayn Rand is one clue that solves the puzzle.
According to Hartmann, Rand wasn’t just a low-rent Nietzschean and wartime trauma victim who used legitimate grievances against Bolshevism to justify her sociopathy. She also worshipped the most notorious child murderer of the early 20th-century America, William Edward Hickman. As a teenager, Hickman kidnapped a rich man’s 12-year-old daughter, pretended to keep her alive to collect the ransom, then kicked the dead girl’s mutilated body out of a car door to fall in pieces at her screaming father’s feet. A genuine psycho killer incapable of empathy, the imprisoned Hickman later bragged in detail about his strangling and dismemberment of the girl. It was fun for him.
A young and not-yet-notorious refugee to Hollywood still bearing her Russian name wrote adulatory diary entries about Hickman and described him as the ideal man. He embodied her belief that “one puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”
Rand’s point of view is not original to her in any way—plenty of malignant narcissists operate with exactly that self-justification—but it is also clearly not how one organizes a government of any type, not even a low-tax, low-regulation, no-safety-net type, the type that Rand fanboy Paul Ryan dreamed of enacting while still a beer-guzzling frat boy. Plenty of people who don’t keep Atlas Shrugged by their bedsides have been infected with this way of looking at the world. It’s at the heart of “unfettered capitalism” that revels in theft, unfair competition, lies, cons, schemes, and greed; at the heart of the Reagan anti-government revolution; at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s proclamation that “there is no such thing as society” (although compared to Rand, Thatcher was too soft by adding “only families” to her formulation—Rand didn’t have much interest in those, either).
It’s clearer than ever, or it should be: Trump Republicans (basically all of them now) are either sociopaths or enablers of sociopathy, destroying young lives and old ones by a matter of explicit policy, doing the dirty work of a couple hundred grotesquely wealthy and insanely greedy individuals, all of whom must hate humanity except to the extent they can bilk it and make it suffer.
Within the various agencies at work during the launch and implementation of the “zero tolerance” border policy, there were several agency officials and career staff trying quietly to stall, push back against, or at least mitigate the family separation policy’s predictable impact on vulnerable beings—quietly, i.e. without disturbing their career trajectories in DC.
Many were in plain old denial or assumed other people would solve the disaster before it happened. Almost no one had the capacity or the power to see it and call it for what it was. Evil. The banal kind.
P.S.
Right on cue! I had already finished this piece when I stumbled on yet another relevant item by Bess Levin at Vanity Fair.4 According to a new book, Trump once mused about wanting his generals to be more like Nazi generals, or at least his historically inaccurate version of Hitler’s generals, e.g. blindly loyal to him with no duty to country. Again, none of this is surprising if you were paying any attention at all during the Trump presidency. He’s a great admirer of dictators in general and had to have John Kelly explain to him—while they were in France, of all places—why he should never say “Hitler did a lot of good things.” Please, people. Do not let this man return to office in 2025. Let’s not fully embrace the genocidal potential already within our nation’s history. Put the gleeful child-killers and wannabe fascists back in the hole, please. We’re a deadly enough place without them.
"Put the gleeful child-killers and wannabe fascists back in the hole, please." Yes. PLEASE!