Security State

An attempt to set the mood.

“And if one has to choose between the paranoid fantasy about a paranoid reality or the stupidity of common sense, one is always going to get further with paranoia.”

 – Letter from Adorno to Horkheimer, 12 November 1952.

“This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.”

 – Corinthians 7:29-31 NIV

            Everyone finally asleep, I shut the door behind me and watch my breath cloud out into the cold of the night. Slippers settling into the porch snow, end of the joint glowing red like the little light on the camera in the corner. It’s new, like the rest of the security system Mom installed after we left for college. She says there have been suspicious people spotted in the neighborhood lately. My little brother still lives here. Police SUV glides by quiet and sharklike. I know if I walked down the block to the school (good district well funded) one would be humming quietly, lights off, in the parking lot. Before I could drive I used to wander around for hours while the streetlights winked on, to the park or to McDonalds or nowhere at all, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends—all seasons. It was a small world but it was bigger than home.

When my brother and his friends go to the parks we went to after dark, the cops come and hassle them back to their houses. The alleys downtown I filmed little youtube movies in are floodlit and alarmed, and the theatre banned unaccompanied minors when they decided too many brown and black kids from other towns nearby were spending too much time there. The new houses popping up like mushrooms are all floodlit too, fortress-like, smooth sharp angles and huge trucks in the driveway next to the minivan. A GM exterior designer, discussing the 2020 GMC Sierra, emphasized that “we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you”;“that’s what this truck should look like – a massive fist moving through the air.”¹ When I stopped for gas on the way home, I had the option of buying an “I don’t brake for rioters” bumper sticker along with my jerky.

“In 1971 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone but by 1990, only 9 percent did.”² Kids in the 1970s were allowed to use the stove alone in fourth to fifth grade, while those born in the 1990s didn’t until middle school.³ Between 1993 and 2019, the overall violent crime rate fell 74%, but “in 20 of 24 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the generally downward trend in national violent and property crime rates during most of that period.”⁴ Dance classes, piano lessons, SAT prep, swim team. Why are the kids spending all day on the internet? It’s easier than sneaking out, for one, especially now that your parents might send you to a private jail instead of grounding you. In kindergarten I watched LeVar Burton stepping over the rubble of the World Trade Center explaining that sometimes the world can be scary. I got scolded and sent home later that week for a drawing of a “food bomb,” which was a bomb that laid out a banquet for you when it exploded instead of killing anyone.

Some commentators have recently proposed that universities monitor “incels,” given their propensity for violence. Administrative wellness checks to confirm your v-card is punched. An active sex life is important for mental health, and has been shown to reduce risk of heart attack and stroke. “In total, less than a third of U.S. undergraduates are “traditional” students in the sense that they are full-time, degree-seeking students at primarily residential four-year colleges.”⁵ We studied so hard, got our extracurriculars just right, 1500 on the SAT, we deserve to have fun. But not too much fun. Disneyland has hundreds of personnel dedicated to customer health, safety, and security, and if you die they’ll be sure to wheel you out of sight gently and efficiently.

Employers are known to monitor the social media accounts of applicants. The USPS recently employed its covert operations wing to monitor the social media of alleged January 6 rioters.⁶ Your greatest asset is your reputation, and it’s never too early to start building. When the Federal building was bombed in OKC, the FBI had an asset close to McVeigh who warned them well in advance about his reputation and plans, but they declined to investigate further.⁷ To access the gym at my current university, I let a machine scan my retina and check it against the one on file. A notable college application coaching firm announced in 2015 that it was working with 5th and 6th graders to cultivate narratives of life-long passion from as early as possible. “They don’t want to see an application from a high school student who decided she wanted to be a veterinarian in 10th grade and traveled to India to save an elephant in 11th grade. They want to see the 6 year old who fell in love with animals at the zoo, volunteered at a local animal shelter in junior high, researched a project on elephants in 10th grade, and went to India in 11th grade.”⁸ When an alleged ISIS supporter shot up a Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, the FBI agent who had been egging him on for weeks was sitting in a car nearby taking pictures up to 30 seconds before the shooting took place.⁹ He then fled before being intercepted by police. His presence was explained by prosecutors as a coincidence. Many commentators, in the wake of campaigns to defund the police, have suggested replacing them largely with social workers and mental health professionals.

The camera makes me furtive like I’m still in high school so I finish the joint quickly. I drove here instead of flying. Airports have been unreliable, the same old militarized malls but with more tension and dysfunction than usual. The long lines of petty middle-class misery and indignation make me picture border checkpoints thronged with affluent refugees. I bought the car two years ago with my pandemic check as a precaution against vague predictions of post-election violence. I didn’t want to rely on public transit if I had to leave the city fast, rush home to check on family. Silly in hindsight, hysterical. Do any of us really know what political violence looks like, how to see it coming? In truth, we do, even if we think we don’t. Scholars have suggested fascism is inextricable from the experience of total war. We’ve been at war as long as I’ve been alive—on drugs, terror, in Iraq and Afghanistan, so much so that even to point it out is a stale cliché. Now the analogy is stretched to the “climate emergency” and the need for a “green war economy.” With some exceptions, the cold parts of the world are rich and the hot parts of the world are poor. As the world heats up, every wall—anywhere in the world—that separates the two has begun to bristle with bayonets and barbed wire. It’s been noted that we’re in a lull, a thread stretched taut between the way things have been since the 90s and—what? I don’t know, but clearly we’re all holding our breath waiting for it. Stuck in these violent doldrums, it pays to be paranoid.

1. https://www.musclecarsandtrucks.com/2020-gmc-sierra-hd-design-the-origin-story/

2. https://www.mamamia.com.au/things-that-used-to-be-legal/

3. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/08/slate_childhood_survey_results_kids_today_have_a_lot_less_freedom_than_their.html

4. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

5. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/#fn-4

6. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/27/covert-postal-service-514327

7. Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 218-229.

8. The post seems to have been deleted. I believe it was originally available at https://collegeplanningexperts.com/college-preparation-in-kindergarten.html, but it may have been somewhere else.

9. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2019/05/23/prosecutors-say-why-undercover-fbi-agent-was-at-scene-of-the-2015-attack-in-garland/ ;

see also,

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fbi-agent-apparently-egged-on-draw-muhammad-shooter?ref=scroll