Chicago, ICE, and the Lie of the American Pastoral
The taunt—a tack—isn’t new, only reinvigorated under the current regime. Assuaging the anxieties of folks who are not from around here is a rite of passage among Chicagoans who did not grow up here. The moniker “Chiraq,” for instance, is made risible by the many picturesque scenes from the riverfront and the West Loop restaurant scene found in “day in the life” vlogs, which like to display the city as a last American bastion for yuppies without inherited wealth. (The best parody of this genre, created by the comedian Mike Schwanke, shows a “weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” as an interminable cycle of prosaic hangs—brunch, happy hour, dinner, repeat.) Whereas New York arrivistes romanticize difficulty, Chicago transplants humbly take pride in ease. Chicago, in our image, is well managed and ripe for play. It’s serene and safe enough, if an outsider is asking—benign.
Can we chide this well-meaning posture without tripping into the usual slippery claims about authenticity—that what’s genuine about a city isn’t found near its famous landmarks, or that life must be difficult to be real? Maybe we laugh, as the Chicago poet Britteney Black Rose Kapri did in a video over the summer: “I know them motherfuckers ain’t never been south of fucking Hyde Park and that’s just because the university is there. West? Baby, O’Hare. Like, I get it, but it’s just also so fucking funny.” I get it, too: the sociology behind what gets counted as violence in Chicago, and why that violence is visited upon some areas and not others, is incompatible with peacocking of this sort—and, anyway, nuance hasn’t ever meant much to conservatives, either within or outside the city, except insofar as any violence can justify policies that prolong inequality. But I don’t expect that their feathers are much ruffled by the pleasant images meant to combat their histrionics. Those images of the city, soothing in their homogeneity, seem to assume that any defense against fascist occupation must assume the grammar of tourism. They call to mind what the author and activist Sarah Schulman has described as “spiritual gentrification,” a way of looking which replaces “complexity, difference” with “sameness.” They are harmonious with a conservative outlook that would have no problem transforming the city into a playground for those who can afford it. That is the reactionary dream for any city, the city as the suburbs—whose pastoral image, by the way, is its own illusion. Chicago is beautiful, but pastoral? Ha!
Pastoral is the pretext. Reaganite conservatism accomplished its mission of reimagining the exemplary American citizen within the “Dick and Jane” fantasy of the American family. Today, that family is the lingua franca of politics: liberal and conservative politicians alike articulate policy in terms of what it will or won’t do for “American families,” as if looking out upon a sea called “America,” populated by so many private islands. Even as the “American Dream” has been leached of its credibility by blatant inequality, we can’t shake its logic of individualist striving, whereby, as the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant put it, “if you invest your energies in work and family-making, the nation will secure the broader social and economic conditions in which your labor can gain value and your life can be lived with dignity.”
That’s “you” and “your,” crucially, not “we” and “our.” The exemplary citizen, the thinking goes, seeks signs of public good in private places—and especially in that heralded place of privacy in America, the family home. The exemplary citizen is discouraged from identifying with the sort of masses who demand that their government do things for people en masse; such organizing of multitudes menaces the tranquil familial portrait by which the citizen understands himself. In his quest for an American life well lived, he should excuse contradictory state behaviors—for instance, that health care will not be a universal given but that bodies should be monitored and punished under the law when they endanger the picket-fence ideal.
Examples abound in this nation of ours, but the mere existence of something called the Department of Homeland Security—the recipient of heaps of money to monitor, detain, maim, and kill people who live here in the name of public safety—is one place to look. Since January, D.H.S. propaganda, broadcast on social-media platforms such as Instagram and X, has adopted the President’s characteristic penchant for shitposting and slop. The department has been releasing “Cops”-style clips of ICE seizures, doxing citizens, and memeing with the sweaty intimacy of a corporate account. A post from July shows a Chevy Silverado wrapped in Border Patrol branding, parked to appear as though its passengers were staring wistfully upon the open desert at the golden hour. “ ‘You Look Happier,’ ” an observer imagined in the text says. The response: “Thanks! ICE is deporting all criminal illegal aliens & there is no crisis at the border.” Another post describes a “one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation,” beside footage of a chain gang being forced onto a plane. A piece in The Drift by the writer Mitch Therieau has given such messages the apt name “agit-slop.” On the video of the chain gang, one commenter remarks, “I thought this was a meme account at first.” Another is left to point out, “THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS WITH FAMILIES JUST LIKE YOU!!!!!”
