LA and the omnicrisis
from the front lines of Los Angeles, and the world through the lens of Virgil
“Everywhere there’s horror everywhere.”
I was tempted to use that quote, from Virgil’s Aeneid, as the subject line of this newsletter, not because I think that’s a precise description of now, but because it captures something of now, not so much the state of the world but of our seemingly limitless view and relationship to the world and its horrors. I don’t know what your internet consumption is like, but my feed, over the last years, has become increasingly Virgilian1.
Plus, it’s such a shocking, anguished, beautiful line. No comma, a neat lexical loop, harkening both omnipresence and infinitude.2 What a state of mind you must be in not to speak those words as distant observer, but as subject. That empathetic turn is evoked for me when looking at photos of Gaza: the rubbled, dustblind neighborhoods, the bloodied children in their sobbing parents’ arms, the crowds of famished people holding bowls, scrambling for grains and lentils. Is that what they think? Four words: “Everywhere there’s horror everywhere.”
Because you can look these days, if not everywhere than manywhere, you can thumb at your phone and what else are you confronted by but such horrors. And yet our media diet is too fast, too dyspeptic, to really process or understand, to seek to end or change these horrors. They so often enter in, distaste, and then flush through.
As Robert Stone wrote in his 1998 novel, Damascus Gate, “Gaza was the data that threatened the human reference point, the degree at which informed engagement began its metabolic breakdown.”
And now war reboant again in the region. I often ask myself — and I don’t know if it’s a productive or protective question — how much worse will it get? How much closer? (I’m lucky I even get to ask it.)
LA
And by LA I mean the rising and increasingly snapping tension around immigration policy and enforcement in the United States.
Skating around the Posse Comitatus Act, Trump deployed active duty Marines to an American city — a move that seems both escalatory spectacle and tactically questionable ploy to further enable ICE arrests. It’s important to point out that Posse Comitatus was originally meant not to protect cities from government violence, but to allow such violence. Passed in 1878 at the end of Reconstruction, when federal forces left the South after the Civil War, the express intent of the act was to make room for the implementation of Jim Crow.
The reminder prompts another thought, one which, in spirit, I suspect has pushed people to take a stand: the Audre Lord observation that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” When Congress and the courts aren’t effectively hitting the brakes on executive overreach, where else do people turn, but to each other, to protest, to the streets?
To better understand how and why that’s happening, I spoke with someone who was on the front lines in LA for the first week of the uprisings.
But first, a little context about ICE’s current tactics.
Since Trump took office again, the administration is targeting basically anyone anywhere. One of the their very first policy moves was to revoke guidelines that limited immigration enforcement operations at hospitals, churches, and schools.
In Tucson, where I live, Border Patrol arrested a woman in a hospital shortly after she gave birth, and then gave her the option of being deported with or without her US citizen newborn. DHS sent letters to international students — some of them due to graduate in mere weeks — threatening imminent arrest and possible deportation to a third country. ICE has arrested green card holders because of protected speech. (Read, if you can stomach it, Mahmoud Khalil’s letter to his newborn from inside an immigration detention center.) And they’ve sent people to countries where they will be tortured. They’ve tried to send non South Sudanese people to South Sudan, a country on the brink of a genocidal civil war that’s about to descend into a massive famine. They’re descending on neighborhood swap meets like they’re conducting military raids and they’re threatening more warrantless arrests and targeting teenagers.
I could go on and on and on.
In an illuminating article on a series of recent ICE arrests, Rozina Ali wrote about Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, who in March was handcuffed outside his home and told he was going to be deported “today.”
Ali writes of Suri’s child that he “was so shocked by his father’s disappearance that he stopped speaking” and that Suri “thought the agents would deliberately crash the plane he was put on.” Suri later said of his experience in immigration detention: “There was no charge, there was nothing. They made a sub-human out of me.”
More about Suri’s experience here.
LA — “I love it here”
Nic Maier, an artist I’ve known and admired for a long time, told me about his experience on the front lines in both downtown LA and Paramount, where Angelenos have poured into the streets to protect their neighbors and push back against immigration arrests.
Maier was shot by “non-lethal” munitions twice, once at point-blank range. He showed me gruesome photos of a pancake-sized black-and-purple welt on his upper thigh and — from the point-blank shot to his lower shin — a leg swollen to about twice its size from ankle to knee. He couldn’t walk for a couple days and went to the doctor to see if his leg had been broken. It hadn’t.
Despite the gruesome wounds, the emotional impact hit him harder than the physical.
He broke down at one point as we spoke, describing the psychological toll of four days of being shot at by law enforcement officers.
I just felt so overwhelmed, the flash grenades were going off and tear gas was being shot and I was just like, I can't… I can't be around this anymore, like it's too fucking much. I felt myself dehumanizing the people shooting at us and it felt just awful.
