WATCHER ZINE: EVERY SUIT COLLAR IS A CHRYSALID, EVERY CITY A COCOON
Adherence to American Civil Religion abets social murder and equips tomorrow's fascist.
This month: inchoate thoughts and fear.
The anointed machine
“We maintain that both rulers and ruled are spoiled by authority; both exploiters and exploited are spoiled by exploitation … We admit the imperfections of human nature, but we make no exception for the rulers.” - Kropotkin
Among the most incisive critiques of the nation-state are observations of what people become when they wield state power. A contempt for the governed is implicit in most politicians’ legislative priorities, as is a sanctification of governance and the use of state power. In acknowledging the existence of American Civil Religion, one discovers crude moral rankings.
Our institutions become sacred elements, our participatory civic engagements become holy rites, and our officials are so many priests. The governed are either faithful or not, devotees or heretics. As with pro-Palestine protesters, one may be counted among blasphemers at the arbitrary command of elected officials. If the levers of state power are the only accepted means of enacting social change—and politicians the sainted few who can operate them—then mass movements and direct action become heresy.
The supposed accomplishments of the US are contained wholly in its mythic past, and utopia is always just beyond reach, fleeing the same distance we traverse in the day. Welfare of the general public exists only in the state’s founding myths or its supposedly imminent paradise. The common good is absent from the present—now is the domain of participation without substance.
For all the pomp and myth of dominant culture, American Civil Religion is at bottom, faith in a violent machine, and the desire to be incorporated into it. Elected officials rise in the priesthood by offering their municipalities to the probing organs of the state, a machine that services capital and foments social murder. That machine marches, steadily and inexorably, toward fascism.
The future tragedies reaching back toward us
San Diego County has suffered a housing affordability crisis for some time, with median home sale prices rising from $600,000 to $900,000 since 2019. A direct consequence of the rising cost of housing is homelessness, and local politicians have campaigned on the issue while failing to address it.
The latest point-in-time count in the county tallied 10,200 unhoused people. There are more than 180,000 unhoused people in California, and 653,000 in the nation. San Diego has nearly 75,000 vacant homes, and a tenants union reported that Blackstone raised rent on affordable housing units by 34-64% in two years.
The City of San Diego declared housing a human right last year, but has worked to achieve that end through tepid encouragement of the free market. Rather than working toward de-commodifying housing, local elected officials have paired market solutions to homelessness with criminalization. Housing First has not been implemented in California, but some cities still oppose it. Escondido is proffering a “public-safety first” option—implicitly framing Housing First as deprioritizing public safety. Unhoused people, who are more often than not the victims of violent crimes, are implicitly excluded from the “public.”
Climate change will likely bring colder, wetter winters to California as a whole, with the state potentially alternating between droughts and downpours. But the changes come today, like the apocalypse bleeding back into our present.
Before the culverts overflowed and homes were flooded in January, the city was aware of the potential consequences. Internal reports detailed the potential consequences, but the city failed to fund the repairs. Then, January’s storms displaced more than a thousand people. Each displacement is a product of neglected maintenance.
As the climate crisis comes home, we may discover more delays and insufficient fee structures in our past—mistakes and failures that give way to new and horrible disasters in our present and future.
Notably, a settlement is compelling the city to release data on its progress toward its climate goals, and to change course if the city fails. The city didn’t have enough staff working toward such goals in 2021.
Among the catalogue of public-facing acts an official can take, critical infrastructure maintenance is probably too unspectacular to prioritize over Westwing cosplay—or Reagan worship if one is so inclined. Repaving roads and opening dog parks will always win out against clearing culverts. Always, at least until catastrophe strikes.
Long term problems often require the legislation of long term solutions. If election cycles demarcate the periods of governance, then long term solutions are only visible in future periods. That is, politicians can not profit by securing votes from long term solutions in the short term. Elected officials have no incentive to prioritize legislation beyond the short term—and, perhaps, one term in the future if a politician is mindful of reelection. The myopia of electoral politics begets dog parks and graft in the short term, and nothing in the long term.
Worse still, firms tend to report earnings quarterly. They file taxes yearly. There is a bias toward the short-term among those who steward private and public capital in the US, whether by the accounting period or the election cycle. International capitalism is not conducive to solving these problems, and the city governments underneath it are no better off.
