One of the theories concerning the elimination of an ear worm—an annoying song snatch that loops continuously in brain—is that if you sing the entire song through to the end then the mind will find closure and the ear worm will cease to loop. Part of the challenge, of course, is to know where the end is.

Much of what we do suffers from the same problem. Too often we don’t know where the finish line is and in the grand scheme of life, death is the only certain (Benjamin Franklin was wrong) demarcation. Yet we need to create resting points, places where we can stop, catch our breath and say to ourselves, well, that’s done. We need to see things through. Damon Young, in Distraction, writes;

For the American philosopher James Dewey, writing in the 1930s, the acceleration of life was dangerous—it’s simply contrary to our nature to work so hard, so fast and for so little reward (physical or existential, as much as pecuniary). Dewey pointed out that humans—like all living things—are tightly interwoven with their environments. To survive, we engage in an ongoing to-and-fro with it, whether this is tracking trails, foraging for food and building shelter, or driving, shopping and renovating. We act upon the world, and it acts upon us. Dewey called this whole congress with the world experience, and each little part an experience. These experiences have their own rhythm: a beginning, a middle and an end, departure and arrival, start and finish. Preparing meals, driving, writing and countless other everyday tasks have their cycles and patterns, where they come to fruition: we serve the pasta, we park in the driveway, or cap off the final sentence. Dewey notes that we genuinely enjoy these climaxes—as he put it, moments of fulfillment punctuate experience with rhythmically enjoyed intervals. In other words, part of the fulfilling life is the ability to and opportunity to see things through—little things like shopping lists and games, or big things like work projects and renovations. By entering into the rhythms of life, we gain immeasurable pleasure, and this is precisely the cadence sought by T.S. Elliot in poetry and employment. pp. 47-8

From Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free by Damon Young

For myself, seeing things through most commonly takes the form of a check mark on my daily action list. That mark doesn’t mean that a task is finished forever—I would never have an action like: write novel—but an action like: write 3,000 words or edit chapter 34, would be perfectly reasonable.

I tend to think of my tasks as never taking more than a half day, four hours of so. If a task requires more time than then I need to break the job into smaller bites. When I talk to my students I try to stress the importance of this. While I acknowledge that they’re present job is to graduate from school, that is too grand a goal. We all need to eat the elephant one morsel at a time.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Mano Singham, writing in Backlash to the NYT op-ed, had this to say:

There has, not surprisingly, been a huge reaction to the anonymous New York Times op-ed penned by someone the paper describes as a ‘senior official in the Trump administration’. If the author expected to be treated as some kind of hero, then s/he must be disappointed. There has been condemnation from many sides, the only supporters being those who like to see Trump embarrassed and do not care that the author and associates in this scheme to undercut policies they dislike seems to be doing so because they think he is not conservative enough or not as hardline on foreign policy.

Even severe critics of Trump are unnerved by the open boasting by unelected people about how they are carrying out a palace coup against someone who, whatever his many faults, was elected to office. The idea of an unelected cabal secretly deciding what policies should be enacted undermines even the degraded form of democracy that currently prevails in the US.

For further commentary, Mano goes to The Intercept’s Medhi Hasan who writes:

You claim, on the opinion pages of the “failing” New York Times no less, that senior officials working for the president of the United States “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

“I would know,” you add dramatically. “I am one of them.”

Sorry, what was the point of this particular piece? And what is it that you want from the rest of us? A thank-you card? A round of applause? The nation’s undying gratitude?

Screw. You.

The honorable action here would be to fall on your sword, resign and immediately agree to testify before Congress as to what you, and your co-conspirators did.

If this is John Kelly, that is what he will do.

In Judaism there is a Talmudic principle regarding the 613 commandments that says an adherent ought not to die for a commandment. If you find yourself on a desert island with nothing but ham and mayonnaise sandwiches, eat the damn sandwiches. There are two—three if you’re a community leader*—cases when choosing death rather than break a commandment right, when becoming a martyr is the correct action: murder and rape.

The rationale goes like this: if someone puts a gun to your head and orders you to murder or rape another, then you ought to tell them to pull the trigger because there can be no way of taking back your act, of restoring the victim and making them whole again.

