The American Culture (Part 3)

Dear Pedro,

I've been in a kind of stupor since I last wrote, June felt like a slide into a filthy pit, and I have kind of felt squished inside a stupidity, a helpless feeling, a kind of smoldering mental and spiritual torpor, given all that is happening here.

Somehow the recent political assassinations in Minnesota and the explosion of state kidnappings of thousands of brown people by masked agents across the country, and most especially the systematic murders in Gaza directly funded by AIPAC and congressional money and our tax dollars, all swirling within a far graver and quieter context for us in the US: the rise of a police state -- somehow all of that swirled together has felt actually physically crushing, at once stultifying and enraging.

By physically crushing, I mean that the air actually feels like it has gone through a thickening, our bodies feel heavier, stiffer. So I'm grateful to you and Vinduet and Priya and Bendik for the chance to "talk with someone" who is living in a functioning democracy. It feels helpful to me to know you can literally hear me and are listening from a world that better knows how to care for itself.

Despite how obviously messed up all things here are now, I got worried that all the stuff I said in my previous about driving around with a handgun might comport too readily with all the Hollywood depictions of Americans cosplaying with guns, the way we so self-parodically do here, or that I am somehow otherwise a ghoulish puppet of propaganda, duped by a trollfarm in St Petersburg into believing we Americans are awash with white militias, or like maybe I've succumbed to a paranoia manipulated by some malicious algorithm synthesized and cultured in a digital lab in Silicon Valley. But I'm sorry to report the violence here is real and very tawdry, like violence always is.

And increasingly "it" manifests. The thing about violence is that it masks itself, it camouflages itself, until it presents itself and then refuses to be ignored. Or conditions are otherwise so volatile that it surprises even those who perpetrate it. At the end of June, a dear and old friend of mine and I celebrated the longest day of the year by visiting together a broadlawned mountaintop observatory in the Blue Ridge Mountains, around an immense telescope, and despite that mountain top being cold and windy and cloudy it was the best time ever, wrapped in sweaters and beanies and catching glimpses of constellations with other weirdos in the dark ... but then the next day as I was driving homeward through the mountains of Tennessee I came upon a white man in a pickup screaming with his window down at the long solid snake of traffic I was a part of as it came streaming around a mountain corner in front of his driveway, clogging his world and delaying his arrival somewhere important because some distant highway closure dozens of miles away, in another part of the immense Appalachian range, caused us to stop-up the traffic at his very front lawn, choking off the scrawny thread attaching him to civilization. And I happened to be situated right in front of him when he with window unrolled, shoved his middle finger up into the air like a tiny javelin (knitting needle?) of hate and threw his eyeballs right at me, gunned his pickup right at me, and came lurching and braking at my car screaming, teeth bared, "I'm fixin to shoo-oo-oot someone!" and I had no reason to doubt him, and was happy to leave his white ass in the rearview, and then about a mile later I took a picture of a small house at the back of an immense yard, along this same choked stretch of the Dixie Highway, a small house with a small porch on which were hungTWO Confederate flags side by side, making the little red house look like a weird enraged flag-eyed face.

So the vibe here is not okay. And it has expressly to do with whiteness. It's always been violent here, especially since 1850 and the institution of a series of slavery laws, but I saw more Confederate flags this spring in my four otherwise wonderful trips to Tennessee and North Carolina than I have ever before seen. So the signs on the world are changing here and many of them have expressly to do with our settler colonial and slavery past: old flags return, renaming of old forts after Confederate generals again, renaming the Gulf of Mexico. White people here are enculturated to hate and fear and patrol and control nonwhite bodies. I remember being four years old and sitting in my mom's '57 Chevy on a street in Minneapolis Minnesota when someone in the car hissed, "Indians! Lock the doors!" This would have been 1970 near the very same north Minneapolis neighborhood, on Plymouth Avenue, where only two years prior the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded by Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, and Russell Means ... four indigenous gentlemen who helped, from that very neighborhood where we were locking our doors, electrify a pro-indian activist and educational and cultural movement, AIM, across the continent as an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, pro-indigenous, pro-education, pro-empowerment, pro- and pan-indian, pro-cosmopolitan movement meant to better the conditions of indigenous people everywhere. AIM, founded in Minneapolis Minnesota, changed America. Not least, AIM helped wake white people up to a culture and a history that white people had tried to suppress and literally bury. And AIM's political and educational efforts bettered everyone's lives in great part because of its ability to call attention to indigenous issues and history, helping people to understand not only who but that indigenous people are. And I now wonder in one sense if my mother and us in that car were ultimately probably safer in that neighborhood in that moment than in any other neighborhood or suburb in Minneapolis at that time. We were sitting at one of the beating hearts of anti-colonialism in North America and we had our car doors locked to it.

