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pengychan · 3 years

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[Coco] Nuestra Iglesia, Pt 21

Title: Nuestra Iglesia Summary: Fake Priest AU. In the midst of the Mexican Revolution, Santa Cecilia is still a relatively safe place; all a young orphan named Miguel has to worry about is how to get novices Héctor and Imelda to switch their religious vows for wedding vows before it’s too late. He’s not having much success until he finds an unlikely ally in their new parish priest, who just arrived from out of town. Fine, so Padre Ernesto is a really odd priest. He’s probably not even a real priest, and the army-issued pistol he carries is more than slightly worrying. But he agrees that Héctor and Imelda would be wasted on religious life, and Miguel will take all the help he can get. It’s either the best idea he’s ever had, or the worst. Characters: Miguel Rivera, Ernesto de la Cruz, Héctor Rivera, Imelda Rivera, Chicharrón, Óscar and Felipe Rivera, OCs. Imector. Rating: T

[All chapters up are tagged as ‘fake priest au’ on my blog.]

A/N: First off, unlike Ernesto, I gotta give some credit! The song that features in this chapter was written by @eldathe, who has a gift I sorely lack (but whom I'll definitely not murder for it). Also, @lunaescribe wrote the bulk of the scene in which Ernesto and John discuss the scriptures. I only made some minor edits with her permission (watch and learn, Ernesto). Art is by @swanpit, who is a gift as always!

***

“So it… worked? It actually worked?”

“Why the surprise? I told you I could sell it.”

Sofía made a point to cross her arms and look just a little insulted, but she didn’t really put a lot of effort in it: relief was too great. Sure, she had been pretty certain she’d managed to back the gringo into a corner and force him to keep the secret, but she couldn’t entirely discount the chance he’d decide screwing Ernesto over was more important.

“Right, right-- you did a great job,” Héctor replied, laughing a little in sheer glee. “Well, it’s sorted! We’re safe!”

Imelda rolled her eyes. “From the Federales, yes. Not from boredom now that Juan will be the one to say mass.”

“Let’s be honest, Sunday mass was never a party when Padre Edmundo led it, and we somehow survived.”

“Fair enough.”

“Huh, Ernesto? Why the long face?” Héctor spoke up, blinking. Now that he mentioned, Ernesto did rather look like he’d just announced Juan had opted to personally hang him in the plaza first thing after the evening mass.

As a response, Ernesto made a face. “He wants me to study the Bible.”

“Well, there are worse punishments--”

“And learn Latin.”

“... Ah.”

“Oh.”

“My condolences.”

“Would you like me to send a telegram now for the Federales to come pick you up at their earliest convenience?”

Ernesto scoffed. “You know, this is the part where you’re supposed to be telling me Latin is not too bad.”

“But it is,” Héctor said, matter-of-factly.

“What, you’d have me lie to you?” Sofía gasped in moc horror, hand to her mouth. “Me? A nun?”

“... I hate all of you,” Ernesto informed them, only to yelp and laugh when Héctor threw an arm around his shoulders and ruffled his carefully combed hair.

“Ay, don’t be like that. We survived it, and you will too,” he declared. “But I have just the thing that will make you feel better!”

“You managed to sneak in a bottle of tequila?”

“Better - I have an idea for a new song, and I know you’re going to love it.”

“Hah! If I’m left with any free time for music now.”

“Well, Juan is going to be busy, no? Saying mass and confessing and whatnot. He can’t be watching you all the time,” Héctor pointed out, and patted his shoulder. “... It’s good to know you’re safe.”

Ernesto chuckled, reaching up to fix his hair. “We all are.” The rest of the sentence - for now - hung unspoken in the air, but none of them said anything. In the end, it was Héctor to speak.

“Well-- I’ll go looking for Miguel. I need to talk to him. And don’t you think I forgot you also owe him an apology,” he added, jabbing a finger against Ernesto’s chest before he was off... though not without giving Imelda a dreamy smile as he left the room. Ernesto scoffed.

“What, is apologizing is my new job now?” he called out, but none of them bothered to reply.

***

Héctor found Miguel at the stream, throwing flat rocks over the water and trying to make them bounce all the way down to the bridge while Dante jumped in the water over and over again, trying to catch them in mid-air and failing miserably.

The chamaco was breaking the rules in several ways - skipping his laundry duty day, staying out past the time he was allowed to be out, and in a place where he was not supposed to be - but Héctor wasn’t about to give him a lecture now that he had to try and extend the olive branch.

… Oh, who was he kidding, he wouldn’t have given a lecture under any circumstances. He walked up right behind Miguel, grinned, and strummed his guitar with a grito.

“Ayyyyyyy!”

“GAH!”

Miguel jumped a couple of feet up in the air, almost landing in the stream right along with Dante; the only reason why he didn’t was that Héctor reached out to grasp the back of his shirt quickly enough to spare him an unplanned bath.

“Careful, chamaco!” he laughed, pulling him back onto solid ground. “My new song may need a little polishing, but it’s not so bad to jump in the stream over.”

Miguel blinked, taken aback, then grinned. “A new song? What is--” he exclaimed, only to trail off. He made a face, crossing his arms. “I’m still mad at you.”

Héctor sighed. “I know, I know. I’m sorry I didn’t keep my word, Miguel, but it wasn’t a secret I could sit on. I had to make sure Santa Cecilia was not in danger.”

“Ernesto is not dangerous,” Miguel protested, but ay, Héctor would hear the slight hesitation in his voice, notice how quickly he averted his gaze. He frowned.

“Miguel…?”

“I just-- he was really mad that I told you. He yelled at me, hit Dante - I mean, he did growl at him, but…” he bit his lower lip. “He said he should have let me drown the day we met.”

He said what, Héctor thought. I’m going to kick his ass, he thought. With an immense effort, he managed to let neither of those thoughts show.

“He is sorry, and he will apologize,” he said instead. He’d better, or else. “He was under a lot of pressure, and said things he didn’t mean. He-- we were afraid word got out.”

Miguel looked back up at him, alarmed. Héctor, the nuns and everyone else had done their best to shield children from the harsh reality that was the ongoing war outside Santa Cecilia, but any child could tell that would have been bad, bringing the Federales down on Ernesto and Santa Cecilia like wolves on cattle.

“What? But it didn’t, right? It wasn’t me, I told no one else but you, I swear--”

Héctor smiled. “No, it was a false alarm. All is well,” he promised, and strummed the guitar again. “And I have the new song. Want to be the first to hear it, chamaco?”

It had been a while since Héctor had the time to write a new song, even longer since Miguel had been the first to get to hear it, and the thought was clearly enough to chase away the lingering fear and anger. “What is it called?”

“Cómo está tu Padre - it’s about Ernest-- Padre Ernesto and Padre Juan.”

Miguel bit his lower lip. “Padre Ju-- John is not too bad,” he declared.

“Oh?”

“He talked to me. Put in a good word for you when I was mad.”

Well. With how their recent interactions had gone, that was not something Héctor had expected to hear. “Oh. Well then, I suppose I’ll thank him for that.”

“The song isn’t too mean to him, is it?”

Héctor’s smile turned a bit sheepish. “Not excessively. Just some light-hearted fun.”

Miguel seemed thoughtful for a few moments, then he clearly decided it wouldn’t be too bad - or, more likely, that being decent for once was not enough to make up for the huge pain in the neck the gringo had been in the past few days. He perched up on a rock while Dante climbed out of the stream, a rock in his mouth, and flopped in the dirt at Miguel’s feet.

Ah, there was the public. Héctor cleared his throat. “When you're a Man of God, the people come to you to check in on the church…” he spoke, and strummed the guitar before singing.

“As I walk through the plaza, A señora comes my way From her lips falls a question Cómo está tu Padre? Ay, now what do I say? The Church of Santa Cecilia Watches with cynicism An American man hell-bent on Sharing blanco egoisms. Lone, he thinks he's the one! To have Divine Right to bear down on! He'll show dismay When his own way, Can't stay long. Such is life, with Padre-”

***

“John--!”

“Don’t John me. It’s Father Johnson, and you’ve had your break, Ernest. Now, read aloud--”

“It was three hours ago!”

The protest gained Ernesto a single, insufferable arched eyebrow from the gringo sitting across the table. He had his own Bible open, which looked… significantly more beat up than last time Ernesto had seen it.

“Oh, no,” he said flatly. “Three straight hours of study. No man has ever endured such torment.”

“Well, it is more than enough for me!”

“Unsurprising, considering you seem to be barely literate in Spanish--”

“Hey! I can read, write and do maths, for your information--”

“-- But if you are to learn any Latin before the end of days comes--”

“-- And I can read music sheets! Can you read music sheets?”

The gringo sighed and shook his head. “Not that it is relevant, but as a matter of fact, I received piano lessons as a boy,” he said. His expression, like that of a man who sucked on a lemon, made Ernesto suspect they had not gone too well. “Now, I ask you to focus until at least the end of the page.” He pushed the book back towards Ernesto. “Go ahead, translate the next part.”

Holding back a groan, Ernesto looked back down at the page. If he did what he asked, maybe they would be done soon. “All right, so, uh. Pray for us sinners, which is ora pro nobi--”

“Nobis.” Juan - since using his real name got him no leniency, may as well keep calling him that - cut him off for the eleventh time in the past five minutes. “It is nobis. Which case is that?”

“Uhhh… ab… gen...” Ernesto glanced up, trying to gauge his reaction.

All he got was a raised eyebrow. Again. He was more and more tempted to rip those ridiculous stripes of yellow hair off his face. "Think. Nos, nostri or nostrum, nobis. Nominative, genitive…?"

Something clicked in Ernesto’s head. “Oh! Dative! That would be dative, right?”

An approving nod. “Dative plural, correct. Now, what else did you get wrong?”

Ernesto looked back down at the page, trying not to think that if he’d just let him call the Federales he would now be hanging by the neck from a tree and none of this would be his problem anymore. “Peccatoris?” he guessed.

“Exactly. Peccatoris is genitive singular of peccator, first of all, so at least you didn’t entirely make it up. But in the sentence it refers to nobis, which means it must be…?”

Ernesto gave him a blank look. Juan sighed, but did not lose his nerve. “Think of the same sentence in Spanish - ruega por nosotros pecadores. Why not ‘nostros pecadora’?”

“Because nostros is plural and pecadora is singular. And feminine.”

“And what is the issue there?”

Well, that was a dumb question even a kid could answer. “That it’s got to match.” Ernesto frowned, thinking it over, and-- oh. Oh. “Wait. It’s got to match nobis, so-- dative plural as well?”