I think the amount of explosions going off by me for so long, the number of times I had to have my eyes washed out, just the realization that we're like a bunch of teenagers in pajamas and they have all this gear, all this money, you think about all the stuff that we all care about, each other, and seeing these people that we employ attack us and all of it washing over me over and over again, and then the emotional trauma, and I had convinced myself that they couldn't hurt me...
I saw a lot of crazy shit. One time they shot so many flashbangers at me that I lost consciousness. They were just shooting them one after another and they were exploding right next to my body and… I always try to not run, I always try to walk slowly and move away, kind of like walk backwards, and I was doing that and the flashbangs just kept going off to the point where I lost vision. I couldn't hear and everything was ringing, and my spine was hurting and I don't know how long it was but then I came to and was still standing.
Another time this woman, probably in her late 60s, no protective gear, and she was standing next to me at one point and her hand just kind of exploded and blood was squirting out of it. She started yelling, My hand is broken! and I had, I had nothing. I didn't even have a bandana. I had nothing to offer her.
If you don't see that, why we’re out there, protecting our neighbors, I have a hard time understanding your humanity. And I think all of it just finally hit me and it just shut me down. Or opened me up, and I had to shut down, you know?
On the moment he was shot, from a few feet away, in the shin:
There was a woman in a dress to my left who the cops started shoving, and so I stepped up to the front. She kind of pushed the cops back a little bit and they just unloaded on her. Three or four shots at super point bank range to the legs of the woman in the dress. And so right after that the cop who shot her turned to me and started screaming drop the shield. So I had my shield on and he [the cop] was yelling and I was yelling but nobody could hear because I had on a gas mask. In my opinion the police really don't like when people try to protect themselves, and they target them.
And this photographer, I don't know if it was like a civilian photographer or what their deal was, but he stepped in front of me and said, I got you, bro. And he was blocking the cop from shooting me. And that moment was when I should have really realized how much I was being targeted and how clear it was and I should have fallen back. But then he shot me in the shin from about six feet away.
I didn't really feel the pain because I think I was just so emotionally overwhelmed. I thought I had been protecting myself. I had been just pushing for all these days and then it just kind of knocked me over like a wave.
It was a real reminder that they can hurt me, and hurt me really badly, and they did.
It’s upsetting on a personal level. Yeah I could die, that's fine, but more upsetting on a larger scale, that we pay these violent men to stand there and shoot us, and it's just awful. Especially with this issue, it seems so obvious that you're kidnapping our neighbors, and then when we protect ourselves you attack us.
I just kept saying to myself that I want to cry in my mom's arms. I just wanted to be safe, I wanted to be in my garden, I wanted everybody to just fucking live a nice goddamn life. And it was just so upsetting.
The LAPD is not legally permitted to shoot at protesters with rubber bullets. A couple days later, when Maier was still struggling to walk and his leg was swollen, he went to the emergency room. “It was awesome to be in the presence of true civil servants,” he said.
You know, after what I’d just experienced. They were really concerned at first. They actually bumped me to the front of the line and treated me right away. They were concerned about infection because it looked so insane. And they wanted to do X-rays right away because they thought there was a good chance it could have been a hairline fracture. I had an X-ray technician whisper in my ear that he was going to come out Thursday and that he was a Marine and he was so upset by everything he saw. The intake woman was like, "You were a victim of a crime."
Maier said he wants to get back out to the streets, but first, for his own safety, he feels he needs to make sure he can run, at least jog.
I'm so proud of my city. I'm so happy to be an immigrant here in Indigenous Los Angeles. I haven't felt this kind of civic pride ever. It's been traumatizing and my body's all fucked up in ways it's never been, but I've also never felt this invigorated to be here and to be with folks. It's beautiful to see how people have responded to this pretty much unanimously. All these people who have been here for generations before the US was a country, or Mexico was a country. I really feel like connected to this place in that beautiful way.
People in the streets have countered what they perceive as the violence of the state with their own violence — the rocks and torched cars — but according to accounts from on the ground, from Maier and many others, the violence is largely asymmetric and mostly one direction.
“One of the the more upsetting things about how gaslighting the Democratic leadership in the city and state are,” Maier said, “is that they're saying that they're not in support of ICE and these raids, but then when we try to stop them, they come out and brutalize us.”
Virgil, Virgil, Virgil, Vergil
More writing from me soon, but for now, some of my summer reads:
By which I mean, in this instance, not so much of or like the 1st century BCE poet, but of his tragic, woe-filled singing
The line is from Book Two, during the sack of Troy, and is David Ferry’s translation.
John,
This story had me in tears. I'm so grateful for your story John. God the inhumanity. Nic is such a beautiful person. I'd like to meet him someday. May his Mother hold him in her arms for a long time. And please tell him from me that if I'd been there I would have had his back, as we all do in our hearts.
Wow. thanks for sharing this, John.