If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. p. 3

From The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

*If you are a community leader, if others would be led to follow your lead, then choosing death over apostasy is deemed the correct action.

*Seriously…

Perhaps my compulsion to order is genetic, maybe I obsess over fighting clutter comes from my 11 years in the military. I really don’t know. What I do know is that disorder throws me into a death spiral of inactivity. So much so that one of my Universal Principles is: Entropy Sucks—Create time through energy and beauty through order.

That is why this sentence struck me so hard.

For others still, [the drive to work is] a fervent desire for order and meaning, making the chaos of the psyche, or home life, tolerable. p. 39

From Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free by Damon Young

Young is precisely, in my case at least, correct. I suppose you can find meaning in chaos, but I’d rather not spend my few minutes searching there.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Marc Kasowitz denies everything, but Harris’ staff says otherwise.

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing…

Sacramento Police Shoot and Kill Man They Say Pointed a Pellet Gun at Them

Chicago Police Officer Who Killed Laquan McDonald Violated Bail Conditions, Judge Rules

A Harlem Restaurant Owner Tried to Help an Unconscious White Woman. Now, He’s Suing the NYPD for False Arrest

Cops Cuff Black Teen Riding With White Grandmother Because Someone Thought He Was Robbing Her

A Black Man Was Accused of Shooting at a Cop. Now the District Attorney Is Saying There’s No Evidence That He Even Had a Gun

Woman Who Claimed She Was Kidnapped and Robbed by Black Men Was Lying to Get Out of a Debt: Police

Pennsylvania GOP Official Resigns After Calling Protesting NFL Players ‘Baboons’ and ‘Ignorant Blacks’ on Facebook

911 Dispatcher Questioned BBQ Becky’s Mental Health

Previously…

Also, Stephen Colbert and John Kerry Part I, Part II….

[Update at 1001 on 6 September: Listen to this morning’s discussion on WCPN’s Sound of Ideas where Jonathan Entin, Professor Emeritus of Law, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Case Western Reserve University and David Forte, Professor of Law, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University step away from the foregone conclusion that Kavanaugh will be confirmed to discuss the greater issue of our constitution and a broken system.]

Those who think that confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court is a bad idea are just pissing in the wind. He will be confirmed and, in the short-term, our nation’s only hope is the Chief Justice John Roberts can mitigate the worst the could happen.

If that causes you to lose sleep, well, get off your social media and do something other than piss and moan.

Ralph Nader, writing in Stop Brett Kavanaugh— A Corporation Masquerading as a Judge fantasizes that there is hope. I wish he were right, but he’s not.

Observers say that confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become President Trump’s second pick for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court will make the Court more conservative. It is more accurate to say Kavanaugh will make the Court more corporatist.

With Kavanaugh, it is all about siding with corporations over workers, consumers, patients, motorists, the poor, minority voters, and beleaguered communities.

Repeatedly Kavanaugh’s [The autocorrect here for Kavanaugh’s was Naughtiness, JH] judicial opinions put corporate interests ahead of the common good—backing the powerful against the weak, the vulnerable, and the defenseless.

Apart from his declared views pouring power and immunity into the Presidency (which is why Trump wants him), Kavanaugh could be the most corporate judge in Continue Reading »

Also, Transcript: Phone call between President Trump and journalist Bob Woodward which includes this exchange:

Woodward: I’m sorry we missed the opportunity to talk for the book.

Trump: Well, I just spoke with Kellyanne [Conway] and she asked me if I got a call. I never got a call. I never got a message. Who did you ask about speaking to me?

Woodward: Well, about six people.

Trump: They don’t tell me.

Which is followed a few minutes later by:

Woodward: Well, Mr. President, how can I spend all this time talking to people and — like Kellyanne and Raj and Republican senators?

Trump: Who were the senators? No, they never called me about it.

Woodward: Senator [Lindsey] Graham said he had talked to you about talking to me. Now, is that not true?

Trump: Senator Graham actually mentioned it quickly in one meeting.

Woodward: Yes. Well, see. And then nothing happened.

Trump: That is true. That is true. Well, that — no, but that is true. Mentioned it quickly, not like, you know, and I would certainly have thought that maybe you would’ve called the office. But that’s okay. I’ll speak to Kellyanne. I am a little surprised that she wouldn’t have told me. In fact, she just walked in. [to Kellyanne] I’m talking to Bob Woodward. He said that he told you.