A nod, something that almost resembled a smile. “Very well,” Juan conceded, and Ernesto grinned. There, that wasn’t too bad, after a-- “And that would be?”

“Huh?”

“Dative plural of peccator. What is it?”

Ah. “Er… peccatorum?

"That’s genitive."

“Peccatores?”

“Nominative. Or accusative, could be either.”

“Uuuugh.” Ernesto let out a groan, and his head dropped on the desk with a distinct thunk. He could almost hear a smirk in Juan’s voice when he spoke again.

“Peccatores, peccatorum, peccatoribus,” he said, taking a cigarette out of the case. “Ora pro nobis peccatoribus. We’ll go through the third declension again before we call it a night.”

“What-- you said this was the last page!”

“I asked you to focus enough to finish it, didn’t say it’d be the last. You clearly need more prac--”

“It’s almost two in the morning!”

“Then we better be quick.”

Forehead still pressed on the desk, Ernesto groaned. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not without a clear conscience, which is to say not until I’ve done my duty,” Juan replied, and pushed a notebook full of notes in front of Ernesto again. “It’s not difficult. You need to memorize it and, with enough practice, it will come naturally. You should have an edge on me there.”

Was he mocking him? Ernesto raised an eyebrow himself. “... Do I now?”

“Spanish is one of the closest languages to Latin, whereas English has different roots. It was difficult for me to pick up Latin at first. You’re doing quite--” he paused, stopping short of saying ‘well’. “... Passably, for someone entirely ignorant.”

“Hey!” Ernesto protested. He may not be a bookworm, or a scholar, but that was going too far.

“It is not meant as an insult. It comes from Latin ignorare, which simply means ‘not to know’--”

Ernesto dropped his head back on the table, and rather wished the Federal Army would come to put him out of his misery sooner rather than later.

***

“So, we’re marching south?”

“Jesus Christ, we have literally just arrived, I was hoping we could rest…”

“We will, I think they said we’re not going for at least another week--”

“Two weeks. If you’re going to eavesdrop, at least do it properly,” a voice suddenly spoke up, causing the gathered soldiers to wince and turn.

“Commander Hernández!”

“We were just, uh, we--”

“I was not eavesdropping, I only… er… walked by, and… sort of… overheard what they were telling you...”

The newly appointed Commander Santiago Hernández waved a hand, clearly unbothered by the very obvious lie, and they all breathed a little more easily that no punishment would be doled out. That was something they appreciated about Hernández, even though they didn’t know him well: he had been one of them until recently, when his actions in Veracruz and his show of loyalty in refusing discharge had gained him a promotion. He was above them, but didn’t flaunt it nearly as much as others would.

“It will be announced soon, so it is no secret,” he was saying. “Our battalion will remain here for a further week or two, in case reinforcements are needed around Mexico City, but it seems unlikely the current standstill will break. Once we receive the all-clear, we finally head south.”

That word - finally - sounded like a sigh of relief, and the men exchanged a few glances. It was no mystery that Commander Hernández had been itching to lead them down south for a good while, growing increasingly frustrated with the skirmishes and changing tactics that kept them in their current position. He was hellbent on finding a deserter who had shot a friend of his and had fled south, which was understandable but… a touch loco, really.

South is a very vague hint to finding a man who had run off months earlier. This Ernesto de la Cruz may have joined the rebels or been killed by them, died in the desert he’d escaped into, be hiding into some hole or even have crossed the border into Guatemala or British Honduras; chances of running into him were slim to none.

But of course, none of them was foolish to say as much aloud in his presence.

“This will be no stroll in the park,” the Commander was going on. “We will need to get through Zapata’s territory to get there, but it is necessary. We cannot let them push their control all the way to Veracruz and cut the country in two. We will have reinforcements for that part.”

“... And after that?”

“After that, the battalion splits. Some units will go towards Yucatán, while I will lead you towards Oaxaca and then down to Chiapas. There are some very active rebel groups in both regions who support Zapatistas, but few enough they can be dealt with. There is belief they have widespread support among the civilian population, and that is what we need to crush.”

If Commander Hernández noticed any of his men shifting uncomfortably, he pretended not to. His voice was cold, his eyes unyielding, the world reduced to friends to fight alongside with and enemies to be destroyed.

No, not friends - comrades. Santiago Hernández had no friends, not anymore. The last he had left were shot dead, by a deserter and by Americans. His fellow soldiers could show him obedience, show him respect and even camaraderie, but there was no one left to show him friendship.

And no one left who could talk reason into him.

***

“Since he rode in with swagger And a crass sort of charm, His unconventional ideas Keep our town safe from harm He draws in crowds To the church, old and young Quick to bestow, He'll make his blessings come We were fatherless, and Hey, presto! We were gifted with Padre-”

“Miguel.”

“-- Huh? No, Ernest-- gah!” Miguel let out a yelp, trying with very little success to hide the guitar behind his back and acutely aware of the fact the small crowd of children who’d been listening to him was dispersing very quickly; out of the corner of the eye, he could see Óscar and Felipe leaping over a fence like thoroughbred horses. Within moments the only ones in the yard were himself and Dante, with Father John towering over them.

… Well, at least he didn’t look too mad. Only rather tired. Miguel was suddenly very glad he’d decided to only sing the part about Ernesto and not the bit about him. Even so, seeing children shrieking and running off when he approached probably was… not very nice. Miguel gave a smile he hoped would come across as charming but that was actually very, very sheepish.

“Hola, Father John,” he said, making sure to pronounce his name as correctly as he could. The priest’s thin lips curled for a moment in something reasonably close to a smile.

“Hola, Miguel. That was… an interesting song.”

“It was just… just a bit of fun.” Miguel shifted a little, hoping he wouldn’t find out about the rest of it, or who had written it. Thankfully, the gingo didn’t prod for more details.

“... I do apologize. It was not my intention to spoil your fun. I am searching for my Bible - I seem to have lost it,” Father John said, letting his gaze wander around the yard, on the low stone wall and the few benches - but there was no sign of a Bible anywhere. “It is quite old and ruined, but it has a sentimental value. Could you spread the word and let me know if you find it?”

Ah. “Of course. I can go look for it. I will now,” Miguel spoke quickly, and turned to leave - but Father John spoke first, causing him to pause.

“... You do miss Father Ernest, I gather,” he said, and well… there was no point in lying there. Ernesto had even apologized to him for snapping, as Héctor said he would, even though he’d offered no explanation, and Miguel had accepted the apology. So all was well now… right?

“We kinda miss him at Mass,” he admitted. “I know you said he’s busy with other things, and-- I like how you say Mass,” Miguel added quickly, hoping he had not noticed how he’d almost dozed off and dropped the incense the previous Sunday. “It’s just-- well-- you know--”

“It’s all right, I understand. I’ll ask him to say Mass this Sunday,” he said calmly, and walked back to the church. As he watched him go, more of Héctor’s song echoed in Miguel’s head.

Like oil and water Their teamwork does seem strained And so I often am questioned Cómo está tu Padre?

***

Father John Johnson lit his next cigarette against his best judgment.

He normally practiced more restraint, even with a vice, especially considering rolling papers and tobacco felt like something immoral to spend his small allowance on in such hard times. That, and it was the last in his tin - which meant that in order to get more he’d have to go on an unpleasant trek up the hill, to the small stand on the edge of town, with the little gruff man who clearly overcharged and quipped about John reminding him of Spaniard colonizers each time.

John’s family was actually of Dutch ancestry - not a drop of Spanish blood as far as he was aware - but it was a fight John had decided not to pick. He’d just take the scathing remark and be content that the man wouldn’t go telling the rest of the town that the gringo priest bought tobacco from him. By far not his most shameful secret, but still one he’d tried to keep hidden.

“And what’s the point of that anymore,” John mused aloud, leaning back against a tree.

As much as he’d tried to avoid the thought, he feared his worse sin would leak to this town sooner or later, due to Ernest’s continued existence here. Granted, the man had all the more reason to keep John’s secret now that his own had been found out, but a slip of the tongue was all it would take.

And if that happened, well, he would no longer have to worry about keeping his smoking habit hidden. Who’d be bothered by a priest having a penchant for foul-smelling habits when it’s common knowledge he has an even stronger penchant for men in his bed? Perhaps Brother Hector would write a song about that, too. The thought terrified him, knotting up his stomach, and yet he couldn’t hold back a bitter laugh before he took another drag.

Such thoughts circling endlessly in his mind were part of the reason for his irresponsible rationing of cigarettes, along with Ernest’s gauche behavior ever since he showed divine and priestly mercy.

That morning’s breakfast had made him nearly reconsider indulging Sister Sophie’s plea for Ernest’s pitiful life. The man had been edging toward familiarity ever since John had given him the gift of mercy allowing him to remain in the parish, so long as he did his best to behave like a real priest so no one else learned his secret - which meant listening when John assigned him scripture to study, so his sermons no longer consisted of him improvising stories he thought he remembered from childhood.

Even so, he regretted allowing Ernest to occasionally say mass to keep people from questioning the change. It took all the restraint in John’s body not to stand up in the middle of mass that day to correct him that Jesus never ‘set a temple on fire for revenge’ and certainly did not ‘condone’ arson in the ‘right situation’. Indeed, John 2:14 was his first assignment for that little mishap.

Clearly, the lesson Ernest had taken from it was not precisely the one John had hoped he would. Instead he seemed quite coy at breakfast declaring loudly to all the sisters and impressionable Hector how reexamining the bible was such a ‘good reminder’ that Jesus simply ‘doesn’t care much if we sin!’.

“He was a bit of a hell-raiser himself! A rebel!”

Each phrase announced with a strongly targeted grin toward John in an obvious attempt to excuse his own behavior, which nearly caused John to flip a table himself. But he had shown restraint, and channeled that anger into what was now his last cigarette, which he would attempt to savor as slowly as possible.

“There you are!”

The voice burst seemingly from nowhere, causing him to yelp. “Lord have mercy!”

John startled, nearly dropping the cigarette and turning to glare up at that man. In response, he just grinned.

“I thought you had better reflexes than that,” Ernest began, the forced friendliness and warmth radiating off him just as strongly as it had during breakfast. He either wanted something from him, perhaps more foul carnal acts - in which case he would be sorely disappointed - or was trying to make sure his little stunt that morning hadn’t cost him John’s silence and mercy.