I think one of the things that few white people appreciate is that it is core to the history of the enculturation of whiteness that part of the socialization of whiteness and what it means to be white in some parts of this country meant serving on slave patrols when required by law and custom to do so. This is one of the reasons why police and policing in the United States is so toxic: if historian Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad of Harvard's Kennedy School is to be believed, there is a direct throughline between American policing and the culture of slavecatchers ... and the idea that the brown body needs to be captured and controlled. American militarism and its whiteman's love of tacticool clothing comes ultimately from slave patrols and white people-hunting paramilitary gangs ... The love of paramilitarism here isn't an accident or an affectation: it comes from an actual history of vigilante paramilitarism of slave patrol and surveillance-of-brown-bodies culture. I think few people today really appreciate that fact and what it means.

At a press conference on July 1 last week, during a tour of the new "Alligator Alcatraz" concentration camp designed to house captured migrants that was just built in the swamps of the everglades around Ochopee, Florida, Trump was asked by a reporter about whether the government would begin using the new concentration camp system to standup a "program" of "farm workforce and service sector workforce," the reporter noting that migrant detentions are hurting multiple industries. And Trump's reply underscored that he is indeed aware that imprisoning migrant laborers ultimately harms American farmers and hotelliers who rely on that migrant labor, so Trump then offered that they will be implementing a program of "owner responsibility" wherein American farm owners and hotelliers will participate, in Trump's words, in "a system of signing them [the migrants kept in the detention facility] out, so that they don't have to go" -- meaning migrants won't have to be deported.

The idea, according to Trump, works this way: detained migrants can stay in the detention camps and not be deported so long as farm and service sector "owners" can use their labor. Rather than being deported, they can instead by libraried at the concentration camp and checked out like books to be used for their labor. This program would satisfy the needs of the Trump administration to control brown migrants while also ensuring that white employers are not deprived of their cheap migrant labor. So the government will be allowing farmers to use the inmates as labor.

The word for this is obviously slavery. Its manifestation today, as compared to its first advent in the United States, may have different legitimating rhetoric and different political origins, and it may have different methods of ideological manipulation and a different cultural implementation, and it may function in an economically different way, but it is still the control of brown bodies, and the labor of brown bodies, as economic objects: in this case, these bodies are not just bodies that labor on farms or in hotels ... now, in this new gig-necropolitical economy, each brown body is also a political object and an object of spectacle, a prop, a profitable prop, so to speak, in an economy of xenophobia and racism and caught up in fascist spectacles of attention.

I must tell you that at an emotional level of bodily vibe things here seem suddenly very cruel, as if we have been gripped by a necropolitics of cruelty. It's always been cruel here for people who aren't white, and now, gee whiz, now for white people it's also cruel too, imagine that, even though white people are often too stupid or too resentful to know they are also the objects of their own cruelty. And like all true cruelty, American cruelty somehow also has a theocratic component. Like there's a straight-up necropolytheocratic vibe to the US right now. I'm not sure how to describe it.

Yes, we are returning to our roots as a carceral, necrocapitalist state -- and yes the US has always loved controlling black and brown bodies, and yes the vibe and ideological atmosphere that was once necessary for that is apparently clearly permeating everything once again. Yes all that is true. For a while, we were doing well: Kennedy's Peace Corps, Johnson's Great Society, Civil Rights legislation, Roe, even Nixon cared for the poor, fuck Reagan though), and if we were as a nation once hopeful and productive and happy and wealthy and far more peaceful and doing our best ... we certainly aren't now.

If whatever we are witnessing can be construed in biblical terms, it feels like what we are dealing with in Trump.2 are the Old Testament pagan deities of the Levant. Like literally the old spooky Canaanite ones.

