Cross Section 4.5.26
Even more scattered than usual this morning
I fell asleep to the sound of Michael Barbaro asking a roundtable of econ journalists, “How monumental is this moment in time? How significant are the tariffs?” A sort of gleeful tinge to his questioning, as each journalist agreed that this was indeed unequivocally unprecedented, disrupting a half century of relative peace and prosperity.
Soon it will be impossible to buy car parts, maybe. I think of the orange exclamation point on my Camry’s dashboard, the one I’ve ignored for going on a year now.
In Kenya, my grandmother’s lungs have filled with fluid. She is in a hospital in Nairobi. She prays for me every day. When I saw her this Christmas she looked at my skirt disapprovingly, said “Kenyan girls do not dress like that,” and slowly chewed her watermelon.
In the Metropolitan Correctional Center I introduce myself to my newest client. She is smaller than me, fresh faced, smiling. “I see that you’re smiling,” I say, and my interpreter translates. “I’m just nervous,” she says, still smiling.
She tells me how, after her husband of twenty years kicked her out of the home they’d shared, she was left to raise her seventeen-year-old cognitively disabled child alone, tasked also with providing for her mother, who suffered from severe diabetes, requiring monthly doctor’s visits. She spent months working as a live-in housekeeper, eating the scraps left over by the family, sending every last cent home to her child and mother.
Then she decided to try and come here to work. Got on a boat in Rosarito with eight strangers, was told, still far from the shore ,that she would need to swim to America, though she could not swim. Fought for her life holding on to another girl, the two of them clutching one another, taking turns battling the waves until they washed up ashore.
And there, in the middle of the sunny day in San Diego, spring breakers. Teenage spring breakers who did not offer water, who did not ask questions. Simply held hands to form a human cage around my client, wet head to toe and sputtering. Simply took out their phones to film the alien for their TikToks. Held her there until border patrol came.
I am in the process of reading five or so books? And I’ll buy another one today, I think.
(1) Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is my palate cleanser, best taken first thing in the morning or right before bed to cover over my dreams with a sort of gauzy peace, my subconscious returning to mountains and lakes and humble, wise, white people tending gardens. This morning, I feel seen by her words: “So when she seemed distracted or absent-minded, it was in fact, I think, that she was aware of too many things, having no principle for selecting the more from the less important, and that her awareness could never be diminished, since it was among the things she had thought of as familiar that this disaster had taken shape.”
(2) Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, which seems to have the literary intelligentsia in a chokehold. Hilariously, the author and I were camp counselors at the same Butler University creative writing camp for a summer when I was a teenager and he was twenty-something, sharing his opaque poems at our camp-wide first-thing-in-the-morning open mics. The book is grim and self-serious and funny and experimental. I read it in the middle of assertively sunny San Diego Saturdays, where I can bear the weight of the main character’s interiority. Like chatting with a brilliant but very depressed friend. On page 209, I underline this passage: “Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contended and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.”
(3) Psalm 37, which sings, “I have seen a wicked and ruthless man flourishing like a green tree in its native soil, but he soon passed away and was no more; though I looked for him, he could not be found.”
(4) Still working through Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Should finish today I think.
(5) Been carrying around Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. I remember the sort of rapturous feeling I had when reading it in 2020, the way he was able to steel man ideas I’d previously dismissed whole cloth, forcing me to grapple with what it is I really think. Anyway I’ve been carrying it around but haven’t had the mental fortitude to pick it up. Instead I’ve taken up listening to Trevor Noah’s podcast. Loved his interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’ll pick up her newest today I think.
I have been trying to train my eyes to bear witness to this moment a little more. On Thursday morning in court, I resist the urge to tune out during the guilty plea colloquy, as behind the wooden barrier, in matching tan jumpsuits, five Mexican men answer the judge’s questions:
“Have you had any drugs or alcohol within the past five days?”
The low murmur of the Spanish interpreter’s simultaneous translation, uttered into a black microphone connected to the matching headsets of each of the five brown gentlemen of varying ages who stare grimly ahead as they answer.
Mr. Ramirez-Sotomayor? No. No! (The interpreter repeats for the record.)
Mr. Sanchez-Quijano? No. No!
Mr. Rodriguez-Rodriguez? No. No!
Mr. Zazueta-Chacon? No. No!
Mr. Chavez-Rafael? No. No!
“And how much schooling have you completed?”
The low murmur, the ceremony, the solemnity, the cattle call, the mass.
Christ have mercy.
xoxo,
LKM