John inhaled, his voice coming out strained with fragile control. “I have… given you respite, patience, and lessons. I can not fathom a reason you must accost me in private when I have been explicit that unless it is in the parish for lessons we are not to--”

Ernest didn’t seem to be listening: the next moment he was plopping into the grass beside him, leaning on another side of the tree. “I know, I know,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m not going to take up much time, it’s just that you rather rudely ran off at breakfast--”

“You cannot fathom how close I was to strangling you over the nonsense you were spouting, you should count yourself lucky that I left--”

“But,” Ernest cut him off, “you left before I made my point about my, uh, study of scriptures.”

“I’m not grading you,” John replied flatly.

“I am aware. But I think I found something that could bring you, uh…” a vague gesture. “I just think it’d be something you’d like. I don’t think what you-- we are is such a big deal. In case you missed it--”

Missed it - now that was nothing short of an insult, and John’s composure broke. “I’m the real priest, Ermest - what could you possibly teach me that I don’t know about scripture!” he barked. Ernest didn’t even flinch, but lifted a Bible he’d seemingly pulled out of nowhere. Had he kept it hidden under his robes for a dramatic reveal just now?

“What, don’t like to think I can get something you didn’t?” Ernest made a face. “I am pretty smart, if I say so myself. Even you admitted I’m getting the hang of Latin.”

His boldness was coming back each day he awoke to see John had not yet cast him out it seemed. “Pride is a sin,” John muttered, making an effort not to release a slew of profanity he would have to confess to - God knew who to, since he was the only priest in the village. Instead, he pressed the cigarette between his lips and inhaled as though the smoke was oxygen.

Ernest shrugged. “Anyway. I’ll have you know that according to Romans 3:23--”

“Yes, yes. ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’,” John replied without missing a beat. “I’m well aware. Is this a case to prove why you deserve full forgiveness and a return to--”

“Well, if you shut your mouth and let me finish, maybe you’ll see.”

Oh, John would love to be a pettier man, to make some empty threat about changing his mind to get Ernest on his toes again. But, well… God was watching, and he’s sinned enough lately. Far more than enough.

“Well then,” Ernest was going on. “Since he’s saying we’re all sinners, there’s no reason to feel particularly bad if we--”

“Priest. I’m a priest,” John cut him off again, stressing the words just enough to remind Ernest that he was not one, regardless of the cloth he wore.

“Huh?” He seemed honestly confused. “I know you’re--”

“Do you just keep forgetting priests are on another level of standard than--”

“Cálmese one minute, will you?”

“I am calm!” John snapped. “But if you don’t cease blaspheming, I’ll have you study so much--”

“So anyway,” Ernest barreled on before he could be scolded for the disrespect. “That verse reminded me of one I heard as a boy, and it took some digging to find it, has anyone ever thought of alphabetizing this thing?”

“This thing would be the Holy Bible, it would be appreciated if you showed some respect towards the Word of--”

“Anyway, it was a Psalm,” Ernest continued, clearly having made a habit of not acknowledging John’s attempts at educating him that day. “And it went, ‘for you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made - your works are wonderful’, and so on, right? God made us and all that, and makes no mistakes. You told me - and I’ve watched - you tried everything to avoid these desires, so… why would God make a mistake with you?”

John was silent for a moment; it mirrored a touch too closely to the argument Father Joseph had given him years ago. Shaking off the alarm, he turned his gaze on Ernest’s face for the first time in the conversation. “You have mistaken the Devil’s influence for divine design.”

“Didn’t you tell me you’d felt this way since you were a child - an innocent?”

“I was not that young, I was…” Almost a man, he’d thought then, but looking back now… oh, he truly had been barely more than a child. Something ached in John’s chest and throat, and he swallowed before speaking. “The devil, he… he works in deceitful ways.”

“Me too, you know.”

John scoffed. “Yes, you certainly do work in deceitful ways too, but that is no reason--”

“No, I mean-- being like that. As a boy.”

Ah. John fell silent, and turned back to Ernest. His hands were crossed, and he looked… uncharacteristically uneasy, no longer looking at him. “Even before my… experiences in, uh…” a sigh. “I said it was seminary, but of course that was not it.”

“Where…?”

“In the army. Overall unpleasant.” A bitter chuckle, but he didn’t elaborate. “But well before then, I would look at men. Other boys, really, well before I knew what sodomy was. Like you, correct?”

John had only ever looked that way at one boy when so young, but the memory of Walker Underwood - leaning back on the grass beside him to look up at the stars, talking and laughing, so unaware of John’s reddening skin and uneasy thoughts - still hurt all those years later, and he chose not to remark on that.

“... Correct,” he murmured instead, and Ernest nodded before speaking again.

“And it was not lust exactly, was it? Too young for that. So… why’d God make you like that if his design is divine? Either of us?”

A somewhat smug smirk was emerging on Ernest’s face, like that of a pupil who had turned in an immaculate report despite the teacher’s mediocre expectations. John turned his attention to the grass, his smoking hand lingering in the air as Father Joseph’s kindly voice and words echoed in his head.

Perhaps it is in God’s plan that it remains your cross to bear.

Ah, but Ernest did not think of it as a cross to bear. He accepted it, embraced, revelled in it… and God had not struck him down for it. He’d struck down neither of them.

He was quiet so long that Ernest’s look of confidence began to waver, as though he feared that perhaps he had simply broken him further as opposed to-- ah, was comforting him what he’d meant to do? His way to apologize for his deception? John suspected as much.

The thought sat warmly in his chest, and that feeling in itself should have concerned him, but… he wanted to revel in what comfort that knowledge gave him, if only for a little while.

Without a word, slowly, John’s free hand landed on the one Ernest rested in the grass. A delicate pat, the kind of gratitude a widowed parent shows to the child who thinks they can console them with a false belief the dead will return, knowing full well it is not to be. But the key there was that he... he recognized the attempt.

“You’re dreadfully naive about scripture theory.” John remarked, his voice somber. Before he could pull his hand free Ernest took hold of his index finger, forcing him to linger.

“Either I’m right, or God has messed up a lot of kids in his design.”

The notion God may mess up in any way, shape or form was another blasphemy, but it was probably the point Ernest was clumsily trying to make. So John didn’t rebuke him, nor did he try to pull away from his grasp, which was loose enough for him to be able to do so effortlessly. There was a doubt that may be just a ploy from Ernest’s part to remain in his good graces, or maybe even slither back into his bed, but even so it was difficult not to appreciate the gesture.

Perhaps he means it. Father Joseph surely did.

John gave a single nod, and allowed his hand to be clasped as he finished the remainder of the cigarette - Ernest’s presence no longer quite as stressful as it was before. Then the cigarette was done, he blew out the last of the smoke, and he pulled his hand away.

“We ought to head back--”

“Here,” Ernest said suddenly, pushing the Bible in his hands. John blinked, taken aback, and glanced at him to see he was looking away. What in the world…?

“You know I can quote the Bible in my sleep, don’t you?” he pointed out, just a little offended. “I know exactly which passages you’re quoting. I simply don’t think your simplistic interpretation--”

“No, I mean--” Ernest fidgeted, uncharacteristically uneasy with words. “That’s yours.”

“... I beg your pardon?”

“Your Bible. I, uh, got someone to fix it up. As a, you know. Apology.”

Ah. John looked down at the Bible in his hands, truly focusing on it for the first time. That wasn’t his Bible, it couldn’t be; he’d ruined it slamming it down on the camera, until the spine broke, the leather cover came off and several pages came loose. The one he held in his hands was newly bound, now, with a new cover and all pages firmly in place. Still, when he opened… that was his handwriting at the margin, his notes. His Bible, indeed. So that was where it’d gone.

“I see,” John heard himself saying, his throat a little tighter. He instinctively flipped the pages, searching for-- yes, there it was, right where he’d left it: his father’s letter. Disowning him, telling him he no longer had a son, to never be in touch again, so he wouldn’t taint them. But for the first time, seeing that letter did not fill him with shame. It filled him with anger.

“Didn’t you tell me you’d felt this way since you were a child - an innocent?”

I did nothing. I was a boy, I only thought of kissing another. His own child, cast out over nothing.

“I noticed it looked kind of ruined, and I figured old Raúl could fix it up,” Ernest was saying, seemingly unaware of his thoughts. “He owed me a favor, so--”

“Thank you,” John said, very quietly, and smiled, the restored Bible - his keepsake of Father Joseph, the man who had called him his son despite everything - clutched to his chest. “This means more to me than you’ll ever know. I-- I have no words.”

Ernest smiled back. “Not even in Latin?” he asked.

And, for the first time since the truth had become clear to him, John Johnson laughed.

***

Well, getting Juan’s Bible fixed up hadn’t saved Ernesto from his daily Latin lesson, but at least he’d been allowed to go to sleep at a reasonable enough time, so there was that.

Not that he had hoped to fall asleep soon or easily, because he never did, not when he had to sleep alone. In the dark and the silence, falling asleep to find himself back in the barracks - or in a battlefield, or marching under the sun, or about to gun down civilians - was all too easy. So far, he found that some company was the easiest way to keep all of that away at night.

He’d tried to casually suggest Sofía to spend the night with him, but of course, she’d shrugged him off and said she had plans. She was probably living it up with Sister Antonia right now, who was pretty but, in Ernesto’s opinion, nothing to write home about. Unlike him, of course. He was very much something to write home about. Or to the Archdiocese. Thanks for that, Juan.

Ah, yes. Juan. Asking him for nightly company was now entirely out of the question for obvious reasons, but Ernesto found that the thought of him helped a little just now. Namely, the thought of the look on his face when presented with his fixed-up Bible; the surprise, the smile, the laugh. It had been… nice, to hear that laugh again.

Not that it had been the goal, Ernesto thought, but he was not entirely sure what the goal had actually been. He’d just eyed Juan’s Bible on the table after the gringo left to deal with some confessions, and thought that it looked in terrible shape, like he’d dropped it from a great height. He vaguely remembered Juan telling him that the old Bible was a gift from Father Joseph and very dear to him, much like the crucifix around his neck.

Grabbing it had taken a moment, and the walk to Raúl’s shop only minutes. The man was mostly a leatherworker, but was good at book binding and also the father of a woman finally expecting a child after years of fruitless marriage thanks to Ernesto’s, er, blessing - so he owed him a favor. When he’d returned to pick it up, the Bible looked new and he’d actually flipped through it to check Juan’s notes and make sure it was the same one he had left.

What am I doing?, he’d asked himself then, and he did again now. ‘Getting a book fixed’ was technically the right answer, but why would he bother was another matter entirely. He told himself it was vital he remained on the gringo’s good side, and that also was technically true. So there, that had been it - no motive but self-preservation, as always. End of story.