It feels like we are witnessing more than just the rise of mammon: certainly this administration's apotheosis of neoliberalism's desire to privatize wealth while burdening the public with debt is mammon-like. But if Musk is Mammon, Trump is Moloch.

It really feels like there is really no other metaphorical correlate for this administration's evil culture of cruelty-for-its-own-sake than the Canaanite deity of child sacrifice, Moloch.

Moloch wants blood. According to one study USAID cuts may lead to more that 14 million deaths globally in the next decade, with about 5 million of those deaths being children under the age of five. So, child sacrifice is precisely what Trump and his minions have teed up. That is what they have done by gutting and defunding USAID programs, by the choking off food stamp programs and medical research programs, and by the doge-driven defunding of the National Weather Service: Moloch, as it just this past week resulted in the completely preventable deaths of over a 100 people on the Guadalupe River in Texas, at least 28 of whom were girls at a Christian summer camp swept to their deaths in a flash flood that would not have otherwise gone unforeseen, had not Trump gutted the NWS, while Trump, in his most melifluous and self-satisfied voice says piously in front of our cameras about the drowned children, "It's a terrible thing to watch," and then squints and sucks wind through his cheeks, when he obviously loves watching it. Trump is why stories of King Herod were told. He wants those bodies tangled in the river. Moloch wants child sacrifice.

He wants us enraged. And we are enraged. He wants blood sacrifice and he will get blood sacrifice. Once asked for, it is given. Once it becomes possible for a person to ask for blood sacrifices to be made to him, the conditions are already such that that request will be granted. So, Trump has asked, and he will be given his sacrifices. And Moloch wants child sacrifice.

We are not at war yet. But I can feel a charge rising in people. There is an energy here and it only needs to be organized and directed at a goal. It feels like we are accelerating toward something, so I suppose it is fitting that we should have an accelerationist president elected by adherents of an accelerationist religion. I fear we are going to start to see widespread political assassination attempts soon: in April we saw the arson of the home of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. We saw two political assassinations only last month of two Minnesota state politicians, and their families, both shot in their homes, not far from Plymouth Avenue in north Minneapolis where AIM was founded. The assassin is a Minnesotan Christian preacher and he lined up the family of Senator Hoffman in the hallway and shot them all point blank only a few weeks ago, after shooting to death State Speaker of the House Emerita, Melissa Hortman and her husband. During Trump 1.0 the governor of Michigan was threatened with death and kidnapping, and while her conspiracists were indicted, their pardon is "being looked at" by Trump. From 2016-2021 we saw a ten-fold increase in incidents and threats of political violence, from 900 to 9000. Journalists here are repeatedly threatened and SWATted. I know it has only increased since the pandemic. It feels like we are going to experience a significant rise in mass shootings and mass casaulty events here soon. Over our already preposterously monstrous levels. Moreover, we are crippling the FBI, the very organ by which we have managed to defend ourselves from white supremacists domestic political violence, which is our greatest threat in the United States, according to our last (credible) FBI director. White political terrorists have haunted and shaped this nation for centuries. The FBI, say what you want about it, has been very good at stopping white domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing. But I not only fear that we will see a police-on-crowd shooting soon, I fear that Trump wants that. He in fact did ask both Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper if troops simply can't shoot protestors in the legs. So, Trump wants a conflict. Moloch. He wants sacrifice and bloodshed. He is now this week threatening to "take federal control" of both Washington DC and New York City. We are going to see attacks on police stations soon. And this is what Trump wants. He wants us enraged. And it is working: we are growing enraged. We are experiencing something unbelievably unsettling and seismic right now. And it is asking for blood sacrifice.

There is something happening to us now that is beyond political: stupid and vampire-movie-like it feels to say, it does feel like we are being thrust back to our primate roots, like we are watching ourselves through some vampire's mirror, because what is happening is beyond even some weird comic book primitivism, influencers in the man-o-sphere advocating monarchy -- a return to apeman patriarchy, the real man's man's way of being, alphas galore, but it is not just masculinist self-aggrandizement: Trump has the most powerful nuclear arsenal ever amassed at his disposal. And he is clearly stupid and insane and ingenious. There is an oldtime hardon right now for alphamale masculinist patriarchy and monarchy and all the cocksuckers of what Blake called Nobodaddy, who cares for nothing but his own power -- so whatever monstrous thing you can dream up, this thing that is happening to us, now deeply impoverished Americans, is not just happening at the political and cultural level, nor just on the level of public policy and civic structure.

