Doom Report (Week 8: Didn't Know that "Disappeared" Was a Transitive Verb)

I learned what “Los Desaparecidos” means by watching a movie, sometime around the turn of the century.  I can no longer remember exactly which one, but, looking back with the faulty memory of a quarter-century passed, I suspect it was probably Of Love and Shadows, which is not (as that faulty memory assured me) about Argentinian dictator Jorge Videla, but rather about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.  But perhaps I can be forgiven for mixing them up: they were dictators during roughly the same time period, in neighboring countries, and were both a large part of Operation Condor, which is a particularly chilling thing to read about, because the US was actively supporting these brutal dictators, on the grounds that they were arresting Communists, and of course we hate Communists.  And this is not one of those “oh, people say that the CIA was involved, but we really don’t know for sure”: no, we know, because in 1999 Clinton declassified all the communiques between these regimes and our government, mostly in the form of Henry Kissinger, who might be responsible for more deaths than anyone else in history.

But, anyway, I’m pretty sure the word “desaparacidos” wasn’t used directly in this movie I was watching, but it did mention “the Disappeared,” which was a grammatical construction that struck my ears as odd at the time.  Which is what led me to the Wikipedia articles which used the term, which itself is just the Spanish word for “disappeared” turned into a noun.  Because, you see, these dictators weren’t just arresting the Communists (and anyone else they thought disagreed with them): they were whisking them away to secret facilities, torturing them, and, more often than not, murdering them.  This process came to be know as “to disappear” someone.  As Videla once said:

They are just that ... desaparecidos.  They are not alive, neither are they dead.  They are just missing.

You see? no body, no crime.  As long as you don’t know where your father, or brother, or husband is, you can’t accuse me of killing him.  I may have lost him—so many prisoners, so much paperwork, so much bureaucracy, it is so hard to keep track—but I’m sure he’ll turn up.  And this is how “disappear” transformed into a transitive verb.  Which leads us to the words Heather Lofthouse spoke on this week’s Coffe Klatch:

They disappeared him.  I mean, I didn’t even know that that was a transitive verb.  They have ... you disappear people.  I mean, that, to me, is not what happens in America.

No, it’s not, because it’s what happens in South America, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia ... although it must be noted that among all the countries from those regions, the United States (along with Northern Ireland) does sort of stand out in the “Examples” section of Wikipedia’s “enforced disappearance” article.

And, yet, the big story this week was that of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent (Green Card) resident of the US, married to a US citizen who is 8 months pregnant.  And, on March 8th, our government disappeared him.  Arrested in New York, it took his wife and lawyer several days to figure out that he had been incarcerated in Louisiana, for some inexplicable reason.  To my knowledge, neither his family nor his legal representation have actually seen or spoken to him in the intervening week.  He has been charged with no crime.  He and his wife were told that his student visa was being revoked, but he doesn’t have a student visa: he’s a permanent resident.  ICE and the State Department then claimed that his Green Card was being revoked, but they have no legal authority to do that.  He’s been accused of anti-Semitism, but there’s no evidence that he’s said anything other than that bombing Palestinian children is wrong—although that seems to be close enough to anti-Semitism for many, including (as the Even More News crew pointed out this week) Chuck Schumer, whose statement “supporting” Khalil starts with the words “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports, and have made my criticism of the antisemitic actions at Columbia loudly known.”  Well, good to know Schumer abhors the idea of not bombing children.  But, more importantly, even if Khalil were anti-Semitic—and I again stress that no one has offered any evidence that suggests that he is—but even if he were, that is not a crime.  If it was, there’d be far fewer Klan members and Proud Boys running around fucking up the country.  Hell, someone might have even locked up Elon Musk’s Nazi-saluting ass by now.

If you want to see what it looks like when ICE disappears someone in front of their pregnant wife, there’s a video.  But it’s pretty depressing.  I would hope you’d think that even if you “abhor” his pro-baby anti-murder stance like Chuck Schumer does, but I suspect I may be misguided on that score.

Khalil has been the top story for a good reason, not only highlighted on the Coffee Klatch and Even More News, but also touched on by a Seth Meyers’ A Closer Look segment (Seth highlights the possible good news that a judge has blocked his deportation, but no one wants to opine on whether that will actually stop the Trump regime from doing so), Christopher Titus’ podcast (Titus’ take: “when you just start grabbing people without the rule of law and and holding them without charging them ... that’s Gestapo shit”), and, reliably, America Unhinged, who pointed out that Trump and Rubio are here using the same logic that was used to justify the “internment camps” where we locked up American citizens (including George Takei from Star Trek and Pat Morita from The Karate Kid) because their ancestors just happened to come here from a country we were currently at war with.  Trump said during the campaign that he planned to revive the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and here we are.