Ernesto turned to the wall, pulled the covers up to his chin, and closed his eyes. His thoughts did keep drifting back to Juan’s smile, which was annoying, but when he finally fell asleep no soldiers, screams or gunfire disturbed his dreams. All in all, it could be worse.

***

You no longer have a father. I only ever had one son. For both of our sakes, never write again.

For a long time, John stared in silence at Reverend David Johnson’s neat handwriting in the flickering light of the candle barely lighting up his room. He had read that letter every morning upon awakening, and every night upon going to sleep, for well over a decade. A reminder of his sin, of his failure as a son. It hurt, each time, and it hurt him now.

Only that the hurt was different that night, the disdain no longer entirely against himself. The letter was written on Christmas Eve, a brief unfeeling response to a heartfelt plea. Cold. Cruel.

I was a child. I was his child. How could he?

John pressed his lips together, the letter in one hand and his Bible in the other. A father’s rejection, ink more and more faded, and a Father’s gift - now restored. John’s eyes drifted towards the candle and, while he did not burn the letter, he did think about it.

He thought about it for a very long time.

***

“A flying machine! What in God’s name were you two thinking??”

“That we wanted to build a flying machine. It worked pretty well, except for the part where it didn’t fly.”

It took every ounce of Imelda’s patience, plus some she probably borrowed directly from the Almighty, not to grab Felipe by the front of his shirt and shake him hard enough to make his teeth chatter - and if not for the fact he had a broken left arm in a cast, she may not have been able to hold back.

“Maybe we should have picked someplace less high for the first test,” Óscar was conceding, all bruises and skinned elbows but with his bones still all in one piece. “We’ll choose better next time.”

“Next-- there is absolutely not going to be a next time.”

“Yes, yes, that’s what mamá said.”

“Papá as well.”

“So we knew you’d say that, too.”

“But you need not worry, because the next flying machine will actually fly!”

Imelda groaned, reaching up to rub her temples. “Was a broken arm not enough for you?”

“Nope! I still have the other one,” Felipe quipped, flexing the arm in question to show off absolutely non-existent muscle.

Óscar laughed. “And on the bright side, if the Federal Army comes looking for new soldiers, they won’t take him! Huh, maybe I should break my own arm--”

“Don’t say that,” Imelda cut him off, her voice suddenly sharp. It was the sort of thing she’d been having nightmares about. “Not even as a joke.”

“... The arm thing or the army thing?”

“The Federales. Actually, both. But mostly the Federales.” Imelda found she couldn’t entertain the thought even for a moment and something had to show on her face, because both of her brothers stopped smiling at exactly the same moment.

“Hey, we… we didn’t really mean it.”

“We won’t say that again. Promise.”

Imelda sighed and finally nodded, managing a smile. “... Good. And if you want to entirely reassure me, you may also promise you will not keep trying to build flying contraptions and launch yourselves--”

“Oh look, it’s getting late!”

“We should be home in five minutes!”

“We should have been home five minutes ago!”

“Wait a moment--” Imelda began, only to trail off when her brothers took off running in the direction of their home. She sighed, making a mental note to let her mother and father know they should keep all tools under lock and key next time she saw them. Not that she thought it would stop them, but at least it would slow them down. Possibly until Felipe’s arm healed.

Their joke about Federales passing by to pick men to replenish their ranks rang through her mind as she walked back towards the parish, impossible to entirely ignore.

If they took them, I don’t know what I’d do.

Her thoughts turned for a brief moment to the loaded pistol she kept hidden in her room. She paused mid-step, clenching her jaw. No, that wasn’t entirely true, was it?

She knew exactly what she’d do.

***

“He left, didn’t he?”

“Yes, Commander, as you said he would. We watched him take a horse and ride off.”

“Of course. To warn his friends down south of what he heard in the cantina, no doubt.”

Santiago took a swig of his drink before setting down the glass, eyes glued to the map. It had been a grueling business, pushing past Zapata’s forces immediately south of Mexico City, but they had made it and now the battalion had split, leaving him in command of a couple of units… heading for the area where Ernesto de la Cruz had fled, leaving behind Alberto’s body in the smoldering sand.

I’m getting closer, I know I am. It’s only a matter of time.

And he could wait, of course. He could bid his time; being in the army had taught him discipline… something many of his men severely lacked. They were unruly, prone to talk and drink and then to talk even more after a drink… and that small village was full of ears. Thank God, said ears were also very bad at spying without being entirely too obvious.

Sergeant García scowled. “Do you want us to follow him and take him out before he can warn them of our itinerary?”

“No, let him warn them. Let those traitors waste time rallying around San Luz while we take another route right past them.” With some luck, they may even be able to catch them by surprise from behind. He’d come up with another itinerary, and avoid sharing it with anyone who didn’t strictly need to hear it.

“I see. Do you need any further help…?”

“I think I’ll be fine, thank you. You’re dismissed.”

The sergeant left and Santiago focused on the map again, slowly working his way through the glass. There were several alternative routes they could take, but he settled for one that went through some hills and a small village barely marked on the map, the name printed in such tiny letters he had to squint to read it.

Santa Cecilia.

***

A/N: yes, I had to study Latin and had nightmares about it from time to time. But it's cool, they're fading. Ancient Greek, on the other hand, shall haunt me to my grave.

***

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nightcoremoon · 3 years

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weird opinion but christians aren't religious.

ok so like, jews generally follow god's rules, muslims follow allah's rules, hindus probably follow their gods rules, so on and so forth. and overall they do it out of faith; they do it because they want to honor the deity who loves them rather than because society forces them to.

granted the zionists and the radical extremists and the zealots do exist but as loud minorities and thus are statistical outliers & don't matter.

christians are... a different breed.

"if you aren't x branch and dont obey y rules you'll go to hell so we'll fucking murder you" is pretty much the main driving force behind a significant portion of christianity in history. the catholics, the protestants, the orthodoxy, all are built on a foundation of fear, anger, and hatred. it's shaped the way society developed; in the 4 nations that did the most genocidal imperialist colonialism- England, France, Spain, and Italy- a combination of convenient coastal locations, naval prowess, military tendency, christianity, and ultranationalism lead them down a path of missionaries, holding bibles in one hand and bloodstained knives in the other. the religion is inseparable from the culture and inseparable from the horrible things done in the name of their god, and the resulting cancers of society we feel today from the campaigns of slaughter. xenophobia. capitalism. savage barbarism via sensationalized capitol punishment. misogyny. queerphobia. gender fascism. classism. racism. all of these issues in the "civilized world" stem predominantly from those four nations and the disease ridden pestilent filth some call pilgrims.

here's something interesting:

there are less than 1 million rastafari in the world.

there are less than 5 million shinto in the world.

there are less than 25 million jews in the world.

there are less than 30 million sikhs in the world.

there are roughly 100 million african cultural religious adherents in the world.

there are less than 400 million chinese cultural religious adherents in the world.

there are about 500 million buddhists in the world.

there are about 1.1 billion hindus in the world.

there are about 1.2 billion nonreligious people in the world.

there are 1.6 billion muslims in the world.

and one final statistic

there are over 2.1 billion christians in the world.

the jewish count is a highball, rounded up, and includes several different definitions of jewish including people who are only one quarter. so for every single person who is even remotely jewish, there are more than 8 christians. for every hindu, there are 4 christians. for every atheist, agnostic, or "other", 2 christians. this frightening statistic should set off warning bells for everyone who is involved in a discussion about religion. and anyone who knows BASIC world history and can correlate data at all can probably piece together what I'm putting down.

now, I may be slightly biased here considering my eclectic religious beliefs. now, I personally believe that there is some primary force of energy that may or may not manifest itself as a humanoid being, that engineered the most basic laws of physics in the universe: atomic magnetism. as can be inferred by planck's constant and its implications, our universe is digital, written in binary. an electron either moves or doesn't move. there are no other options. so I genuinely believe in some form of intelligent design; whether it's a bearded guy on a cloud, some dude with six arms and an elephant for a face, just a big swirling pool of ectoplasm, or a big ol' plate of spaghetti and meatballs, something is out there that we are physically incapable of contacting from our plane of existence, just as a drawing on a piece of paper cannot reach out to interact with the world: a gif will move on its own but it will never acknowledge our existence, even if it could think by itself. and all the different mythologies of the world- egyptian, greek, norse, shinto, whatever- very well could be the agents of that unknown "god". perhaps anubis, ra, and bastet are just angels with animal heads that all of the peoples of ancient egypt saw and were like oh I guess this must be a god. maybe zeus and loki were the same person with a magic dick who fucked a bunch of animals in both greece and the scandinavian countries and spawned all of the horrible half-animal monstrosities that, idk, made vishnu think "well I have to kill that" and caused the biblical flood or something. maybe the jewish god gifted wisdom to siddhartha for sitting under a fig tree for 6 years through the angel pomona [roman goddess of fruit, had to google that one], so buddha gets his wisdom from demeter and is in nirvana right now right a step up from hades on yggdrasil the world tree keeping an eye on his charge persephone. any theory could theoretically be true but we ants of humans will never fucking know because we can't just point a telescope at the magellanic clouds and say "look, there's amaterasu with russell's teapot, and she's having tea with... *rubs eyes* lemmy kilmister??? wow I guess gods are real after all!" it's impossible to know the secrets of our universe because of the very restrictive nature of the universe itself. is it a circle? is it a donut? WE DONT FUCKIN KNOW.

we cannot know what religion is truthful.