Economic oppression is at times something that requires multiple periods to create, and almost always requires multiple periods to correct. As neglect of vulnerable communities goes on, slight disparities grow to oppression and poverty.
Failing the governed in one period impacts the subsequent period. Failure that harms the governed today can benefit tomorrow’s candidates. A politician may run on the failures of their predecessor. The outright fascist seizes upon them in the same manner—albeit often disingenuously.
Policy outlives its legislators. American conservatives acknowledge the durability of legislation when they warn against the tyrants to come, although they often do so opportunistically. In the United States, the coming tyrant is certainly a fascist. San Diego’s city government has gone out before the coming fascist and prepared the way.
The mayor’s unsafe camping ordinance has seen little explicit use. Since its passage, the legislation’s purpose has become clearer, as evidenced by its outcomes. Riverbed camping has increased. San Diegans in Little Italy are reporting an increase in encampments.
Even more damning, the homelessness count downtown shows a reduction in the unhoused population, but county data indicates no real change. The Regional Taskforce On Homelessness reports that for twenty-two consecutive months, more people have fallen into homelessness than have escaped it.
Thus far, the ordinance has been a means of intimidating residents into relocating. The text empowers police to arrest unhoused people in particular public spaces when shelter beds are available. If one accepts that the purposes of a system is what it does, the city wrote legislation whose power is in the threat of its use. Voluntary entrance into safe campsites that have flooded and fostered illness is encouraged by altering the incentive structure. The disincentive of potential ticketing or arrest also encourages self-eviction—perhaps to riverbeds, Little Italy, and CalTrans land beneath freeway overpasses.
A willingness to remove unhoused people from public life and relocate them at the whim of the state is proto-fascism. Nazi Germany relocated “the homeless, beggars, unemployed, and alcoholics” to concentration camps under a 1933 law.
The city has also provided its police with substantial surveillance infrastructure. The five-hundred cameras equipped with automatic license plate recognition have flagged nearly 1,500 plates and the city touts 22 investigations aided by the technology. The city has moved to weaken the Privacy Advisory Board which recommended against that surveillance infrastructure. Amendments to the board’s establishing ordinance may include an exemption for fixed surveillance cameras.
The city of San Diego has established no upper limit to the surveillance technology it will give police, and it is willing to do so by leasing the technology from firms that work with police departments around the nation. The vendors, then, profit by preparing the way for fascism, thereby accelerating its arrival.
The apprehensive jostling of international capitalism produces the apparatuses that fascists need.
One need only look at the local right’s policy proposals: the forced displacement of unhoused people into the desert, and the removal of services for queer youth. GOP figures rallied for transphobia in Santee last year, with white supremacists and identifiable proud boys in attendance. One of the speakers at the rally worked to recall California’s governor.
In San Diego, one party has worked to equip the coming fascist, and the other ingratiates itself with Brownshirts.
The inherited machine
Friedrich Engels pioneered the concept of social murder by following the observations of 19th century English workers to their logical conclusion. Engels described avoidable deaths that had been induced by conditions under capitalism, such as illnesses borne of deprivation.
A common definition for social murder today invokes social, political, or economic oppression. None of these axes are static, and the expansion or contraction of oppression’s maw can be deliberate or not. A firm may pollute a poor neighborhood recklessly, or with full knowledge of the harm it will cause. A state may cut social services in the pursuit of a balanced budget, cognizant or ignorant of what it steals from working people.
What conditions are produced by the machine we worship? The people suffer, unnecessarily and horribly. American Civil Religion demands the sacrifice of the adherent and the heretic alike.
Nex Benedict was a nonbinary sixteen-year old who died following an assault by his classmates. Whether or not Benedict’s classmates are found guilty of murder, he was killed, and society is complicit. Oklahoma mandates that trans youth use bathrooms that don’t affirm their gender. A stochastic terrorist has been appointed to the state’s library board. One Oklahoma lawmaker called queer people filth while commenting on Benedict’s death.
The crude use of the “groomer” label smears adult queer people with the same unfounded accusations that queer people have always endured. But, by invoking the term, the right erases queer youth. The tacit claim is: queer youth do not exist, and youths who claim to be queer have simply been interfered with. The fascist argues that trans children are not really trans.