Conway: Yes.

Trump: About speaking to me. But you never told me. Why didn’t you tell me?

Conway: [inaudible].

Inaudible my ass.

Duke Ellington famously said in 1962: There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind … the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it’s successful; if it doesn’t it has failed. Three years later, T.S. Elliot would add a third category that I’m not sure works.

“There is only good verse, bad verse and chaos.” —T.S. Elliot.

From Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free by Damon Young

What Elliot may call chaos, it seems to me may simply be a pattern he was not able to perceive.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

I thought the idiots making YouTube videos of smashing their Keurig coffee makers was pretty stupid, but clearly, I grossly over estimated the stupidity of Fox News’ viewership.

Stephen A. Crockett, reporting in Air MAGA: Trump’s Base Is So Pissed at Nike’s Kaepernick Ad, They’re Burning Their ‘White Supremacy 7s’ for The Root, writes:

First, there were the tiki torch marches by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va.; then there was the Roy Moore, Sean Hannity-inspired coffee smashing protest, and now there is the “cut the Nike symbol off socks you already own” protest of 2018.

On Monday, Nike announced in typical Nike style that Colin Kapernick was the face of the 30th anniversary of “Just Do It” campaign. The ad featured a close-up of Kaepernick’s face with words: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

And the Make America Great Again crowd lost their collective shit.

It’s as if the ad literally created a wypipo wedgie by jamming their shorts into their tightly clenched asses. It didn’t help matters that ESPN reporter Darren Rovell revealed that Kap had been on the Nike payroll the entire time that the NFL whiteballed him for protesting injustice, inequality and the deaths of unarmed black men, women and children by police.

Snowflakes immediately ran to the internet to post images of them burning old-ass Nikes purchased during the late ’90s and cutting the Nike swoosh off their socks because, judging from their level of outrage, tube socks mean much more to them than black lives.

Seriously, look at this goofy shit.

Not goofy. Call this shit what it is: ignorant.

Trevor Noah also weighed in last night and [Update on 5 September at 2013: gave a perfect followup…]

J.K. Rowling offered what has to be the best (most British?) response to this sort of thing.

Chuck is spinning in his coffin…

Cal Newport, writing in the first chapter of Deep Work, tells us that the superpower for the 21st century is the ability to focus.

The opposite of focused is distracted and distraction has always existed—being distracted by the tiger in the tall grass was a good thing—and, barring the aforementioned tiger, eliminating distraction has ever been a goal for most of humanity.

The compulsion to seek respite is as ancient as humanity itself, and it stems from our understandable unwillingness to look our own lives squarely in the face. p. 16

From Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free by Damon Young

Young’s thought here is not original, but ever generation must learn the lesson that I first stumbled on in the writings of Blaise Pascal who, in his Pensées wrote: I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

The ability to sit in that room, quietly, alone, is the ne plus ultra of focus. I have wondered at times about how beneficial it might be to teach prisoners, sometimes confined to solitary, how they might turn this punishment into a boon.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Normally Oglaf by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne is seriously NSFW. This is a rare occasion when the kiddies can view the cartoon. Just don’t let them go surfing.

I’m adding this cartoon to my teaching edu-wizarding toolbox.

Previously…

We use the word hero far to generously in our society, perhaps because we feel guilt about our own lack of heroism, or even our inability to stand, and in the words of Maggie Kuhn, before the people you fear and speak your mind–even if your voice shakes.

I served with many good men and women during my 11 years of service, but I don’t know that any of them were heroes. They did their jobs. That was what they, and I, signed on to do. I can say the same about the men and women who serve their communities in police and fire departments.

We reserve special honors for heroes, the Bronze and Silver stars, the Medal of Honor. These recognize extraordinary efforts by individuals that act above and beyond doing their jobs. To cite one such individual of recent notability, Medal of Honor recipient Desmond T. Doss is as great a personification of hero as I think anyone might offer.

The Navy awarded McCain both the silver and bronze stars—the latter with two stars indicating three awards—for his actions as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. Over shadowing those awards, indeed, overshadowing McCain’s entire military career (including his four years at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, are his father, Admiral John Sidney McCain Jr. and grandfather Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr.. Were it not for the legacy of these two men, Senator McCain would have likely led a very different life.

