Put something down on paper, I told myself, though I have no paper in front of me—only this old laptop. Just start to write, I tell myself: there’s a delete function. It’s like priming a well—throw some water down there and see if any will come back up.
Speaking of back, there’s Abrego García. He was one of over two hundred immigrants who got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. A judge had ordered that the plane taking him and the others be grounded. If they were in the air, they were supposed to turn around. There was no ambiguity in the order.
There was no ambiguity in the response, either. The Trump administration ignored the court order. It was one of the first signs that this administration was completely lawless and felt great about it.
It’s hard to know why Abrego García, and not any of the other “detainees” captured the public eye. Every story had its heartbreak, often appealing to one person but not to another. I worried about Abrego García, but I also worried about Andry Hernández, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela. He got sent to El Salvador as well, and only got out last month to return home to Venezuela.
These are the two guys I know about—what about the other two hundred people who got kidnapped? What about the thousands of people who are facing a decision today—do I risk going to Home Depot, to stand around and look for work as a day laborer? Do I go to mow the lawn or pick the fruit? Or do I stay home and cower? But for how long? And who feeds my family if I do?
My Monday morning, which I think is horrible, is a day at the beach compared to this. I leave my apartment and walk thirty feet down the sidewalk—a house is being renovated on my block. Which means that Richard, who is Cuban and lived in the states briefly, is at risk. So are the other guys who work there. Always, in the past, the gate to the building they’re working on would be open. Now, it’s shut—though you can hear them working there—and locked.
It's relentless, and it’s designed that way. It is, in fact, what I always feared: a vast, unyielding network that is designed to remove a certain number of people every day. Once in the system, you are completely unprotected—it won’t matter if you’re a US citizen or not, if you’re here legally, if your tattoos are just tattoos, not gang symbols.
So Abrego García got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. We all followed his case, and a United States senator, Chris Van Hollen went down to Central America to see him. They met at the hotel von Hollen was staying at, not at the prison camp Abrego García had been sent to.
I watched Abrego García speak to the senator, and thought, “great—but what about the others?” Then the senator left, and Abrego rotted a couple more months in prison.
Sorry, he wasn’t rotting. He was being tortured (actively) and held in subhuman conditions (passively). And when he was released, in early June, the story should have been over. But he was arrested again, this time on charges that he was helping to smuggle people into Texas. Unbelievably, the judge ordered Abrego García to be detained in prison for his own protection. The idea was that he was safer from the government in prison than on the streets.
Even that didn’t work. Abrego García was taken into custody by ICE again this morning, and faces possible deportation to Uganda.
Uganda?
I don’t know much about Uganda, other than that it’s in Africa, it had a murderous dictator (Idi Amin) for a decade or so, and it’s nowhere I want to go. This is probably about all Abrego García knows as well, since he is from Venezuela, and probably doesn't speak great English.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the United States government had to “facilitate” the release of Abrego García from El Salvador. The Trump administration disregarded the order for months; the court did nothing.
The message couldn’t be clearer. I have blue eyes and fair skin, as well as an American passport. I am no more safe than Abrego García. I write critically of Trump and all his minions, and occasionally Blogger (the site hosting this blog) will “flag” my posts. Nobody is reading this blog, but it is being surveilled. My name could appear on a list of subversives, I could be detained at the airport, I could be sent to El Salvador and sleeping in the same bunk as Abrego García.
I’m not safe from my own government.
It’s a change, because I used to rely on the government. I wanted them to tell me about the hurricanes, at least, or the flash floods that might take out the summer camp that I sent my kid to. I want them to keep the mercury in the thermometers and out of the rivers. I’d like them to teach my kids, and yes, slavery is wrong. Teach them that, too.
So Abrego García is having a lousy morning, and I am having a great morning (because I am not in prison, in Uganda or anywhere else) but am not feeling it. I could go to the beach, today, and probably should.
Or I could consult ChatGPT or Replika—two site using artificial intelligence to provide (among other things) counseling to teenagers. Kids aren’t talking to anybody, not even themselves, and they probably don’t have the money to hire a therapist. So they are taking their mental health to…
to…
…a computer program that is highly “intelligent” but not human. The New York Times says that the services offered by artificial intelligence are occasionally better than real therapists.
I’m saying no to the artificial therapists, and my Puritan ancestors are telling me “no” to the beach, as well. Instead, I’m going to be binding a copy of Walden, which is crazy because I have no interest in Walden and less interest in Henry David Thoreau.
We read him “then,” I told myself. “Then’ is the 1960’s, when the biggest issue (and it was big) was a war in Southeast Asia that we shouldn’t have gotten into and couldn’t get out of. We read Thoreau because he had spent a night in jail, for not paying his taxes to support the Mexican-American War.
Thoreau got a visit, too—not from a U.S. senator but from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reportedly dragged himself into town and shouted, “Thoreau, what are you doing in jail?”
Thoreau shouted back, “Emerson, what are you doing OUT of jail?”
Thoreau went on to write On Civil Disobedience, and it got around. Gandhi read it. Martin Luther King read. And we all read it, back in the 1960’s—all of us who were marching and protesting.
How quaint it seems.
However vile Richard Nixon was, he was one of us. He was a human—a piano-playing alcoholic who beat his wife and sobbed drunkenly in front of the oil portraits of Washington and Lincoln. Right—the drunk I became and am now makes me empathize with Nixon. But why do I feel that living with Trump—who is a teetotaler—is worse than living with a drunk? Every situation is always worse than you imagined, everything happens too quickly, any control is illusory and usually a trick played by fate to tell you, once again, that you’re fucked.
That said, what do you do?
