“A permanent zone of exception”

A former Border Patrol guard reflects on life at the American-Mexican border, a “permanent zone of exception” with a man-made “disregard for human life”:

The borderlands have slowly become a place where citizens are subject to distinct standards for search and detention, and where due process for noncitizens is often unrecognizable by normal American standards. It is a place where migrants are regularly sentenced at mass hearings in which the fates of as many as seventy-five individuals can be adjudicated one after another in a matter of minutes, after which they are funneled into a burgeoning immigration incarceration complex. It is a landscape often written off as a “wasteland” that is inherently “hostile”—without recognition that it has, in fact, been made to be hostile. Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our borders. It has arrived there through policy.

…[the former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service]’s damning admission—that the loss of hundreds of lives on America’s doorstep each year was not enough to cause the government to reevaluate its policy—reveals the extent to which the desert has been weaponized against migrants, and lays bare the fact that the hundreds who continue to die there every year are losing their lives by design*. Deterrence-based enforcement has steered the immigration politics of every administration since that of President Clinton, and has resulted in an official tally of more than six thousand migrant deaths along the southern border between 2000 and 2016. This figure, it should be said, does not account for the thousands more who have been reported as missing and never found, not to mention those whose disappearances are never reported in the first place.*

…Standing at an altar assembled from remnants of wooden refugee boats, Pope Francis looked out over the port of Lampedusa and asked his audience, “Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept?”

Viktor Orbán’s “constitutional coup”

The New Yorker, with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, on the Hungarian prime minister’s campaign against immigration and refugee asylum and his rising European influence in the run-up to May’s European Parliamentary elections. The article includes parts of the author’s conversations with Orbán himself and Steve Bannon. Politico also had a primer on the topic.

Princeton scholar Kim Lane Scheppele:

They do everything by law—there will never be an illegal action. Any one law didn’t look that bad, but if you stack them together it creates this web. That’s why the EU is unable to cope. They look at one thing at a time, but Orbán is a systemic thinker… it’s absolutely ingenious.

Central European University rector Michael Ignatieff on CEU’s forced relocation to Vienna:

In Hungary, the law is a tool of power. It looks like a law, sounds like a law, walks and talks like a law, but it’s just a piece of arbitrary discretion.

Also:

Around ninety per cent of Hungarian media is now owned or controlled by people with personal connections to Orbán or his party, and eighty per cent of Hungarians who listen to the radio or watch television hear only news that comes from the government.

A selection of the New York Times’ visualizations and multimedia stories from 2018

Sally Rooney profiled by The New Yorker

The article mentions how well technology is integrated into her work, which I alluded to in my last post discussing her second novel, Normal People. I had considered elements like texting and social media to be too clunky and distractingly of-this-era to incorporate well into a book or even a movie, but I’m realizing maybe it’s just that older people and Jonathan Franzen are bad at it in the same way fan fiction botches sex scenes. The article gives this sentence as an example of Rooney doing it well:

“I didn’t feel like watching the film on my own so I switched it off and just read the Internet instead.”

An older novelist might have written “surfed the Internet” or “looked at the Internet,” but “read the Internet” has the ring of native digital literacy. There’s also something current about the flatness of Rooney’s tone; like “breaking the Internet,” “reading the Internet” makes a little joke of the juxtaposition of a puny active verb and the vastness of the thing upon which it is acting.

Searching (2018), dir. Aneesh Chaganty

The movie’s gimmick is that all footage is set on a computer or phone screen of some sort. Also incorporates modern technology extremely well and convincingly. Recommended!

A Greek poem translated six ways

Including as a microwave oven instruction manual