Tim Dickenson, reporting in A ‘Maverick,’ Revisited for Rolling Stone, writes:

McCain’s admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student; he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before meeting a girlfriend’s parents for the first time, McCain got so shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman’s uniform.

His grandfather’s name and his father’s forbearance brought McCain a charmed existence at Annapolis. On his first trip at sea—to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Hunt—the captain was a former student of his father. While McCain’s classmates learned the ins and outs of the boiler room, McCain got to pilot the ship to South America and back. In Rio, he hobnobbed with admirals and the president of Brazil.

Back on campus, McCain’s short fuse was legend. “We’d hear this thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate — doors slamming — and one of them would go running down the hall,” recalls Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. “It was a regular occurrence.”

When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to “bilge out” because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy’s commandant stepped in. Calling McCain “spoiled” to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

“He was a huge screw-off,” recalls Butler. “He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather—they couldn’t exactly get rid of him.”

McCain’s self-described “four-year course of insubordination” ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom—894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.

Graduating from Annapolis, even if you’re 894th out of 894 is a major accomplishment. I knew my share of naval officers during my time at sea and you could always tell the academy grads from the others, even if they weren’t wearing their rings, but McCain’s post graduation record was no better, if not worse, than his four years at Annapolis. This is the story that Dickinson chose as his lede:

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation’s capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It’s the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There’s a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam—call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn’t survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service’s highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as “one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met.”

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

“I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”

“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.

“It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.

“Why? Where are you going to, John?”

“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”

“What the hell are you going to Rio for?”

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

“I got a better chance of getting laid.”

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.”

The people calling Senator John Sidney McCain a hero diminish the selfless actions of Americans like Mary Edwards Walker and Doss.

I first became aware of McCain when he gained national attention as a central figure in The Keating Five. This was not an extraordinary moment for McCain, but yet another ignoble adventure. I could forgive him for that. He was, after all only one of five embroiled in yet another tawdry political scandal.

What upset me more was the way that he turned his heritage into a birthright.

There is much, much more in Dickinson’s long read—the piece runs nearly 12,000 words—and you ought to read them all. (I also highly recommend Branko Marcetic’s John McCain Wasn’t a Hero for Jacobin.)

John McCain did serve his country, but he did so second. He served John McCain first.

In the early/mid’90s when Rick Montanari and I were in our full-on freelancer/starving novelists phase, we played head-to-head first person shooter games at lunch nearly every day. We started with Castle Wolfenstein, graduated to Doom, Doom II and finally Quake. I stopped playing because the game engines became too good and I started to get motion sickness.

Reading Luke Plunkett’s A Doom II Secret From 1994 Has Been Unlocked and then watching the video clip of Zero Master’s run was like eating a piece of madeleine cake.

John Romero is a gawd…

Rome fell for many reasons ranging from lead-lined aqueducts to barbarian hoards. My personal favorite, however, is that the backbone of the Roman empire, the once mighty legions made up of Roman citizens fighting for Rome, gradually grew to consist mostly of mercenaries, fighting for money. The United States of America faces a similar problem with not only our military’s reliance on mercenaries for both support and combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but here at home the paramilitary organization created only 15 years ago—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—relies on mercenaries, rather than federal employees, to spread fear among the people who might have been our grandparents.

ICE is an organization driven by profit. Franklin Foer, reporting in How Trump Radicalized ICE for The Atlantic, explains:

Fear is a contagion that spreads quickly. One ICE officer warned some Mauritanians sympathetically, “It’s not a matter of if you’ll be deported, but when.” Another flatly said, “My job is to get you to leave this country.”* At meetings, officers would insist that the immigrants go to the Mauritanian consulate and apply for passports to return to the very country whose government had attempted to murder them.