Rather it is something else and I can feel it in my neighbors and students: I feel like we are witnessing a kind of emptying of ourselves, something is leaving us, and I somehow think it has to do with our phones and AI and an addiction to spectacle. I think Trump is a manifestation of the industries of spectacle. And whatever made Trump through us has also made us sick. Like our problem is deeper than Trump and Putin, our problem is partly an industry of attention that helped make and entrench Trump and Putin, and we cannot control whatever this spectacular force is that has gripped us.

And we are instead being driven around by it, as if we were those zombie ants with great fungal horns on our heads. And we think Trump's in charge -- but how could that possibly be true? Think about it: That guy can't be in charge. That's not possible. In what possible universe could that man be in fucking charge of anything anyone cared about?

No, Trump's not Trump. He is an it, a that. And that is a golem. We have been gripped by a force. Nobody is driving this fucking bus. "It" is driving. Whatever the golem is that has possessed us, through the attention economy, whatever that thing is, is driving whatever the thing is that we now are.

But I am hopeful. Because I am extremely enraged. And I am armed, lol.

But I'm gonna send you one more letter. Because I don't want to end on a rage-y note. That seems impolite. No, I want to end on a hopeful note, Pedro, because darn it I do feel hope. I do feel hopeful.

Thanks for listening to all this, Pedro. I'm grateful for your ear and your always kind and thoughtful attention. Miss you buddy.

Gabe

15th of July 2025

Dear Gabriel.

Now I'm the one to apologize for my slowness. It's been a minute since I got your letters and I'm only now sitting down to reply. And the reason for my slowness is not simply that I've been trying to land a novel and a music project this spring and summer, or that I've also been trying to take it easy and enjoy the summer days and the new puppy that has landed in our lives out here out on the island. But I also have to admit that my slowness is also due to a kind of refusal: your letters are frighteningly clear, such I can feel the helplessness and the rage and the sadness in your writing – it feels furious and short of breath. Sad and jagged writing – not because it's hesitant or inelegant – but because there is so much to say, too many things that can't really be expressed through reason and analysis, it is as if language is fighting against a kind of cyclops or a sumo wrestler, but a sumo wrestler made of sand or cobwebs. Gollum, you write. Pent-up forces and identity dissolution and power without moral control. What happens when a metaphor is no longer metaphorical? What happens when Gollum is no longer a corporeal entity but something like an uncontrolled virus? What happens to us when we realize that we have created something we can neither understand or control?

My refusal stems from my powerlessness. What can I possibly say? What can my privileged gaze really contribute here? All the time I've been thinking: I need to listen to what you have to say, that has always been the point; to look at what is going on inside the USA throughyour gaze, your language, your sensibility. What does it say about me that I would rather be silent and absent and listening, rather than active and participating?

When we first talked about this correspondence, I mentioned that Trump’s inauguration and JD Vance’s visit to Europe and Musk’s terrifying role in the new administration reactivated and made me relive my childhood terror – growing up in a military dictatorship where the methods and practices were of course similar to the terrifying developments you outline in your letters; a world of disappearances, violence and systematic lies, but also the fact that some are allowed to become strong, that some worldviews are accentuated, favored and confirmed and used to create chaos, unrest, to strengthen and weaken at the same time. I've wondered: Where does the white bitterness come from? What is the cause of the majority’s resentment? I see it and have seen it before. When a structural problem is individualized, the stage is set for revenge, for retribution, for the grammar of fear, which in our American case is protectionist: we are children of a cultural rape that is several centuries old, an unpaid debt, a system whose spinal reflex is to protect and exploit everything that has been taken from us without acknowledging the crime. But instead transforming it into a civilizational right, a kind of inevitability, a restoration of something that never really existed. As you write: It's a great time to be a white, confident, trigger-happy white person. It's a great time to blame a group, to point, demonize, reify people. It's a great time to conjure dramatic spectacles void of knowledge and history about grand old times that never existed in the first place, yet now travel as flashy nostalgic conveyances. I mean, a person could ask, exactly who was America great for in the first place? What kind of a world does a dictatorship want to return to? I remember a vacation to Spain in 1986, when the woman we rented our apartment from spoke at length in praise of Franco and the beautiful harmony that prevailed in Spain under his rule. I think back with horror of those of my family members in Chile who still have pictures of Pinochet hanging in their living rooms, and who long for the simple and fine times when the General had control of the country.