""anyone who says that any one religion is more or less true than any other is a fucking moron, and if they're suggesting that White Western European Colonial Imperialist Protestantism is the one true faith, they're probably a fucking racist colonizer who beats his wife/sister and burns gays at the stake. and considering how that exact demographic is typically the one that murdered people for not converting to their religion, I don't think they have the intellectual non-deranged ability to make those logical connections.

again, I'm not saying that there AREN'T a lot of people of every religion who are evil assholes who contributed to mass genocide. israelites killed palestinians. shiites killed sunnis. hutus killed tutsis. danes killed geats. turks killed armenians. the ottoman empire has as much blood on its hands as the holy roman empire. germans who called themselves aryans but weren't actually aryan killed jews. but all of these tragedies were isolated incidents rather than repeated patterns over the course of two thousand years. not like christianity was and is.

just look at the United States, Canada, Mexico, Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, & India's British Raj. Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, by extension Protestantism and Catholicism, are the shared factor between the long and bloody history fraught with massacring indigenous populations who wouldn't convert religions. native americans, indigenous canadians, latin americans but predominantly mexicans, the eastern chinese, coastal africans, aborigine aussies, indians- coastal coastal coastal. true the western chinese and the mongols/hunnu and xinjiang muslims haven't exactly been on civil terms and the silk road has always been a battleground and the middle east was already tenuous before murrica bombed them for oil but those happened in such a spread out area among asia which is FUCKING HUGE, MIND YOU! but also that's three high traffic places with massive diversity, it's human nature to have conflict, but not nearly to the same level as all of the shit christianity has done to the world. it's impossible to separate the religion from the cultures; victorian england without protestantism is just dirty people who die at 15 from having their 3rd child. italy without the catholicism is just grass and cheese. france and spain without religion are just kingdoms that fought wars with england for forever and now just make food that's one part delicious and three parts horrifying. religion is directly responsible for a significant portion of the evils those countries committed. one religion in particular.

they don't practice religion the same way as the rest do. they aren't faithful to their god. they don't follow his rules out of love but out of fear. they execute dissenters without a second thought, heresy they cry. they execute women and little girls for being free thinking or having sickness associated with mercury poisoning in the water, witch they cry. they slaughter men women and kids alike in the name of cramming their beliefs down the natives throats, we're chasing out the snakes they cry, we're bringing god to your godless people they cry, we're just civilizing you they cry. they shit in the streets and proudly display rotting corpses and leave the impoverished disabled and starving to die alone and whip their slaves and rape teenage girls and scrap in the streets while sopping wet with spilled ale over insignificant insults and stab people to death in the night and never even fucking BATHE, and they have the nerve to say the natives were uncivilized. the nerve. because hey. they read a magic book they stole from a culture who stole from another culture who stole from another culture, mistranslating each time from hebrew to greek to italian to english, and they think they're better because their skin is white.

christians never evolved. their mentalities have stayed the same. all thatms advanced has been technology. that's it. they're still the same evil disgusting degenerate bastards they always were. they just have the money they stole to buy stained glass windows, rosary beads, giant tacky metal statues, bigass robes, leather, and printing presses. and as time passed they used the money they continued to steal to buy cars and websites and radio stations and commit felony tax evasion and secretly molest children and line the pockets of the politicians.

all of their holidays are stolen from pagans anyway.

so fuck christmas. fuck easter. fuck lent. fuck the golden calf christian holidays that the tiny minded fragile snowflake conservatives lose their collective shit over because the pandemic response common sense stipulations won't let them buy the shit they can't afford with money they shouldn't have for people they don't even LIKE, all in the name of tradition, tradition! the rituals that worship something so much worse than satan or baphomet or pan or whatever: the dollar. they buy all the new shiny shit they can, at the expense of the chinese kids that the corporate pigs outsource to, buy the pine trees and the coca cola vunderbar and the fake mint corn syrup Js and watch the same shitty cookie cutter white supremacist hallmark fash movies and stuff their kids full of enough sugar to go into a goddamn coma when the african slaves who pick the cocoa beans will never get to know what actually being a kid will ever feel like because they're gonna die from falling into a combine harvester and be eternally forgotten to history and no christian will ever give a shit because they don't fucking care about what they don't see on their safe space news or hear on their safe space radio or read on their safe space social media. they think their worst sin is eating cheeseburgers so instead they'll go eat a mcchicken or chick fil a or an arby's chicken sandwich instead but not at popeyes because "that place is sketchy" and by that they mean they don't wanna eat where black people eat, that's why cracker barrel was so popular for so many white christians for so long because it had racially segregated seating until barely 20 years ago.

they don't love jesus. they love a paper doll they shove into their back pockets until every other sunday where they go to a fucking mall with a baptism waterslide and raise their hands like a bunch of dumbass weirdos and away to adult contemporary indie schlock with the word jesus pasted into a boring-ass hetero romance song, pat themselves on the back, then go to starbucks to scream slurs and misgenderings at 14 year old starbucks baristas who give them a cappamochalattechino instead of a fucking carmamochalattechino because you mumbled under the mask you didn't even fucking cover your nose with because you don't give a shit about the virus beyond how it inconveniences you.

they are horrible people who pretend to be good. until you suggest the slightest infinitely small inconvenience to them that would alter their holiday plans even the littlest smidge. then they would kill you if not for the police. don't get me started on them because you know by now what I'd say about those fuckers. but they'll gladly wear shirts about how they'll kill you. how they'll go back 200 years. how they'll murder you and watch you slowly suffer because their primate brains shoot a million endorphins when they watch things die by their hands because they never evolved a sense of empathy, compassion, or morality beyond how wearing a cross necklace will remove any of the consequences they will face in their afterlife.

they are horrible people who pretend to be good. unless you're gay or black or trans or Not Christian™ or mexican or disagree with them about politics economics sociology science technology music or movies. assimilate or die. assimilate or die. assimilate or die.

they don't deserve special treatment for their false idols.

they aren't better than jews or muslims.

they're worse.

so much worse.

and they should be stopped.""

-Nightingale Quietioca

save as draft arch draft bookmark draft where did I put my keys contra code kontra kode I need to remember this and copy it buzzwords keywords find it later please god tumblr don't bork on me this is good stream of consciousness repackage repackage change the words this is a great character study if I do say so myself thanks 3am me you're welcome 3am me

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theatheistphotographer · 3 years

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Day 2 — God Bless America

God Bless America’s lyrics have a storied history — one deeply entwined with America’s ever-uneasy relationship between religion and politics.

The song was written by an immigrant. Irving Berlin arrived in New York at 5 as Israel Baline, the son of a cantor fleeing persecution of the Jews of Russia. During World War I, Berlin wrote “God Bless America.” The title was a phrase his immigrant mother fervently repeated during Berlin’s childhood, his daughter later said.

When the song finally debuted 20 years later, the backlash began almost immediately. A Jewish immigrant, critics said, should not get to celebrate this country as his. (Not to mention celebrating Christian holidays: Berlin wrote “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” among his massive catalogue of popular hits.)

In the newsletter of an American pro-Nazi organization, one writer expressed this vehement attitude in 1940: “[I do] not consider G-B-A a ‘patriotic’ song, in the sense of expressing the real American attitude toward his country, but consider that it smacks of the ‘How glad I am’ attitude of the refugee horde of which Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘We wish no further additions to the persons whose affection for this country is merely a species of pawnbroker patriotism — whose coming here represents nothing but the purpose to change one feeding trough for another feeding trough.'”

Others rejected Berlin’s optimistic theology in a song he himself called a prayer. Woody Guthrie began writing “This Land Is Your Land” as a parody criticizing “God Bless America” for overlooking America’s flaws. Guthrie’s original title for his song was “God Blessed America for Me.” One of the lesser-known verses of his now-famous folk song goes: “One bright sunny morning, in the shadow of the steeple | By the Relief Office, I saw my people. | As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering | If God blessed America for me.”

As America’s entrance into World War II drew nearer, the country embraced Berlin’s song. It was played at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1940, and every Brooklyn Dodgers game that year.

The song became an anthem of an array of causes. Striking garment workers and protesting subway workers sang “God Bless America” in the 1940s and ’50s. Students protesting racial segregation in Louisiana and Mississippi in the 1960s sang it. The antiabortion movement adopted the song in the 1980s.

By the 1970s, the widely employed “God Bless America” was taking on a conservative association that it retains to this day. Sheryl Kaskowitz writes in her book “God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song,” that the deep social division over the Vietnam War marked a turning point for Berlin’s melody.

“The song became a staple at pro-war rallies, and was often used as a sonic weapon in conflicts with anti-war protesters,” she writes. “If conservatives can be understood as revolutionaries reacting against the progressive social change movements of the 1960s, then “God Bless America” was their “We Shall Overcome,” used by activists expressing opposition to progressive social movements like school integration, women’s rights, and abortion.”

President Richard M. Nixon, who represented those conservatives rejecting social movements of the 1960s, frequently referenced the song and even sang it at a state dinner alongside Berlin himself, who died at 101 in 1989. President Ronald Reagan, the first embraced by the new religious right, did not just play the religious-patriotic song at his rallies. In his prior career as an actor, he starred in the 1943 movie “This Is the Army,” which was the first film to feature the song.

Others who have embraced and popularized the song continue to include, like Berlin, immigrants and admirers of this country who were not born in America. Among the most memorable renditions of the song in recent decades was Celine Dion’s version, recorded for a fundraiser album that hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Although she is Canadian, Dion sings a soulful “God Bless America.”

When Hispanic singer Marc Anthony performed the song at the 2013 baseball All-Star Game, racists attacked his performance, tweeting slurs including, “C’mon MLB. How you gonna pick a Mexican to sing ‘God Bless America’?” and much more. Anthony is Puerto Rican — meaning he is American.

In other words, a century after the song was written, we are still fighting about who is entitled to proclaim blessings upon the “land that I love,” and “my home sweet home.” Berlin might answer: anyone who knows the words.

— From The surprising history of “God Bless America,” the patriotic hymn Trump might have forgotten, by Julie Zauzmer, Washington Post, 6 June 2018.

Photo: Graffitied wall, Brooklyn, NY

#irvingberlin #theatheistphotographer #secular #humanist #science #reason #skeptic

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The United States vs. Billie Holiday: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics Was Formed to Kill Jazz

https://ift.tt/3smcRhE

This article contains The United States vs. Billie Holiday spoilers.

Federal drug enforcement was created for the express purpose of persecuting Billie Holiday. Director Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday focuses a cinematic microscope on the events, but a much larger picture is visible just outside the lens. Holiday’s best friend and one-time manager Maely Dufty told mourners at the funeral that Billie was murdered by a conspiracy orchestrated by the narcotics police, according to Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. The book also said Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was a particularly virulent racist who hounded “Lady Day” throughout the 1940s and drove her to her death in the 1950s.

This is corroborated in Billie, a 2020 BBC documentary directed by James Erskine, and Alexander Cockburn’s book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, which also claims Anslinger hated jazz music, which he believed brought the white race down to the level of African descendants through the corrupting influence of jungle rhythms. He also believed marijuana was the devil’s weed and transformed the post-Prohibition fight against alcohol into a war on drugs. The first line of battle was against the musicians who partook.

“Marijuana is taken by… musicians,” Anslinger testified to Congress prior to the vote on the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. “And I’m not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type.” The LaGuardia Committee, appointed in 1939 by one of the Act’s strongest opponents, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, ultimately refuted every point made in the effective drug czar’s testimony. Based on the findings, “the Treasury Department told Anslinger he was wasting his time,” according to Chasing the Scream. The opportunistic department head “scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on one single target.”

