The Enemy Within

So I was going to write a column about a recent column Chris Hedges wrote about Delaney Hall, a private prison in New Jersey, operated by The GEO Group, Inc. under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a subsidiary department of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is currently being operated as a federal immigration detention facility (i.e., Delaney Hall is, not DHS).

This column I was going to write, and publish, in a desperate bid to stop or slightly slow down the exodus of paid subscribers from my Substack was going to signal to longstanding readers of my Substack who were, at that moment (i.e., the moment I published the aforementioned column, and it instantly appeared on the screens of their phones), contemplating unsubscribing, that I was “back,” and thus there was really no reason to cancel their paid subscriptions to my Substack (and, a few days later, sign up for a free subscription to my Substack with a new email address that I couldn’t possibly connect to the old one, and continue reading my columns without paying).

It was going to be slightly confusing, this column. It was going to be about private prisons like Delaney Hall, and the private prison industry, and the security industry, and global capitalism, and the new totalitarianism. It was going to focus on The GEO Group, Inc., formerly The Wackenhut Corporation, which was acquired by a company called Group 4 Falck, a Danish-British-Swedish multinational security and emergency services conglomerate that merged with a British security firm called Securicor and became G4S, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Allied Universal, from which Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, a subsidiary of The Wackenhut Corporation, repurchased its stock and became The GEO Group, Inc., which is now independent of G4S, with which it competes, and occasionally partners, on security contracts from assorted governments.

I couldn’t get it up to write that column. I don’t know who would want to read it. It wasn’t going to have anything to do with Epstein, or Israel, or the Jews, or that guy from Maine with the Nazi tattoo, or Bari Weiss, or whatever that weird thing is on Trump’s hand, or Hunter Biden’s comeback, or the race riot in Belfast, or whatever everyone is supposed to have a take on today and then forget they ever cared about tomorrow, which is what seems to be selling.

So here’s another excerpt from the book I’m currently obsessively writing, Strangers in a Strange Homeland: a Manic Odyssey in Search of the American Spirit, which, if I can stay on track and meet my deadline, will be published by Arcade Publishing next spring.

It’s the opening of the chapter about our adventures in Oregon. It begins with a little philosophical reflection.

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The Enemy Within

Back in the summer of 2016, when the Global War Terror was switched off and the War on Populism was switched on like that scene in Orwell’s 1984 where the Party switches official enemies in the middle of the Hate Week rally, the majority of Americans were completely oblivious. And of course they were. The majority of Americans do not have the time to monitor the revision of official reality on a daily basis. Most Americans do not believe there is such a thing as official reality. They believe that reality is ... well, reality. It’s just the way it is. Things just happen. One day, we’re at war with the terrorists, the next day, we’re at war with the populists, and the day after that, Donald Trump is president.

But reality isn’t just the way it is, and things don’t just happen. They do not magically spring into existence out of the ether. They evolve out of other things that evolved out of other things in a series of steps stretching back through time.

This process is generally known as “history.” Most Americans are oblivious to it.

For example, most Americans believe that the Global War on Terror started on September 11, 2001, because some terrorists flew some planes into some buildings. Which they did, but not because “they hate us for our freedoms.” The Global War on Terror started, or became inevitable, when the Soviet Union collapsed, taking its ideology down with it. This is when global capitalism became the last ideological power system standing. Its final external enemy vanquished, it had nothing left to do but consolidate its power and implement its ideology throughout the territory it occupied, which, in this case, happened to be the entire planet. That, and neutralize any and all forms of internal resistance to its occupation. The military term for this is “clear and hold.”

It is the historical context of the last thirty-six years.

It is a difficult thing to get one’s head around, the fact that the entire planet is occupied by a single ideological power system that has no outside adversaries. The fact that there is no “outside” of the system, no external ideological territory from which to mount opposition, and thus any and all forms of opposition to the system are mounted from within. The fact that every form of opposition to the system is an act of insurrection, an act of terrorism, in essence, a crime.

The nature of the opposition is irrelevant to the system. Opposition is opposition. It needs to be neutralized. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, lone-wolf terrorists, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Covid deniers, January Sixxers, neo-Nazis, Antifa, Hamas, the Iranians, Remigrationists, neo-Situationists ... it makes no difference to GloboCap, except to the extent that it can turn one group against another, and neutralize them both, or allow one group to run amok for a while, and then neutralize it, with prejudice, to send a message.

The members of this group, i.e., the group that GloboCap has allowed to run amok for a while in order to make an example of it later, are almost invariably unaware of the role they are playing, and of their inevitable fate, because they are almost invariably unaware of the sequence of historico-political events that delivered them to where they are … which isn’t where they think they are.

He that hath ears, let him hear. In the meantime, back to our manic odyssey.

…

On the afternoon of September 27, as Hugo and I were tear-assing west on I-84 along the Columbia River, President Trump announced that he had directed the Pentagon to immediately send “all necessary Troops” to “War-ravaged Portland,” which was “under siege from attack by Antifa” and other unidentified “domestic terrorists.” Five days earlier, as Hugo and I were tear-assing up into the Rocky Mountains, he had officially declared Antifa a “Domestic Terrorist Organization,” and a “Terrorist Threat.” And now he had authorized the U.S. military to use “full force, if necessary,” to protect the city and “our ICE facilities” from being overrun and captured by the “terrorist” forces.