I have long held that there are a number of functions of government that ought never to be farmed out to for-profit corporations because the missions of those functions are often directly counter to a corporation’s requirement to increase shareholder value. Protecting our borders and managing immigration is one of those functions and ICE is doing a great disservice to our nation. Foer continues:

In 21st-century America, it is difficult to conjure the possibility of the federal government taking an eraser to the map and scrubbing away an entire ethnic group. I had arrived in Columbus at the suggestion of a Cleveland-based lawyer named David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Leopold has kept in touch with an old client who attends the Mauritanian mosque. When he mentioned the community’s plight to me, he called it “ethnic cleansing”—which initially sounded like wild hyperbole. But on each of my trips back to Columbus, I heard new stories of departures to Canada—and about others who had left for New York, where hiding from ICE is easier in the shadows of the big city. The refugees were fleeing Refugee Road.

Now our nation was founded on the idea of ethnic cleansing, just ask any Indian, but we did fight a couple of bloody wars—most recently in the former Yugoslavia—to end ethnic cleansing outside our borders and we ought not to succumb to the faulty rhetoric of the America versions of Radovan Karadžić and Mathieu Ngirumpatse. This is happening in our name because our president likes people who like him.

But one segment of the deep state stepped forward early and openly to profess its enthusiasm for Trump. Through their union, employees of ICE endorsed Trump’s candidacy in September 2016, the first time the organization had ever lent its support to a presidential contender. When Trump prevailed in the election, the soon-to-be-named head of ICE triumphantly declared that it would finally have the backing of a president who would let the agency do its job. He’s “taking the handcuffs off,” said Thomas Homan, who served as ICE’s acting director under Trump until his retirement in June, using a phrase that has become a common trope within the agency. “When Trump won, [some officers] thumped their chest as if they had just won the Super Bowl,” a former ICE official told me.

How much money are we talking here? How about $18 billion?

Since its official designation, in 2003, as a successor to INS, ICE has grown at a remarkable clip for a peacetime bureaucracy. By the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term, immigration had become one of the highest priorities of federal law enforcement: Half of all federal prosecutions were for immigration-related crimes. In 2012, Congress appropriated $18 billion for immigration enforcement. It spent $14 billion for all the other major criminal law-enforcement agencies combined: the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service.

And most of that money is going to the private contractors mercenaries. Some of that is kicked back to the Trump organization.

ICE quickly built a sprawling, logistically intricate infrastructure comprising detention facilities, an international-transit arm, and monitoring technology. This apparatus relies heavily on private contractors. Created at the height of the federal government’s outsourcing mania, DHS employs more outside contractors than actual federal employees. Last year, these companies—which include the Geo Group and CoreCivic—spent at least $3 million on lobbying and influence peddling. To take one small example: Owners of ICE’s private detention facilities were generous donors to Trump’s inauguration, contributing $500,000 for the occasion.

Godwin’s Law notwithstanding, the way that ICE goes about fulfilling its mission is horrifying and innocents are dying, again in our name, under ICE’s mission.

ICE, however, is assigned the task of removing undocumented immigrants from the country’s interior, and it has approached this mission with cold, bureaucratic efficiency. Until recently, the agency had a congressional mandate to maintain up to 34,000 beds in detention centers on any given day with which to detain undocumented immigrants. Once an immigrant enters the system, she is known by her case number. Her ill intentions are frequently presumed, and she will find it exceedingly difficult to plead her case, or even to know what rights she has.

This trope of keeping beds full is one we’ve heard before in the Private Prison Industry. Those full beds are a central tool in our own rein of terror waged by militant anti-immigration wonks that include Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton and de facto secretary of homeland security, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

Under the current administration, many of the formal restraints on ICE have been removed. In the first eight months of the Trump presidency, ICE increased arrests by 42 percent. Immigration enforcement has been handed over to a small clique of militant anti-immigration wonks. This group has carefully studied the apparatus it now controls. It knows that the best strategy for accomplishing its goal of driving out undocumented immigrants is quite simply the cultivation of fear. And it knows that the latent power of ICE, amassed with the tacit assent of both parties, has yet to be fully realized.

One of the early thoughts I had when Trump’s anti-immigrant policies began to roll out was: where are they going to find all the people to make this work? What Trump, Sessions and ICE did to raise their wall was to lower the bar; really, really low.

