The abyss
Look at those assholes, ordinary fucking people. I hate 'em. - Bud, Repo Man
Your job, as a public defender in the deep south, is to be a midwife of suffering. Your clients trust you with their lives, or they do not – the choice is only theoretically theirs – and in return you become a distantly human face of bad news. Of course that is not all. You flail against a web of unbothered, of morally un-botherable, faces, robes, email addresses, and hold lines; you prepare diligently for the ever-elusive promise that you will be heard; you meet people who believe sincerely and zealously in a beautiful, absentee God. But more than anything else, you are the bearer of bad news. You, the go-between of lives and the forces smugly crushing them, asked to do the impossible task of rendering a vicious machine human. You may come to hate yourself for the way you deliver the news: the limpid smile, the squalid silver linings, always the rationalizing. Kind friends call it God’s work, but you cannot remember God ever doing this much apologizing for the actions of the devil.
There is a new evil to be mapped – not just Arendt’s banal evil, but an evil that renders itself inevitable and omnipotent through its affected incompetence, its inability to self-regulate. So far in my work I encountered actively, viciously evil people who relish in brutalizing those over whom they hold power, but the defining motif is a somehow more repulsive High Cringe. A court reporter’s sequined bells jingling as a man, who has the misfortune of being tried by a jury during December, testifies to escape decades in prison. A naïve prosecutor, less bright-eyed by the day, gambling with people’s lives to gain trial experience. You glance at their laptop and read the background: “Nothing is impossible,” it assures, “the word itself says ‘I’m Possible!’” You wonder, briefly, what it would mean to have those words instill anything but dread in your heart. You wonder what they are hoping to make of their life. In another courtroom, a large, ghostly prosecutor swimming in a somehow larger, more spectral suit asks your client to take a guilty plea moments before admitting that he has no case and will be forced to dismiss the matter. You exchange a chilling, damp handshake, and he tells himself by way of you that we did the right thing. He seeks company and connection, which makes him human, but it does not make him a good person. So many little tyrants at their computers, each holding the keys of which they claim to know nothing.
Once evil calcifies into a structure, it does not need to metastasize; massive, coordinated stasis is just as powerful a tool for its reproduction. Once power has entrenched itself, it is well served to empower fools and incompetents as its stewards. The easiest way to make power appear natural is to have it appear out of your hands, not your problem, up to the other guy. The most impenetrable punishment bureaucracy is one where everybody, equally, can claim to not know what they’re doing. The role of the public defender, then, is the likely doomed endeavor of assigning sense to a system that, beyond its broad commitments to racism and industrial-grade degradation, has no operating logic other than coordinated incompetence. A legion of nominally normal people who have been called to serve evil, doling out punishment one shrug at a time to those over whom they wield immeasurable power. An evil that lends itself only to mockery, a wholly inadequate tool to free those in its clutches.
My first flight was cancelled today, and I slept through my second. I’m not the kind of person who sleeps through flights, but my iPhone mysteriously shut itself off overnight, leaving me to contend not only with the logistics of plans gone awry but also with the horrific revalation of how many essential tasks I have learned to outsource to a slab of fiberglass. I took a walk to the Mississippi to look at the sun and clear my head. As I climbed the rusted stairway to the industrial-canopied park, I met an impossibly heavy, suffocating fog. The mass rolled low, creeping slowly, wall-like to me so that the sun was not merely amplified but totally recast. I walked into it, in a moment of perfect stillness, feeling convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was witnessing the afterlife. The only thing about which I could be uncertain was for how long I would stay there. As soon as I could breathe it, the fog lifted, as it always does. On my way back down the stairs to call an Uber to the airport, I realized that I had only just narrowly avoided stepping in a pile of human shit.
