No turning back
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 48
CURRENT EVENTS DEP'T.
The United States Flies Further Out Beyond the Law
PEOPLE SAY THIS about the collapse of law and the onset of authoritarianism and it's true: there are still errands to run. Dirty dishes are piled around the sink because the dishwasher is broken, and the guy who sold me a replacement dishwasher called to cancel the scheduled delivery and installation because the guy from the apartment management company hadn't gotten back to him with the certificate of insurance. The younger kid had a mandatory basketball practice scheduled at the last minute, which meant I had to take a train to meet him on a subway platform to hand off his afterschool math bookbag in exchange for his regular school bookbag. There's a high school open house later this week, on a day his afternoon and evening are already double- or triple-booked. Last night, before bed, I watched a celebratory video posted by the White House's "rapid response" account on X.com showing people who'd been seized in the United States being manhandled on their way into a forced-labor complex in El Salvador—a concentration camp, contracted out to a foreign government.
The people in the video were presumably the ones the Trump administration had flown to El Salvador this weekend in direct violation of a judge's order. As I type this, there's less than half an hour until the judge has ordered the administration to show up for a hearing into how and why the order was ignored. The administration is apparently doing everything it can think of to refuse to cooperate. The Department of Justice, which is in charge of federal law enforcement, does not believe the law can be enforced against it.
The video, which came from El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, is hideous. The Trump administration claims that the captives are members of Venezuela's Tren de Aragua gang. That claim has not been subject to due process of law, and there's no particular reason to believe that Immigration and Customs Enforcement's gang-identification methods—which seem to revolve around tattoos—are any better than any other cops' gang-identification methods, or the methods we used to tell al Qaeda operatives from shepherds in Afghanistan. But it doesn't particularly matter. The brutality in the video is brutality no matter on whom it is being dispensed. The prisoners are shackled, hemmed in on all sides by masked and armored guards, force-marched along with a heavy hand shoving down on the base of the skull to keep them doubled over. They are forced to kneel, bent low, as the guards shave away their long hair or beards. The whole point, for the guards and for the cameras, is to savor their physical helplessness, to reduce human beings to vulnerable bodies, to dominate and to distress.
As with the government's staged perp walk of Luigi Mangione in a cartoonishly huge, dark cloud of guards geared out for combat, the Salvadoran video is so attached to the imagery of power as to forfeit any ordinary claim to high ground. Whoever the stooped and harried figures may have been before, whatever they may have done, the faceless figures doing the harrying are the villains—acting in a frenzy of malice and cowardice, with the impunity of people who know that any violence could only possibly flow one way.
This is, I think, the obvious and natural response to the video. But the existence of the video certifies that it is not the only response; the people who made and shared it felt differently. They had been trained, or had trained themselves, to feel differently. Donald Trump campaigned for president surrounded by sinister images of dark-skinned, tattooed men, telling stories of terrible crimes, warning his public that this was the menace that had been unleashed on them and that only he could stop it. Maybe if a person had soaked in that fear long enough, the sight of the masked guards making the prisoners crouch and flinch and scurry would feel like a relief. Clearly, historically, people by the millions have been taught this other way of seeing. For years now, while I've been packing lunches and ordering cat food and doing the laundry—and while, presumably, other people have been doing similar ordinary things—those other people have been working themselves toward this.
Now the hearing is over. The Trump administration's lawyers did show up, though they apparently tried to stonewall the judge. Eventually they attempted to mount an argument that the planes had flown out of the reach of the courts. The judge set another hearing for tomorrow morning, after dinner and bedtime and breakfast.
The New York Times columnist M. Gessen wrote today about being a trans person and a formerly stateless immigrant, as the Trump administration makes those groups the first targets of the dictatorial powers it has assumed. Gessen noted that the standard thing people say, trying to rouse people against the abuse, is, "If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you."
Gessen continued:
But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, March 16, 2025
★ The breeze was warm and damp, carrying a strong whiff of dogshit. Pigeons flapped up from a mass of sodden and crushed teal-colored snack chips. Something greasy on the wet sidewalk stuck to the shoes and had to be worked off with a grinding, twisting stride. The downtown train was slow and stifling. Half-marathoners in their foil blankets got on board. The afternoon wind throbbed and boomed. Behind it, in the night, came the remains of the coast-to-coast destructive storm, as heavy rain.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
FOR MY COLUMN at Defector, I wrote about Senator Chuck Schumer's decision to abandon the filibuster and surrender to Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans on their spending resolution, out of fear that a government shutdown would be too dangerous:
Tom Scocca
From the very beginning of the Trump era, Democratic leadership operated on a pair of interlocking beliefs: that Trump, left to his own devices, would naturally bring about his own downfall, and that in the meantime, choosing to do nothing about Trump was more publicly respectable—more mature, more sensible—than trying to fight back, and possibly failing.
Experiencing two months of this administration has belatedly shaken many of them out of the fantasy and into active desperation. But their Senate leader still clings to it. When he talked to the press before he let the continuing resolution through, Bloomberg reported, Schumer "acknowledged Republicans could try and jam Democrats with another partisan bill in September, but expressed hope that Trump will be less popular by then and more Republicans will resist him."
FOR AIR MAIL, I reviewed Raphael Cormack's Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult, an account of the showmen who made their fortunes selling unseen mysteries to early 20th century audiences looking for an alternative to the accumulating horrors of modernity:
Tom Scocca
Beneath all the talk of ancient wisdom, Cormack presents the craze for the occult—“a vague and slippery term but the best one there is”—as a fully modern phenomenon. The book juxtaposes the story of Tahra Bey with that of his younger fellow spiritual celebrity, Dr. Dahesh (“‘Dr. Astonishing,’ in Arabic”), born Salim Mousa al-Ashi to Assyrian Christian parents in Jerusalem. Where Tahra Bey delivered fakirism to the West, Dr. Dahesh presented the Western science of hypnotism to the East: a similar bill of entrancement, divination, and other sensational feats, packaged under a different kind of exoticism.
Whether running west to east or vice versa, the mystic path tended to carry its practitioners to the finest hotels or apartments and champagne-drenched late nights at the cabarets. It also brought them from mere show business into broader spiritual projects—the “Institute of Tahraism” and a full-fledged “message,” if not quite religion, called Daheshism, complete with disciples—and eventually into accusations of, or prosecution for, charlatanry, fraud, and other misconduct.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Cook Book of Practical and Tested Baking and Cooking Recipes, Prepared by The Ladies Aid of the Lutheran Hospital, Fort Wayne, Ind., published in 1927, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
TOMATO AND HORSERADISH SANDWICH
One tablespoon butter, 1/4 cup grated horseradish, 1 tomato, bread. Mix butter, horseradish, and mayonnaise together. Skin and slice tomato, sprinkle with salt and paprika. Spread thin slices of bread and butter with the mixture and put slices of tomato between, cut into fancy shapes and garnish with parsley.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