Federal authorization of selective enforcement should come as no surprise. Just this month, HBO Max released Judas and the Black Messiah about how the FBI and local law enforcement targeted the Black Panthers and put a bullet in the back of the head of Fred Hampton after he was apparently drugged by the informant. In MLK/FBI (2020), director Sam Pollard used newly declassified files to fill in the gaps on the story of the U.S. government’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Days ago, The Washington Post reported the daughters of assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X requested his murder investigation be reopened in light of a deathbed letter from officer Raymond A. Wood, alleging New York police and the FBI conspired in his killing.

During the closing credits of The United States vs. Billie Holiday we read that Holiday, played passionately by Andra Day in the film, was similarly arrested on her deathbed. She was in the hospital suffering from cirrhosis of the liver when she was cuffed to her bed. They don’t mention police had been stationed outside her door barring family, fans, and well-wishers from offering the singer comfort as she lay dying. They also don’t mention that police removed gifts people brought to the room, as well as flowers, radio, record player, chocolates, and any magazines. When she died at age 44, it was found that Holiday had 15 $50 bills strapped to her leg, the remainder of her money after years of top selling records. Billie intended to give it to the nurses to thank them for looking after her.

As The United States vs. Billie Holiday points out, the feds had been watching Holiday since club owner Barney Josephson encouraged her to sing “Strange Fruit” at the integrated Cafe Society in Greenwich Village in 1939. Waiters would stop all service during the performance of the song. The room would be dark, and it would never be followed by an encore.

The lyric came from a three-stanza poem, “Bitter Fruit,” about a lynching. It was written by Lewis Allan, the pseudonym of New York schoolteacher and songwriter named Abel Meeropol, a costumer at the club. Meeropol set the words to music, and the song was first performed by singer Laura Duncan at Madison Square Garden.

Holiday and her accompanist Sonny White adapted Allan’s melody and chord structure, and released the song on Milt Gabler’s independent label Commodore Records in 1939. The legendary John Hammond, who discovered Holiday in 1933 while she was singing in a Harlem nightclub called Monette’s, refused to release it on Columbia Records, where Billie was signed.

The song “marked a watershed,” according to David Margolick’s 2000 book Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Influential jazz writer Leonard Feather called the song “the first significant protest in words and music, the first significant cry against racism.”

Holiday experienced the brutally enforced racial segregation of the Jim Crow laws during her trips south with her bands, according to Billie Holiday, the 1990 book by Bud Kliment. She was also demeaned at the Lincoln Hotel in New York City in October 1938 when management demanded she walk through the kitchen and use the service elevator to get on the stage. Holiday also caught flak for being considered too light skinned to sing with one band, and was on at least one occasion forced to wear special makeup to darken her complexion.

Holiday was 18 years old when she recorded her first commercial session with Benny Goodman’s group at Columbia Records, but knew firsthand that an integrated band would be more threatening than an all-Black group. According to most biographies, Holiday began using hard drugs in the early ’40s under the influence of her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, brother of the owner of Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem.

Anslinger, the first commissioner for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was an extreme racist, even by the standards of the time, according to Chasing the Scream. He claimed narcotics made black people forget their place in the fabric of American society, and jazz musicians created “Satanic” music under pot’s influence.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday doesn’t shy away from the drug czar’s blatant racism, but Garrett Hedlund’s Harry J. Anslinger doesn’t capture the full depths of the disgust the man felt and put into practice through his selective enforcement. Hedlund is able to mouth some of the epithets his character threw at ethnic targets, but most of the actual quotes on record are so offensive there is no need to subject any audience to them today. The film barely even mentions the strange and forbidden fruit imbibed in slow-burning paper that Anslinger obsessed over almost as much as Holiday’s song.

Movies

Judas and the Black Messiah Ending Shows Horrific Legacy of COINTELPRO

By David Crow

Culture

Ma Rainey’s Life and Reign as the Mother of the Blues

By Tony Sokol

Commissioner Anslinger came to power during the “Reefer Madness” era, and shaped much of the anti-marijuana paranoia of the period, according to Alexander Cockburn’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press. His first major campaign was to criminalize hemp, rebranding it as “marijuana” in an attempt “to associate it with Mexican laborers.” He claimed the drug “can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.”

Anslinger promoted racist fictions and singled out groups he personally disliked as special targets. He said the lives of the jazzmen “reek of filth,” and the genre itself was proof that marijuana drives people insane. On drug raids, he advised his agents to “shoot first.” Anslinger persecuted many black musicians, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. When Louis Armstrong was arrested for possession, Anslinger orchestrated a nationwide media smear campaign.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ “race panic” tactics had a double standard. Anslinger only had a “friendly chat” with Judy Garland over her heroin addiction, suggesting she take longer vacations between films. He wrote to MGM, reporting he observed no evidence of a drug problem.

Anslinger ordered Holiday to cease performing “Strange Fruit” almost immediately after word got out about the performances. When she refused, he sent agent Jimmy Fletcher to frame the singer. Anslinger hated hiring Black agents, according to both Whiteout and Chasing the Scream, but white officers stood out on these investigations. He did insist no Black man in his Bureau could ever be a boss to white men, and pigeonholed officers like Fletcher to street agents.

Donald Clark and Julia Blackburn studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletcher for their biography Billie Holiday: Wishing on The Moon. That interview has since been lost by the archives handling it. According to their book when Fletcher first saw Billie at the raid on her brother-in-law’s Philadelphia apartment in May 1947, “She was drinking enough booze to stun a horse and hoovering up vast quantities of cocaine.”

Fletcher’s partner sent for a policewoman to conduct a body search. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll strip,” Billie said before stripping and marking her territory in a provocative show of non-violent defiance by urinating on the floor (another action Daniels’ movie glosses over). Holiday was arrested and put on trial for possession of narcotics.

According to Hettie Jones’ book Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music, Holiday “Signed away her right to a lawyer and no one advised her to do otherwise.” She thought she would be sent to a hospital to kick the drugs and get well. “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’” she recalled in Lady Sings the Blues, the 1956 memoir she co-wrote with William Dufty, “and that’s just the way it felt.” Holiday was sentenced to a year and a day in a West Virginia prison. When her autobiography was published, Holiday tracked Fletcher down and sent him a signed copy.

When Holiday was released in 1948, the federal government refused to renew her cabaret performer’s license, which was mandatory for performing in any club serving alcohol. Under Anslinger’s recommended edict, Holiday was restricted “on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public,” according to the book Lady Sings the Blues.

The jazz culture had its own code. Musicians not only wouldn’t rat out other musicians, they would chip in to bail out any player who got popped. When it appeared Fletcher, who shadowed Holiday for years, became protective of Holiday, Anslinger got Holiday’s abusive husband and manager Louis McKay to snitch.

Two years after Holiday’s first conviction, Anslinger recruited Colonel George White, a former San Francisco journalist who applied to join the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The personality test given to all applicants determined White was a sadist, and he quickly rose through the bureau’s ranks. He gained bureau acclaim as the first and only white man to infiltrate a Chinese drug gang.

White had a history of planting drugs on women and abused his powers in many ways. According to Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, after White retired from the Bureau, he bragged, “Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” He “may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high,” according to Chasing the Scream.

White arrested Holiday, without a warrant, at the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco in 1949. Billie insisted she had been clean for over a year, and said the dope was planted in her room by White. Bureau agents said they found her works in the room and the stash in a wastepaper basket next to a side room. They never entered the kit into evidence. According to Ken Vail’s book Lady Day’s Diary, Holiday immediately offered to go into a clinic, saying they could monitor her for withdrawal symptoms and that would prove she was being framed. Holiday checked herself into the clinic, paying $1,000 for the stay and she “didn’t so much as shiver.” She was not convicted by jury at trial.

Afterward White attended one of Holiday’s shows at the Café Society Uptown and requested his favorite songs. After the show was over, the federal cop told Billie’s manager “I did not think much of Ms. Holiday’s performance.”

In 1959, Billie collapsed while at the apartment of a young musician named Frankie Freedom. After waiting on a stretcher for an hour and a half, Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Hospital turned her away, saying she was a drug addict. Recognized by one of the ambulance drivers, Holiday was admitted in a public ward of New York City’s Metropolitan Hospital. She lit a cigarette as soon as they took her off oxygen.

In spite of being told her liver was failing and cancerous, and her heart and lungs were compromised, Holiday did not want to stay at the hospital. “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them,” she told Maely Dufty.

Billie went into heroin withdrawal, alone. When Holiday responded to methadone treatment, Anslinger’s men prevented hospital staff from administering any further methadone, even though it had been officially prescribed by her doctor. Drug cops claimed to find a tinfoil envelope containing under an eighth of an ounce of heroin. It was found hanging on a nail on the wall, six feet from Billie’s bed where the frail and restrained artist could not have reached it.

The cops handcuffed her to the bed, stationed two policemen at the door and told Holiday they’d take her to prison if she didn’t drop dime on her dealer. When Maely Dufty informed the police it was against the law to arrest a patient in critical care, the cops had Holiday taken off the list.

Outside the hospital, protesters gathered on the streets holding up signs reading “Let Lady Live.” The demonstrations were led by the Rev. Eugene Callender. The Harlem pastor, who built a clinic for heroin addicts in his church, requested the singer be allowed to be treated there.

Holiday didn’t blame the cops. She said the drug war forced police to treat people like criminals when they were actually ill.

“Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, then sent them to jail,” she wrote in Lady Sings the Blues. “If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”

Holiday’s social commentary didn’t end with “Strange Fruit.” She wrote and sang about racial equality in the song “God Bless the Child,” her voice captured the pains of domestic violence. Most of Holiday’s contemporaries were too scared of being hassled by the feds to perform “Strange Fruit.” Billie Holiday refused to stop. She was killed for it. But never silenced.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is streaming on Hulu now.

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militant-holy-knight · 4 years

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Jesuit Suppression Across the Catholic World

In this blogpost, we track how the repression of the Society of Jesus took place in the late 18th-Century.

Brazil

Ground zero for the persecution of the Jesuits. At the time, it was still a Portuguese colony and Jesuits held considerable influence over it as protectors of the Native peoples, with one of these tribes being the Guaraní, who refused to accept Portuguese rule and leave the mission settlements. In 1754, a 3000-strong Spanish and Portuguese military force was dispatched to force the Guaraní to leave the area. The coalition was victorious and over 15,000 Guaranis were either killed or removed, under the protests of the Jesuits which earned the victors’ wrath...