The neologism “gender ideology” can be traced back to the “groomer” smear. The term implies a child can be corrupted into adopting a queer identity, and that the corrupting adult may or may not be queer—but the adult is still accused of harming children in a grave fashion.
These smears dovetail with the pathologization of queerness. If queerness is a mental illness, it can be corrected, and the goal of the eradication of queer people from public life becomes palatable.
Since his death, Benedict has been misgendered by countless conservative commentators. He has been blamed for his death, and others have been blamed for his being trans. He has been labeled mentally ill for being trans. By maligning the individual, the fascist inverts social murder—Benedict’s death was not one of social cruelty, but the consequence of a society that is too accepting of a mentally ill child. The fascist calls for more cruelty in response to the killing of a trans child, and society permits this harm.
Knowingly or not, the stewards of private and public capital are working toward creating a society where death is inevitable, where the oppression of queer people is sufficiently, palatably lethal.
Belief can be pathologized, too. On February 25th, active-duty Air Force member Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. Reporting on his life and digital footprint portrays a man who had coherent and logical stances. In the days since his death, however, media commentators have dismissed Bushnell’s act as the product of mental illness. In so doing, commentators also malign the mass movement against the genocide in Palestine.
Eliminating the political element of Bushnell’s death reduces his self-immolation to a suicide. Invoking mental illness absolves society of what he protested. Simultaneously, it perpetuates a common misconception about mentally ill people: that they are fundamentally, inherently dangerous.
Certainly Bushnell’s act was extreme—he admitted as much. But, society has decided that self-immolations in protest against the enemies of empire are the solemn act of a sound mind. The accusations against Bushnell implicitly cast some self-immolations as sane, and Bushnell’s as insane. If the distinguishing factor between Bushnell and legitimate immolation is the conflict one protests, or the power that one protests, then views left of the Overton window are imperiled.
If the man who self-immolates does so due to his own insanity, rather than a clear-eyed assessment of genocide, then the state can go on pretending it is not complicit in genocide. If the bullied child is mentally ill, rather than trans, then a transphobic social murder did not take place.
Economic, social, and political oppression—and their logical consequences—are flattened into individual aberrations for which society bears no responsibility, no duty of care.
Social murder presumes social harm. Thirty-thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s latest offensive. But, nearly 70,500 have been injured, and 576,000 are at risk of famine. These harms are largely inflicted by individual soldiers, but they are permitted by society.
Unhoused people die more and more each year, but the harm they experience along the way is a social one. Every night in the cold, every day in the heat, and every unchecked excess of capital that drives homeless is a social harm.
Trans-bashing is made possible by transphobic oppression, by a dominant culture that is either indifferent- or enthusiastic toward transphobia. The pain that causes trans youth to take their own lives is the social harm that precedes their social murder. The withholding of gender-affirming care is a harm inflicted by society. Queer youth falling into homelessness are of no consequence to the state, either.
One’s living conditions include the degree to which one’s rulers have been “spoiled by authority,” as Kropotkin put it. A politician’s disregard for the needs of the governed constitute or produce social harm. A politician’s apathy toward or contempt for the governed as people is a font of violence.
Society is not arranged around care, and incarceration is the clearest example of social harm at a massive scale. More than 43% of people incarcerated in the US have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Clearly, mental illness is not treated nor improved by the violence of the penal system, as one in four incarcerated people experience serious psychological distress. The conditions which bring people with mental illness into contact with the penal system are violence in themselves, a social harm.
When paired with carceral solutions, pathologization becomes a compelling substitute for a difficult task that the state has taken up—the provision of the general good. When an identity or political belief is declared an illness, the state is no longer compelled to intervene against what inflicts suffering. The state is gifted a far simpler task: incarceration, and if necessary, brutish violence.
The state will not wrest housing from the people and firms who hoard it. Instead, it will use mental illness as a justification to expand conservatorship powers, and cite mental illness as justification for removing unhoused people from public view. The state will not protect queer people. Instead, it will enable a politic of extermination to gain support through indifference or incitement.
If there were any doubt as to the state’s utilization of mental illness, consider that Donald Trump blamed violent crime on “migrants coming from mental hospitals.” Intentional or not, we are moving toward fascism. A politician’s indifference and contempt are indistinguishable if the end result is the same: social harm unto social murder.
It is today, again, and my mouth is full of blood.
I was born inside a thing that hates me, and I will die here.