No one, as a child, dreams about growing up to deport undocumented immigrants. Some 6,000 officers work in the Enforcement and Removal Operations wing of ICE, but this is not always a first-choice career option. “Many in ICE applied to other agencies that rank higher in law-enforcement prestige,” says David Martin, a scholar of immigration law who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. The ranks of ICE are drawn in large part from retired members of the military and from former Border Patrol agents, who prefer the metropolitan locations of ICE offices to the remote outposts dotting the nation’s southern border. The job is a solid option for high-school graduates, who are not eligible to apply to federal agencies that require a college education. It makes for an accessible entry point into federal law enforcement, a trajectory that comes with job security and decent pay, and perhaps the hope of someday storming buildings or standing in the backdrop of press conferences, beside tables brimming with seized contraband. Such reveries are easy enough to entertain, until the first day on the job.

When these men and women sign on, however, they get a very different reality.

ICE consistently ranks among the worst workplaces in the federal government. In 2016, the organization ranked 299th on a list of 305 federal agencies in a survey of employee satisfaction. Even as Trump smothered the organization with praise and endowed it with broader responsibilities, ICE still placed 288th last year.

Pre-ICE staffers aren’t happy.

When ICE was created, two workforces merged, one involved with immigration enforcement and the other, a higher-status group, investigating transnational crime. Members of the latter have since requested to be released from ICE.

Frustrations are building.

“Regular cops get frustrated when a plea agreement is too soft,” says Sandweg. “With ERO, about 50 percent of the people you arrest will still be in the country a year later.” This is one of the many consequences of a system that—whatever one’s political views on immigration—has obvious elements of dysfunction. ICE’s capacity to detain immigrants long ago outstripped the capacity of courts to process them. Immigration courts currently have a backlog of 700,000 cases, which means that someone might wait several years before ever seeing a judge. A sense of futility, therefore, has become a prevailing ethos for much of the ICE rank and file. One former agent recalls learning a maxim on his first day on the job: “It’s not over until the alien wins.”

The workers, frustrated or not, must fill the beds.

It’s one thing for a city to require cops to issue a minimum number of parking tickets; it’s another for the federal government to proscribe a daily goal for the number of human beings it will deprive of liberty. But the system that Byrd helped enshrine encourages precisely that. Jeremy Jong, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, described to me a conversation he had with an ICE official at a Louisiana detention facility. The official bragged that “he always did his best to fulfill his contractual obligation to keep the center’s beds full of inventory.”

A common idea in any war is that you must first dehumanize the enemy. In our revolution we weren’t fighting our relatives on the other side of the pond, we were fighting lobsters. The Union army fought the rebels. We yanks were after the Hun and the Japs and the Gooks and the Ragheads. In our current internal fight, the enemy is even more banal. It’s inventory.

The description of immigrants as “inventory” is a logical extension of how ICE has outsourced detention to private firms, for which each confinement represents additional profit. Detention is a boom industry, backed by such megafunds as Vanguard and BlackRock, and it has experienced a decade of steroidal growth. In the months following Trump’s election, the stock prices of the biggest detention companies, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, rose by more than 100 percent. (Those prices have leveled out since then.) Last year, the bipartisan army of lobbyists employed by the Geo Group and its primary competitors included power firms Akin Gump and the Gephardt Group, founded by former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. That fall, the Geo Group celebrated its good fortune by holding its annual leadership conference at the Trump National Doral resort, in Miami.

The war is not just along the southern borders of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

But even as the nation solves one problem, politicians and bureaucracies concoct new ones. Border Patrol has started aggressively taking advantage of an old regulation, long ignored, that permits an expansive definition of border, encompassing all terrain within 100 miles of the physical frontier. It has leveraged this flexible interpretation to set up checkpoints along I-95 in Maine and to board buses in Florida to ask passengers about their immigration status. Border Patrol has become a regular presence in cities such as Las Vegas and San Antonio—and its officers can be seen cruising highways in northern Ohio.

Finally, our reign of terror is not about bad hombres.

A similar mission creep afflicts ICE. It’s hard to argue with the need for a bureau that can deport criminals who reside in the country illegally. But there are only so many of them. Study after study has shown that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than the native-born population. ICE simply doesn’t have enough criminal targets to justify its enormous budget. That’s why, when Obama provided ICE with strict priorities, its number of detentions quickly plummeted.

At the end of Foer’s cover story, I came away with this thought: unchecked and well-funded, ICE may actually accomplish our own final solution to make America great again. What then?

*This and all subsequent emphasis is mine, JH