Portugal

The Portuguese Prime-Minister Sebastião de Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, was a Catholic influenced by the Enlightenment who saw the Society of Jesus as holding back Portuguese society with their grip over science and education. The Guarani War is regarded as the start of the animosity between Pombal and the Jesuits for them supporting the Natives against the Portuguese interests. After King Joseph was nearly assassinated by political rivals, the Marquis used the attempted regicide to implicate the Jesuits and use them as an excuse to remove them from Portugal and seize their possessions. The Marquis was granted nearly unlimited power by the king and ruled as an autocratic, but liberal dictator who ordered that all Jesuits should be banished from Portuguese lands and it’s colonies.

France

The French were the second to follow suit, due to already existing tensions between local factions such as the Jansenists and the Gallicans, who objected against the Jesuits’ independence from the crown and answering to an alien power like Rome. The attack on the Jesuits was opened on 17 April 1762 by the Jansenist sympathizer Abbé Chauvelin who denounced the Constitution of the Society of Jesus, which was publicly examined and discussed in a hostile press. The Parlement issued its Extraits des assertions assembled from passages from Jesuit theologians and canonists, in which they were alleged to teach every sort of immorality and error. On 6 August 1762, the final arrêt was proposed to the Parlement by the Advocate General Joly de Fleury, condemning the Society to extinction, but King Louis XV’s intervention brought eight months' delay and in the meantime a compromise was suggested by the Court. If the French Jesuits would separate from the Society headed by the Jesuit General directly under the pope's authority and come under a French vicar, with French customs, as with the Gallican Church, the Crown would still protect them. The French Jesuits, rejecting Gallicanism, refused to consent. As a response, their colleges were closed and they required to renounce their vows under pain of banishment.

Poland

The Jesuits were suppressed one year after the First Partition of Poland with many of the Jesuit order possessions taken over by the Commission of National Education, the world's first Ministry of Education. Ironically, they continued to operate in the areas annexed by Lutheran Prussia and Orthodox Russia.

Austria and Hungary

They went even further than merely suppress the Society of Jesus; Secularization Decree of Holy Roman Joseph II issued on 12 January 1782 for Austria and Hungary banned several monastic orders not involved in teaching or healing and liquidated 140 monasteries (home to 1484 monks and 190 nuns). The banned monastic orders included the Jesuits, Camaldolese, Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, Carmelites, Carthusians, Poor Clares, Order of Saint Benedict, Cistercians, Dominican Order (Order of Preachers), Franciscans, Pauline Fathers and Premonstratensians, and their wealth was taken over by the Religious Fund. His anticlerical and liberal innovations induced Pope Pius VI to pay him a visit in March 1782. Joseph received the Pope politely and presented himself as a good Catholic, but refused to be influenced.

Malta

Malta was at the time a vassal of the Kingdom of Sicily, and Grandmaster Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, himself a Portuguese, followed suit, expelling the Jesuits from the island and seizing their assets. These assets were used in establishing the University of Malta by a decree signed by Pinto on 22 November 1769, with lasting effect on the social and cultural life of Malta. The Church of the Jesuits (in Maltese Knisja tal-Ġiżwiti), one of the oldest churches in Valletta, retains this name up to the present.

Spain

The Spanish Empire was one of the last Catholic states to banish the Jesuits. The Spanish crown had already begun a series of administrative and other changes in their overseas empire, such as reorganizing the viceroyalties, rethinking economic policies, and establishing a military, so that the expulsion of the Jesuits is seen as part of this general trend known generally as the Bourbon Reforms. The aim of the reforms was to curb the increasing autonomy and self-confidence of American-born Spaniards, reassert crown control, and increase revenues. A riot against King Charles III which was viewed as incited by the Jesuits (the riot was caused by an arbitrary law on what people should wear and it’s said one Jesuit actually calmed the mob and sent them home) and alarmed the monarch for challenging their authority. Charles III ordered the convening of a special royal commission to draw up a master plan to expel the Jesuits. The commission first met in January 1767. It modeled its plan on the tactics deployed by France's Philip IV against the Knights Templar in 1307 – emphasizing the element of surprise. Charles's adviser Campomanes had written a treatise on the Templars in 1747, which may have informed the implementation of the Jesuit suppression. Secret orders, to be opened at sunrise on April 2, were sent to all provincial viceroys and district military commanders in Spain. Each sealed envelope contained two documents. One was a copy of the original order expelling "all members of the Society of Jesus" from Charles's Spanish domains and confiscating all their goods. The other instructed local officials to surround the Jesuit colleges and residences on the night of April 2, arrest the Jesuits, and arrange their passage to ships awaiting them at various ports. King Carlos' closing sentence read: “If a single Jesuit, even though sick or dying, is still to be found in the area under your command after the embarkation, prepare yourself to face summary execution”.

Mexico

The Jesuits had actively evangelized the Indians on the northern frontier, but their main activity involved educating elite criollo (American-born Spanish) men, many of whom themselves became Jesuits. Of the 678 Jesuits expelled from Mexico, 75% were Mexican-born. In late June 1767, Spanish soldiers removed the Jesuits from their 16 missions and 32 stations in Mexico. No Jesuit, no matter how old or ill, could be excepted from the king's decree. Many died on the trek along the cactus-studded trail to the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz, where ships awaited them to transport them to Italian exile.

There were protests in Mexico at the exile of so many Jesuit members of elite families, but the Jesuits themselves obeyed the order since they had owned extensive landed estates in Mexico – which supported both their evangelization of indigenous peoples and their education mission to criollo elites – the properties became a source of wealth for the crown. The crown auctioned them off, benefiting the treasury, and their criollo purchasers gained productive well-run properties. Many criollo families felt outraged at the crown's actions, regarding it as a “despotic act”.

Philippines

The royal decree expelling the Society of Jesus from Spain and its dominions reached Manila on 17 May 1768. Between 1769 and 1771, the Jesuits were transported from the Spanish East Indies to Spain and from there deported to Italy.

Italy

After the suppression of the Jesuits in many European countries and their overseas empires, Pope Clement XIV issued a papal brief on 21 July 1773, in Rome titled: Dominus ac Redemptor Noster. That decree included the following statement.

Having further considered that the said Company of Jesus can no longer produce those abundant fruits... in the present case, we are determining upon the fate of a society classed among the mendicant orders, both by its institute and by its privileges; after a mature deliberation, we do, out of our certain knowledge, and the fullness of our apostolical power, suppress and abolish the said company: we deprive it of all activity whatever... And to this end a member of the regular clergy, recommendable for his prudence and sound morals, shall be chosen to preside over and govern the said houses; so that the name of the Company shall be, and is, for ever extinguished and suppressed.

Aftermath

Ironically, the suppression was challenged across most of the non-Catholic Christian nations like Great Britain, Prussia, the Russian Empire and the United States. Frederick the Great of Prussia refused to allow the papal document of suppression to be distributed in his country and Catherine the Great not only refused to allow the papal document of suppression to be distributed, she openly defended the Jesuits from dissolution and the Jesuit chapter in Belarus received her patronage. While Britain did not suppress the Jesuits after seizing Quebec from France, they halted the immigration of anymore Jesuits.

It was also was a major blow to Catholic education across Europe, with nearly 1000 secondary schools and seminaries shut down. Their lands, building and endowments were confiscated; their teachers scattered. Although Jesuit education had become old fashioned in Poland and other areas, it was the main educational support network for Catholic intellectuals, senior clergy and prominent families. Governments tried in vain to replace all those schools, but there were far too few non-clerical teachers who were suitable. This also had an negative effect on the colonies, which saw native populations declining even more rapidly without their protectors. The Jesuit order was restored by the pope in 1814 following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and flourished in terms of rebuilding schools and educational institutions but it never regained its enormous power in the political realm.

Recommended readings:

The Jesuits: History and Legend of the Society of Jesus - Manfred Barthel.

Rise, Character, and Development of Jesuit Education - Cristiano Casalini.

youtube

I also recommend the 1986 movie The Mission which features the Guarani War.

#Christianity #history #persecution #catholicism

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sciencespies · 3 years

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The Case of the Autographed Corpse

https://sciencespies.com/history/the-case-of-the-autographed-corpse/

The Case of the Autographed Corpse

On a Saturday afternoon in February 1933, at the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona, a White Mountain Apache Indian named Silas John Edwards and his wife, Margaret, stopped by a friend’s place to visit and relax. Edwards, a trim middle-aged man with a penetrating gaze, was an influential figure on reservations throughout the Southwest. Hundreds of followers regarded him as a divinely inspired religious leader, a renowned shaman and medicine man.

When he and Margaret arrived at their friend’s dwelling, a tepee, they found people drinking tulapai, a homemade Apache liquor. Three hours later, the Edwardses joined a group heading to another friend’s home. People who were there reported that Margaret confronted him inside a tepee, demanding to know why he’d been spending time with a younger woman, one of Margaret’s relatives. The argument escalated, and Margaret threatened to end their marriage. She left the party. Edwards stayed until about 10:30 p.m. and then spent the night at a friend’s.

Shocking news came the next day: Margaret was dead. Children had discovered her body, along with bloody rocks, at the side of a trail two and a half miles outside of the Fort Apache town of Whiteriver. They alerted adults, who carried her body home. “I went in the tepee and found my wife in my own bed,” Edwards later wrote. “I went to her bedside and before I fully realized what I was doing or that she was really dead, I had picked her up in my arms, her head was very bloody and a part of the blood got on my hands and clothing.”

He was still kneeling there, holding his wife’s body, when a sheriff and an Apache police officer arrived. The reservation was patrolled largely by Indian officers, but ever since the Major Crimes Act of 1885, certain crimes on Indian reservations had fallen under federal jurisdiction. Murder was one of them.

A medical examiner reported that Margaret had been killed by blows to her head and strangulation. Curiously, at least two of the rocks used to crush her skull were inscribed with her husband’s initials: S.J.E.

The rocks were key pieces of evidence when Edwards stood trial in federal court in October of that year. The 12 white men on the jury delivered a guilty verdict and the judge sentenced Edwards to life in prison. He was sent to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Steilacoom, Washington.

White Mountain Apaches gather for storytelling in 1904. The group is one of five related Western Apache bands whose hunter-gatherer ancestors are thought to have migrated to the region that is now Arizona from Yukon or Alaska.

(Alamy)

Seventeen years later, in March 1951, Edwards—now 64 and still imprisoned at McNeil Island—wrote a desperate letter. “Up ’til now you have never heard of me,” he began, and then repeated the protestations of innocence he’d been making ever since his arrest. He had affidavits from witnesses who’d said he could not have committed the murder. The White Mountain Apache Tribal Council had unanimously recommended his release from prison. Another suspect had even been found. Edwards had pleaded with authorities for a pardon or parole, but nothing he did could move them.