I wish I could confirm your concern, but no, dear Gabriel, I do not think you are exaggerating when you write about bloodshed, blood sacrifice, Gollum and Moloch and the sacrifice of children and the unmasked reintroduction of slavery, in its purest and most evil form. I also know how the performativity you write about works, how it is both private and public. That mask means that there doesn't necessarily have to be a connection between what someone thinks and does. That mask gives the person the opportunity to be a Christian, to believe in Jesus and the Gospels, and at the same time approve of a genocide. That mask gives the system the opportunity to talk about freedom and greatness while it steals, rapes, plunders, and deceives. That mask allows Trump to send thousands of soldiers to L.A. and none to find the children in Texas. And when the Question is erased as a line of communication, as a possible bridge, as the foundation of dialogue – then only factionalism remains, only camouflage, only manipulation. It is so sad, Gabriel, to realize where we are. It is so frightening to read about what you write, about the self-righteousness of naked violence, about continent-sized delusion, all the self-deception and confusion that prevails. And frightening. That is what Trump want, you write. Blood. Chaos. A kind of purification, in the fascist sense. I wonder what the consequences of this "wanting" will be. Nobody drives the bus, you write. "It" drives the bus. Fuck.

You know me. Everything I can learn I have learned from books and songs. And in times like these, I go to books and songs. That is my privilege. That is where I can think, at least. Today, after reading your last letter for the umpteenth time, I stopped at the word vigilante, which I first heard in my childhood (men with rifles who were supposed to protect rich landowners) and which I later encountered again in Woody Guthrie, in his chronicling accounts of the depression of the 1930s. Guthrie's life as a wandering homeless vagabond was not only a rebellion against the age's demands to participate in a streamlined system, as I see it, but also a variation on Rimbaud's rebellion - a rebellion in which intoxication and poetry and the non-bourgeois are the means by which the poet/singer are transformed into a visionary, a seer. Though Guthrie's weapon was different from Rimbaud's luminous visions, it was also the same; This machine kills fascists he wrote on his guitar and set out on the road to record a reality that would be recognized by both the present and the future could, miles away from a posh kind of life that - in Guthrie's time - was filled with he smoothness of Guy Lombardo's jazz band, Benny Goodman, Tom Dorsey, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Escapism was clearly not Woody Guthrie's cup of tea, and there is a direct line from the slogan he painted on his guitar to the rise of the militarized youth rebellion during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations and the protest movements that have emerged in the United States in recent years. This land is your land, Woody Guthrie's most famous song - you know this of course - was written as a counterpoint to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" (the melody Guthrie took from the Baptist gospel hymn "Oh, my loving brother," which The Carter Family recorded as "When the World's on Fire," in the 1920s. My impression (you can correct me) is that the United States has in many ways embraced this song almost as an alternative national anthem. But there are a couple of verses that Guthrie wrote (and recorded) that are almost never sung.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said 'No Trespassing.'
But on the other side it didn't say nothing
That side was made for you and me.

Or the variation:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, it said private property
But on the back side it didn't say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.

It is easy to imagine – by extension of these verses – the massive unemployment that followed the Wall Street crash of the 30s, and the massive migrations that took place in its wake, where people of all ages traveled across the continent to find jobs that did not exist. It is also not difficult to imagine how these verses must sound to a Mexican illegal immigrant, or to a Mexican who has not even become illegal, but is standing in Tijuana, on the wrong side of the wall between the 3rd and 1st worlds. Or what about all those who board a boat to cross the Mediterranean, those who want to get into Europe, the Eastern European girls who prostitute themselves for a lick and nothing, the Roma people who beg and kneel with folded hands when we pass by them?

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Dear friend. I really don't know what I want to say, but I hope that my words are less confusing to you than to me. The summer is calm. I am reading Thomas Mann's Joseph Quartet and I am probably ashamed of it too; here I sit in my very ugly summer shorts and immerse myself in myths and legends and the past. But you are who you are, too. A big hug to you from here, my friend. Remember to breathe, and I look forward to seeing you again, when the time comes.

All the best

P