Naturally, I was looking forward to arriving in Portland and getting “in the shit,” so I was rather disappointed when we rolled into town and drove around for about an hour looking for “the shit,” and couldn’t find it. There was no “shit,” none that we could locate. The city didn’t look particularly “war ravaged” or “under siege from attack by Antifa,” or any other group of “domestic terrorists.” I pulled over and illegally parked, left Hugo in the Mustang to guard his gear from the roving bands of Antifa terrorists, who would presumably want to steal it, and pawn it, and use the money to buy black market arms or get their genders reassigned, and dashed into some sort of vegan Asian Fusion restaurant across the street. The place was clearly a terrorist front. Everything about it was way too “normal.” People were just sitting there, eating their vegan kimchi quesadillas, as if nothing was happening. A server and the hostess were standing in the back. They looked like they were probably Antifa, or Antifa-adjacent. They had the haircuts, and the piercings, and they were wearing black.

“Hi ... I’m looking to get in the shit.”

“Sorry, our restrooms are for customers only.”

“No, the shit. The fighting. Antifa. ICE.”

“There’s nothing like that ...”

“It’s OK. I’m a satirist. I live in Berlin. My buddy is a photographer.”

“Please keep your voice down.”

“We’re looking for the terrorists.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I dashed back out, and limped across the street.

Hugo was going through the five Google calendars he had put various versions of our ever-changing itinerary and important contacts in.

“What’s the name of the place where we’re staying?”

“Her name is Marie-Clair.”

“No, the name of the town.”

“Gresham. It’s a suburb of Portland.”

“I don’t have the address.”

“Call Brandy. She’ll have it.”

I cranked up the Mustang and got us out of there.

“The staff in that place were definitely Antifa.”

“Are you OK?”

“Sure. Why?”

“You’re talking funny.”

“I just need to sleep.”

“In one mile, turn right onto Southwest Alder Street.”

…

Gresham is a quiet, leafy suburb about twenty minutes east of downtown Portland. One of my readers, Marie-Clair Dumont, had offered to put us up for two nights. Our itinerary was ridiculously tight, as usual. We had a date the next day to gather with some Covid dissidents at Dick’s Primal Burgers in Portland, and Hugo wanted to connect with a friend from Yale or Miami and attend a protest, and then I had to get back to Gresham to do a reading at The Scout, a local wine bar. But that was the next day. We had the rest of the night to relax, clean up, and sleep in separate bedrooms. Marie-Clair cooked us a lovely dinner, and then we sat out on her deck and talked about “War-ravaged Portland,” and what was going on in America. Marie-Clair is a chiropractor. When she saw the state my body was in, she broke out her electrical muscle stimulator, plastered electrodes all over my back, and cranked it up until my infraspinati and latissimi dorsi started jerking and quivering.

I slept like a German marmot that night.

Our gathering the next day at Dick’s Primal Burgers was larger than I had expected. I had thought we were meeting with a couple of random Covid deniers. As it turned out, it was a whole private room full of people, many of whom had been members of a local group that had formed during the Covid era. A lot of them were former leftists, or non-New Normal leftists, or they didn’t know exactly what to call themselves anymore. One of them was Paul Levy, who has written several books about what the Algonquin people refer to as the “Wetiko,” a cannibalistic psychic virus, or spirit, or “malignant egophrenia,” driven by insatiable greed and bloodlust, which takes over people’s minds and turns them into selfish, homicidal assholes.

Everyone has their own version of The Beast.

At some point, Hugo’s friend Doris turned up, and she and Hugo took off in the Mustang. Hugo wanted to locate and photograph “the shit,” and Doris said she knew where to find it. Apparently, a division of “domestic terrorists” were assembling in a park by the Willamette River, preparing to ravage and lay siege to the city. Many of them had brought their children along, presumably to use as human shields. Several of them were posing as octogenarian ladies in motorized wheelchairs. No one was fooled by these devious tactics. This was going to be a major Antifa operation, on the scale of the Tet Offensive at least. Hugo and Doris set out to capture the carnage on film for the historical record. Marie-Clair drove me back to her house, where I took a nap and then got myself together for the event at The Scout that night.

The Scout is lovely little wine bar in Gresham. It’s owned by two guys who were both Cavalry Scouts in Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country. They were part of the “clear” part of “Clear and Hold.” Now they own and operate this wine bar together, and host reading events from time to time. Our event was packed; it’s a pretty small place. We talked about America, and what was going on, and the spectacle, and Antifa, and “War-Ravaged Portland,” and illegal immigration, and the dissolution of borders, and national sovereignty, and how global capitalism was destabilizing and restructuring the planet. My global-capitalism analysis didn’t go over very well, at least not with the gentleman who grabbed me on my way out to smoke and advised me to stop referring to capitalism as “capitalism.”

“It isn’t capitalism.”

“I was just on my way to ...”

“It’s crony capitalism.”

“OK. Sure.”

“Are you familiar with the Austrian School?”

“Could we maybe continue this discussion outside?”

“It’s an oligopoly.”

I really wanted to smoke.

“Look, it may not be the kind of capitalism you want, but it’s the kind of capitalism we have.”

###

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The rest of the chapter covers our visit to Ashland, Oregon, and the interview we did for Jefferson Public Radio, the local NPR affiliate, and the event we did at the Barnes & Noble in Medford, all of which events were arranged by Margaret Anna Alice, with whom many of my readers will be familiar. You’ll have to wait for the book for that.

Photo: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York