Mallory's Camera

I continue to be in a dark mood.

(Although the flowers did get delivered to Eleanor, and I got the cats drunk on catnip. Poor stodgy Rutger! When he found out he couldn’t eat it, he lost interest.)

Honestly?

I think it’s the political situation.

Trump is setting up detention camps in California, Arizona, and Alabama.

The Hitler analogy could not be clearer.

What does a good little German do?

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The immigration hysteria could not be stupider.

Forget about humanitarian considerations. Pragmatism argues for permeable borders: The federal government has been running at an enormous deficit for years, so by definition, all Americans cost the government more than they contribute toward government services. Your taxes aren’t paying for what you get or for what immigrants – documented or undocumented – get. Those costs, for the most part, are gonna be picked up by generations of Americans as yet unborn. It’s a fact attested to by numerous longitudinal studies that U.S.-born children with a foreign-born parent or grandparent are among the strongest fiscal contributors to the economy in the second and subsequent generations.

So, it could actually be argued that immigrants are paying for you.

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Though, of course, the humanitarian considerations are overwhelming.

Remember the Dust Bowl?

That was an ecological catastrophe.

The migrants who fled that catastrophe were persecuted, humiliated, exploited, and spat upon when they fled the land that was no longer capable of supporting them. Fortunately for them, they did not have to cross any imaginary national boundaries.

But that’s the situation that refugees pouring across U.S. southern borders find themselves in today. Who willingly leaves home? No one! You only leave home when there’s literally no other option for your own survival. These refugees are no different from the Dust Bowl migrants – only through some accident of colonial history, they speak Spanish instead of English.

Climate change is gonna make vast tracts of the U.S. uninhabitable in the very near future. You’re already seeing it throughout the American southwest with rising temperatures, evaporating waterways, droughts, more severe ground fires, and the death of forests. What’s going to happen in 20 years when people in California realize that except for a narrow strip along the coast, that entire state is uninhabitable?

Citizenship has its privileges, I suppose. All those people can move to Iowa without risking getting thrown into a detention camp. Maybe.

‘Cause see, here’s the thing: Once those detention camps have been established, it’s merely a matter of adjusting admission criteria to determine how to fill them. And hey! the more detainees you can stuff into them, the better it is for the local economy!

###

What can I do?

Besides shoot Hitler, I mean.

Very, very little.

I can campaign/campaign/campaign to get a progressive elected in my own tiny corner of the universe.

And that’s essentially it.

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I continue thinking about Jayson R, and it feels generative to me, like I want to write a story or a novel about him, but who the fuck knows, right? Maybe I’m just being creepy. When is it stalking, and when is it fact-finding? And who’s allowed to find the facts?

Jayson jumped from the 8th floor of the Country Inn & Suites Hotel in Long Island City at ten minutes to three on the afternoon of January 3, 2016.

Several weeks after he jumped, I made a pilgrimage to Long Island City. I’d scored a tiny wand of white sage, which I lit. I lurked near – but not too near – the entrance to the hotel and waved the sage wand furtively while trying to think uplifting thoughts. That was difficult: The hotel was a relatively new construction but all around it were vacant lots, burned-out buildings, where the wave of urban renewal washing forth from the Queensboro subway station had not yet reached.

I tried to imagine what Jayson was doing there. Had he been living there? And if so, what terrible sequence of events had led him there?

When he left Ithaca, I was shocked. All I could piece together was that there had been a wife and kids in Ithaca, and there was a beautiful woman in New York City. There had been a socially meaningful job in Ithaca; there was a directorship at a top global market intelligence firm in the city. The Ithaca job, which paid a pittance, involved imparting basic math skills and wise counsel to a group of adolescent misfits, one of whom was my kid. The global market intelligence job paid the big buck$, and one assumes it involved packaging together all sorts of science-fiction-y derivatives.

The next thing I heard was that he was dead.

This was what he looked like when he was teaching math at New Roots:



This is what he looked like when he was earning lots of zeros making numbers jump through hoops for Da Man:



He is an amazingly handsome man in both shots, but he looked a lot happier as a teacher.

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In other news, I am just about done with my quantitative analysis for Boy Wonder, which means I can start writing fiction again.