Well, Michelle Obama knew the answer, which is when they go low, we go high.
Lovely, we’ll stride proudly with our head held high!
…as we approach the guillotine.
Gavin Newsum—the governor of California and Trump’s current most-outspoken critic—has the opposite approach. Beat ‘em at their game, he says, and proposes gerrymandering California to counteract Texas. That might work, if the rest of the country buys the argument that, “well, they(meaning Texas) started it!” I used to try this on my mother, and it was a dud.
So it’s a Monday morning and people are doing their Monday morning things like making a living and binding notebooks. Not that those two activities have anything to do with each other.
And Judge Zinis is having her Monday morning as well. She’s the judge dealing with the Abrego García case, and she has ruled for months now that the federal government must “effectuate and facilitate” Abrego García’s release from his illegal detention. The Supreme Court threw out the word “effectuate,” which meant “do” but agreed 9-0 that “facilitate” had just the right passivity—sitting by and letting the El Salvadorians put him on a plane, if they were so disposed.
The United States did nothing; the El Salvadorians did nothing. The Supreme Court did nothing.
Judge Zinis must have been pissed—and why shouldn’t she be? She has been ordering the government to come up with any real evidence they might have against Abrego García, and all they come up with are plane rides (no ticket needed) to foreign jails.
Worse, ICE set up a hearing with Abrego García and then arrested him when he showed up. It was a trap.
Well, she must have been disgusted, and I was disgusted too, which is why binding a copy of Waldenseemed like the least nonsensical thing to do. Short of buying Judge Zinis lunch (they probably have Uber Eats or Door Dash up there) there wasn’t much I could do.
Want to know my worst secret?
I bind books so that I don’t buy bottles.
And since the only bottles I buy now (infrequently) have shampoo in them, I can now bind books. Even better, I can thread a needle.
You smile indulgently, perhaps, thinking that it’s just aged hands and faltering eyesight that keeps me from threading needles easily. But it has nothing to do with that. At the end of my drinking, my hands shook so badly that a friend felt my hand shaking as we stood joined together in a circle to say the serenity prayer, eight years ago. For years, I tried to thank God, mentally, every time I threaded a needle, which became second nature, of course.
I made jokes about it: “It’s just as we feared,” I once told Raf when he came upon me sewing something.
“I’ve gone from the bottle to the needle!”
He wasn’t amused.
So Judge Zinis made another ruling that said that the government cannot deport Abrego García—and this seems to have stuck.
At least for now.
9:23 on Tuesday morning.
So then I went off to bind Walden, which I thought was going to be a simple affair, since the book is only 50 pages or so.
Not that I remember all that well, since the last copy I saw of Walden was half a century or so ago. It was a dirty, slim, earmarked (if not indeed ragged) paperback with cheap paper and miniscule print. It had been thrown on a dirty sofa next to an overflowing ashtray.
Well, books change over the years.
They grow up, maybe, since my copy of Walden, which I downloaded from the Internet Archives is derived from a copy published in that leisurely age, 1899. It has all sorts of gewgaws the paperback never had, like faded but impressive woodblock engravings (or reproductions, at least), and type font that is usually associated with the dire side effects of a vitally needed drug. (You know, “may cause itching, ___45-other-things, seizures, paralysis and death.”) Yesterday’s book was on cream-colored paper that was substantially thicker than the toilet-paper-like paper of the old paperback. And the paper will probably stay cream and not turn brown, since it’s acid and lignin free.
The Victorians were generous—more port? Another cigar?—in their books, too. The book comes with a generous portrait of the author, a wieldy forward and introduction (probably a preface in there, as well), a list of the assorted works of Henry David Thoreau, and for all I know an extensive biographical sketch.
The book was over five hundred pages, and would have collapsed any old sofa that it had been hurled onto.
So it had grown up, Walden had, since the days of my youth. Actually, it had aged substantially better than I had, and I got real pleasure seeing the sections slowly build themselves up.
A book is bound from the back to the front covers. It’s logical, of course—would you build a house by constructing the roof, putting the attic underneath it, then the second floor, and all the way to the basement?
Thus the binder, if he is of a mind, rereads the book from the back. It’s like telling a story with friends—you remember what happened, but not why, or all the details surrounding why it happened, and why it had to happen. As the evening goes on, you remember more and more of the back story (as we call it, now).
And as the afternoon wore on, I left paragraphs starting with, “And so my two-year journey into the busy solitude of the pond drew to a close,” and worked my way towards, “the noise and bustle of the city had become impossible for me.”
End-papers, cover, and bam--that’s it.
Another secret—binding a book is a LOT more fun than actually writing it. Writing goes on forever, and then you have to watch your friends shift nervously, every time someone mentions the fact that you’ve written a book. Because they haven’t read it, and why should they? But they’re feeling lousy about it, as they should.
(This makes perfect sense, to me at least. But don’t worry—I’ll probably edit it out.)
Binding a book is nice because the rules are clear from the beginning, and you follow them or you don’t. If you do, and if you’ve made 500 awful books or so—then you’ll be fine. You can throw the rules out, and more likely than not, you’ll end up with a mess, and not the glorious creation your fevered brain attempted to create.
Even though I tell myself, before I begin writing, “you know all the words, you just have to put them into the right order,” it doesn’t really help. Writing a book is like a blank canvas, but binding that book is more akin to a coloring book. The mind can rest as the hands toil.
And so Abrego García had his day in court, and not a government-funded vacation in a Ugandan jail.
The world has another copy of Walden.
I’m still sober.
Judge Zinis is plowing through her day, and I am plowing through mine.
Is it enough?
No—but it has to be.
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