In truth, the fact that people continue to believe that Trump won’t do exactly what he very explicitly says he will do continues to astound me.  Here’s another exchange from the Coffee Klatch:

Lofthouse: How about Wall Street, you know was reeling and shocked and upset; what did they think was going to happen when they supported him?
Reich: Well, very good question.  I think that most people I have talked with on Wall Street assumed that Trump would back off with the tariffs; they assumed that as, if there was any indication that the stock market was reacting negatively to tariff talk, that Trump would say no, no that’s—I won’t do it ...

I have to admit, I literally laughed out loud when Robert Reich was talking about Wall Street people “assuming” that Trump didn’t really mean it when he threatened to put tariffs on everyone, everywhere.  It’s easy to fall into the trap of being dismissive of average voters who supported Trump, but trust me: it’s way more fulfilling to see Wall Street bigwigs fall for that same used-car-salesman scam.

And, if you think I’m exaggerating about Trump being a used car salesman, you definitely haven’t paying attention to the news this week, because he literally did a Tesla commercial on the White House lawn (a thing which in itself would have been scandalous in less “interesting” times).  He did this because Tesla stock has crashed lately, by an amount which, as Sky News put it, “to put it in context, ... is roughly equivalent to Poland’s annual economic output.”  And, if your company is tanking to the tune of a mid-size European Union country, why not get the US president to do some marketing for you?  I mean, we’ve already established that the office is for sale, so may as well take advantage of that.  If you’d like to watch President Musk and his slimy orange salespumpkin shilling on government property, I recommend watching the Christopher Titus version.  At least there’s some amusing patter to go along with the cringe.

But, in general, I’m thinking back to week -4, when I pointed out that the schadenfreude of watching people almost instantly regretting their choices (I specifically called out the old Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party meme) won’t be worth the actual suffering that real people will have to live through.  I’m sure Mahmoud Khalil’s wife takes no comfort at how many billions Musk lost in the stock market.  Or, for an even more sobering example (if you can imagine that), the Even More News crew (and no one else that I’m aware of) talked this week about the Trump regime transferring trans women into men’s prisons.  You’ll have to watch Jonathan and Katy and Cody talk about it; I’m too traumatized by the mere thought of it to recount it here.

But overall this week feels less like the blasting firehose of previous weeks and more like “merely” whitewater rafting amidst sharp rocks.  I’m not sure if that’s because our capacity for horror has been overloaded at this point and we’ve just gone into shock, or because the regime is going more underground and doing their terrible things without making quite so many waves, but what I don’t think it is is any lessening of the evil.  But point being that there aren’t too many other things to note this week.

The fine folks over at Election Profit Makers this week caught a news item that had fallen through the cracks of the other folks I follow: 538.com was shut down, immediately after Trump’s approval rating went negative for the first time since the election.  Disney says this was just part of a larger restructuring—nothing to do with approval ratings!—but then again Disney also paid Trump $15 million to settle a case he absolutely would have lost, so I’m not sure they can be considered trustworthy here.

And, finally, Strict Scrutiny continues to keep us up-to-date on the goings-on at the Supreme Court.  This week they reported on Trump’s loss on the attempted USAID fund freeze, including Alito’s screed of a dissent (Kate Shaw’s assessment: “such a drama queen, my God”), which includes the line “nothing in our precedents even remotely supports this grossly inflated conception of executive power which seriously infringes the legislative powers that the Constitution grants to Congress” ... no, wait, that’s what he wrote in a case where Biden wanted to do something he didn’t like.  Here, he wrote “I am stunned” that the majority of his colleagues agreed that the government should have to pay its bills.  Kate and Melissa also reported on the Court’s ruling that the EPA’s was misinterpreting the Clean Water Act by attempting to regulate clean water in San Francisco.  The interesting part here, for me, was that this was the second case this episode where Amy Coney Barrett sided with the 3 liberal justices: in the USAID case, they were the majority (along with Chief Justice Roberts); here in the EPA case, they were the minority (as Melissa Murray put it, “it’s a 5 to four opinion, with Justice Alito and the other sewage swilling mens in the majority, and all of the women justices, who apparently would prefer their water without a side of raw sewage, siding with the EPA and Mother Earth in dissent”).  This harkens back to an earlier observation of mine (also in week -4, as it happens) where I wondered if Barrett might end up becoming a moderate, perhaps like Justice Kennedy.  Still too early to tell for sure, of course, but here at least are two more data points.

I do hope that this trend towards fewer obvious insanities per week means that I can take a break from writing the Doom Report as often as it’s turned out to be necessary.  You think I enjoy collecting all this dreck and dung and regurgitating it all in these columns?  I assure you I do not.  As far as I’m concerned, one Doom Report a month would be plenty—or even one too many, some might say.  But I think that as long as President Musk and his oily orange salesflunky are continuing to attempt to destroy our democracy, I’ll probably continue writing.  It feels like the least I can do.