The News: A Shithole Recipe
Step 1: Elect Donald Trump
Whether or not you think I have been correct over what is now almost a decade of grappling with Donald Trump’s impact on American politics when I have claimed that at least some of his supporters want him to blow the entire federal government to smithereens as an act of revenge against their perceived social enemies, that is quite plainly what the people gathered around Trump in this second term intend to do. Are doing. So far they are succeeding in carrying out that plan both because of the scope and speed of their detonations and because the leadership that remains of the older establishment has either acquiesced to its own demolition or can’t believe it is happening.
One of the few moments where I’d defend Trump against his critics, however faintly, is his reported use of the word “shithole” to describe some countries during his first term. I think it’s a useful description of some countries, some cities, some places. I think most of us have seen shitholes, lived in shitholes, fled from shitholes.
The problem with Trump’s usage wasn’t the word or the concept, it was the idea that you don’t want to accept people from shitholes as immigrants. Quite the contrary: there is no one who appreciates a good society that is run well, a place that is not a shithole, more than the person who has escaped one. Usually, that person also has some degree of insight about how to avoid the decisions and actions that make a place into one, especially if they’ve lived through a history of change where a tolerable or liveable community or country became thoroughly befouled. A democratic society, a wealthy society, a society that protects and values human flourishing, should crave that kind of insight.
What makes a society a shithole? Visible deprivation and poverty is one obvious answer, but I’ve spent time in places that were poorly maintained and whose residents were poor and not thought to myself, “What a shithole”. I’ve also been in places that are materially in decent enough shape where my instant feeling was nevertheless “this is terrible, this is a horrible place”. I’ve even been in a few places that are ostentatiously wealthy and felt that way.
Still, in most shitholes, you do have a sense of serious deprivation. You can see that people don’t have enough to eat, or what they have to eat is cheap, unpleasant, and dull. There’s a monotony to the landscape: buildings look the same, they’re cheerless and utilitarian, nobody looks out for them. They’re either falling apart or carelessly intact. Public spaces are grungy, dirty, disordered. Building owners don’t bother to have windows washed. Governments don’t pick up trash or keep streets free of obstacles. People seem to know that if they do anything to add a bit of color or life, it’ll be erased. Or they’ll be arrested. There’s a bad smell, always. Sometimes it’s garbage, sometimes it’s chemicals, sometimes it’s sewage. Everything seems it was built or bought forty years ago.
There’s a mean vibe in a shithole. People move through shared spaces listlessly, carelessly, without curiosity. Hardly anyone smiles. A sense of menace is everywhere but rarely is focused through any given person. Nobody lingers, nobody makes eye contact, but everybody’s glancing this way and that to keep an eye on the whole scene. Whether it’s a good day or a bad day, nobody betrays a hint of it on their face. You get the feeling that if the chance arose, everybody would stab you in a second and take whatever you have on you. You get the feeling that if you fell and broke your arm, you’d be left in pain.
When you are inside social spaces—a bar, a family room, an event—with friends, acquaintances, strangers—there are many things you quickly realize are not to be talked about. There are questions not to ask. There are things that are said that throb with the weight of obedience and obligation, to end a conversation rather than sustain one. It’s the kind of moment where the thought of proposing a way to improve something is a sick joke that might get you a free drink or a punch in the face. Around the edges, a thin film of hopelessness and anger glows like a dying fire. There’s an unspoken knowledge that things weren’t always like this, things shouldn’t be like this, but that there’s no way ever to fix what is broken in the way things are now.
You know you’re seeing a shithole, in a shithole, when you can’t imagine what could undo how it is. When there’s no hope of a government that could spend money wisely—or no money for the government in the first place. When everything is so far gone that you feel as if fifty billion dollars couldn’t do much to change things if it fell from the sky tomorrow. When there are no institutions left that nourish art, when there is nowhere left to play, where there aren’t newspapers or where there’s just one thin, sad one that can barely be bothered to print the propaganda, let alone the news. Shitholes don’t have schools, they have warehouses for children. They don’t have careers or professions, they have the things you do to survive another day. They don’t have anything you share or give, they just have the meager things you take away from someone else or struggle to hold on to.
Poor and disorganized governments let a lot of things slide, and people living in poverty have to focus hard on just getting through the day. (Poverty is a lot of work, even when you don’t have a job.) A shithole is worse than that: it is a place, a community, a society that a government is actively working to make more awful still, where the few people who have fragile kinds of power and wealth have set out to create suffering. Where a vain man looks out on a landscape of garbage and sewage and thinks it good, because he lives above it all. (In many shitholes, the few people with real power don’t even live in the country most of the time.) It’s a place where the dissenter who was thrown in jail two years ago and tortured all this year since gets out and joins the government as a minister and sets to arresting the next dissenter, where no virtue lasts for long and everything is for sale.
In such a place, nothing can get better but at the same time life always feels like there are even worse catastrophes just waiting around the corner: there could be a war, there could be an epidemic, there could be an earthquake, a famine, a plague of frogs. Nothing to be done about them, no way to prepare, and certainly no hope that governments or power might move to stop such things from happening. The disasters the government can’t prevent or ameliorate it will likely cause.
Of course there are good people in shitholes, as many as anywhere else. Of course they want to leave, precisely because they know a better life is only possible somewhere else.
Nothing that is happening right now in Washington is about making life better for most people. Perhaps for any people, since they haven’t even had time yet to find alternative ways to shovel cash into the waiting maws of their future clients. I’m not even sure that’s a goal at this point, and that’s a big diagnostic sign of a shithole. In a shithole, a goose laying a golden egg is murdered remorselessly for the crime of making more wealth. Telling the people with authority in Washington right now that they’re destroying something valuable, that they’re harming even their own prospects for sustainable corruption, doesn’t inhibit them at all. They know that. It’s the point! They’re thinking about scorching the earth because if they are afraid that if they leave anything intact, it’s always possible some day that someone else that they hate might take hold of it.
That there are functions to all the offices and departments and projects that are being ripped up, eliminated, retired, defunded or put under the authority of a 21-year old whose previous experience is fetching coffee for a billionaire is not something that DC’s new gang of vandals have overlooked or forgotten or misunderstood. They know full well how important some of those functions are to stability, prosperity, probity. They know that because they’re setting out to make life unstable, poorer, and radioactively erupting with untruth. They do this with no master plan of a better world on the other side. They are going to level everything as an object lesson to us all. The plan here is the same plan that an angry toddler has when they start throwing all their toys out the window. It is about vast and unmotivated anger that has no goal besides itself.
This is not a revolution, it is a negation. It is a colossal expulsion of the entire contents of a body politic. This is not just a bowel movement expelling what the body no longer needs, it is an evacuation of everything that has kept the body alive up to this point.
They are digging a shithole so deep that there will be literally no way to climb back out again. They want us all to be down there in the dark as a punishment for the temerity of having been who we have been.
Image credit: "Hot Raw Sewage" by Trey Ratcliff is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.