This letter was a last-ditch effort to avoid dying of old age behind bars. Edwards thought the man he was writing to could get him out. The man was Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason mystery books.

At the time, Gardner was America’s best-selling author. He was also a lawyer, and soon after he received Edwards’ letter, he agreed to help. Thus began an unprecedented partnership between an imprisoned Apache holy man and a fiction writer who’d made the dramatization of crime a national obsession.

* * *

Until the day of Margaret’s murder, Edwards had spent his whole life on Indian reservations. His grandparents had been born in the same region when it was still part of Mexico. They’d lived in family groups that grew corn, beans and squash along waterways nearby.

Silas John Edwards, who learned from his father how to treat illnesses by tapping the power of rattlesnakes, in an undated photo.

(Edgar Guenther courtesy William Kessel)

His parents, born after the Mexican-American War in the recently annexed New Mexico Territory, spent their lives worrying about the increasingly hostile U.S. Army, which built a garrison at Fort Apache on the White Mountain tribe’s land. The Indians could no longer travel, trade or even raise crops freely.

Nonetheless, a group of 50 White Mountain Apache men helped the U.S. defeat Geronimo in 1886. As a reward, the U.S. government allowed them to continue living on part of their ancestral territory, establishing the White Mountain Reservation (divided into the Fort Apache and San Carlos reservations). The reservation was a gorgeous expanse of mountains and valleys. Edwards was born there in the 1880s and given the name Pay-yay.

As a child, he was raised with traditional beliefs about male, female and animal deities who had created the world and given power and good fortune to the Apache people. But life on the Apache reservations was hard. Government food rations were insufficient. Starting in the 1890s, Indian children were required to attend schools where they had to shed cultural practices, from hairstyle to language. Edwards and his classmates were given Anglicized names.

Silas John Edwards (left) and his father, photographed by the Rev. E. Edgar Guenther, who submitted this picture to a contest under the title “The Old and the New.” He was awarded a $10 prize for it.

(Edgar Guenther courtesy William Kessel)

But their geographic isolation allowed the White Mountain Apaches to keep some of their traditions. Edwards learned from his father, a medicine man, how to treat illnesses by tapping into the power of rattlesnakes. He also became skilled at tanning rattlesnake skins, and crafting hatbands and other goods from them. Blue dots tattooed along the bridge of his nose and on his chin soon signified his special talents as a practitioner of traditional Apache medicine.

In 1911, a young Lutheran missionary named Edgar Guenther arrived at the reservation. He and his wife, Minnie, would remain in the area for 50 years. Under the pastor’s tutelage, Edwards converted to Christianity and began working as an interpreter for church services. He was especially fascinated by a biblical passage, Numbers 21:4-9, that described God setting venomous snakes on the rebellious Israelites. He and the minister had a falling out after Guenther discovered that Edwards had been using the Guenther home to “entertain women,” says Guenther’s grandson, William Kessel, who was born and raised on the Fort Apache Reservation. “That became a problem for Silas throughout his younger life, entertaining the women.”

At 2,627 square miles, the Fort Apache Reservation is slightly larger than Delaware. Today more than 12,000 Apaches live there in numerous small communities. The tribe runs a ski resort, a casino and a historic attraction that contains the remnants of the U.S. military fort.

(Guilbert Gates)

Around this time, new religious movements were rising among the White Mountain Apaches in response to disease, drought, food shortages, poverty and assaults on traditional life. Edwards began leading one of the most successful. He reported that he’d received a vision “in rays from above”—a set of 62 prayers recorded in graphic symbols. The symbols communicated not only words but also gestures and body movements. In 1916, Edwards proclaimed himself a prophet—more than a medicine man—and launched the Holy Ground religious movement, which stood apart from both Christian and traditional Apache religious practices.

The White Mountain Apaches called the movement sailis jaan bi’at’eehi, meaning “Silas John his sayings,” and Edwards conducted his first Holy Ground snake dance ceremony in 1920. Apaches began joining the movement in sizable numbers. By the early 1920s, Holy Ground had drawn so many followers that it had the potential to upend and revolutionize Apache life. Edwards’ healing ceremonies, often involving rattlesnakes and lasting for days, drew large crowds to consecrated locations at reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. Whites were not allowed to participate or observe.

Apaches and U.S. soldiers in 1893. One proponent of the Arizona Territory, soldier and politician Sylvester Mowry, voiced a malignant opinion then tragically common, saying Apaches should be “surrounded…surprised…and then put to death.”

(National Archives and Records Administration)

Meanwhile, the police saw Edwards as a dangerous figure. He was arrested for assault and for violating Prohibition by selling liquor to fellow Indians, even as he was fined for holding snake dances. Local officials were watching him closely.

By 1933, the popularity of Holy Ground had leveled off, but Edwards continued to preach, which annoyed officials in the region. He’d been married for six years to his third wife, Margaret, an Apache woman who had children from a previous marriage. Meanwhile, as many people close to the couple noted with disapproval, Edwards was carrying on an affair with another woman.

At his trial, which took place at the federal courthouse in Globe, Arizona, Edwards was declared indigent and given a court-appointed lawyer, Daniel E. Rienhardt.

For the prosecution, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Dougherty introduced letters Edwards had written to the other woman and witnesses who described his argument with his wife on the night of her death. Others confirmed there had been blood on Edwards’ clothing, as Rienhardt’s notes from the trial recorded. The cast of a shoe print found near the victim’s body was brought into the courtroom and was said to match Edwards’ shoe. The prosecution even displayed part of Margaret’s skull—an act Rienhardt called prejudicial.

The federal courthouse in Globe, Arizona, where Edwards was tried, is now a post office. Although Arizona has Apache courts that rule on tribal cases, the Major Crimes Act lists 15 crimes that require Indians to be tried in U.S. court. Murder is one of them.

(Ash Ponders)

“I was fully convinced Edwards was not guilty,” Rienhardt later wrote in a letter to Gardner. A biochemist presented support for the defense, testifying that the blood found on Edwards’ clothing was smeared on the fabric, not splattered or dripped, which supported Edwards’ story.

But the strangest evidence was the rocks that bore Edwards’ initials. The prosecution told the jury that the initialed rocks were in keeping with a tribal tradition—that an Apache murderer left initials at the scene of a crime to prevent a victim’s soul from seeking retribution. Rienhardt argued that this was utterly false. Apaches didn’t leave their initials at murder scenes, and anyone familiar with Apache customs would attest to that. (The surviving notes from the trial do not show that any witness testified about the supposed tradition of leaving initials behind.) Besides, Rienhardt argued, why would Edwards be strenuously maintaining his innocence if he’d left his initials at the crime scene? When Edwards took the stand, though, the prosecution subjected him to a sarcastic and ridiculing cross-examination.

The trial and the jury’s deliberation took only a week. “A white man would have been freed in 15 minutes by the same jury that tried him,” Rienhardt wrote in a November 1933 statement, trying to get a new trial for his client. Rienhardt also maintained that the superintendent of the Indian reservation had welcomed the chance to take the influential shaman away from his followers. But there was no new trial, and Edwards would languish in prison for nearly two decades.

* * *

At the time Gardner got the letter from Edwards, he was living on a ranch in Temecula, California, about 60 miles northeast of San Diego and just outside the borders of a Pechanga Reservation. (Today, the ranch is part of the reservation itself.) His office was decorated with American Indian artwork, baskets, masks and moccasins. But Gardner, a Massachusetts native, had little knowledge of the religious life or cultural significance of the man who wrote to him from the McNeil Island Penitentiary.

Gardner dictates a story in 1941.

(Bob Landry / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images)

What Gardner did understand were the flaws in the prosecution’s case. A bespectacled man with a commanding gaze, Gardner had spent years practicing law in California. In the early 1920s, he’d started writing mystery stories for pulp magazines. He’d published his first Perry Mason novel one month after the murder of Edwards’ wife. Over the years, Perry Mason—a fictional defense attorney who usually defended innocent clients—became the center of a literary juggernaut, generating sales of more than 300 million books as well as a popular TV show.

Like the hero he’d invented, Gardner felt drawn to cases involving the wrongly accused. He believed America’s criminal justice system was often biased against the vulnerable. In the 1940s, Gardner used his fame and wealth to assemble what he called the Court of Last Resort, a group of forensic specialists and investigators who—like today’s Innocence Project at Cardozo School of Law—applied new thinking to old cases.

A fan’s collection of Gardner memorabilia. In The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), the first Perry Mason novel, the character describes himself as “a specialist on getting people out of trouble.”

(Bryan Chan / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images)

Gardner’s team rescued dozens of innocent people from executions and long prison terms. Among them were Silas Rogers, a black man sentenced to death for shooting a police officer in Petersburg, Virginia; Clarence Boogie, a victim of false testimony in a murder case in Spokane, Washington; and Louis Gross, who had been framed for murder in Michigan. Gardner persuaded Harry Steeger of Argosy magazine to regularly publish his articles about his organization’s findings. “We are busybodies,” Gardner declared in a letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. “If, on the other hand, citizens don’t take an active interest in law enforcement and the administration of justice, we are going to lose our battle with crime.”

The letter from the Apache shaman made a strong impression on Gardner. “This Silas John Edwards case has been preying on my mind,” he wrote to James Bennett, the director of the Bureau of Prisons at the U.S. Department of Justice, on May 2, 1952. “This man is a full-blooded Apache Indian. There is every possibility that he didn’t get justice at the hands of a jury who may not have understood Indian psychology, temperament and custom. I think we should investigate the case.”

Gardner met Edwards in prison a few months later, shortly after the Apache shaman had been transferred from McNeil Island to a federal prison camp near Wickenburg, Arizona. The prisoner appeared heavily muscled and younger than his years. “Outwardly he is stoic and calm,” Gardner later recalled. “His alert, attentive eyes miss no detail.” Gardner admired the fact that Edwards had a treasury of Apache tradition and medicinal wisdom stored in his mind. He asked Edwards about the most damning evidence in his case: the rock marked with his initials. “That is no custom to appease the spirit of [the] departed,” Edwards said, “but it is a very fine custom by which somebody can frame a killing on somebody else.”

At the end of their meeting, Edwards dipped his forefinger into a buckskin pouch that hung around his neck. It contained sacred pollen, called hadndin, which Edwards dabbed on Gardner’s forehead in the shape of a cross. He made a similar mark on the crown of Gardner’s hat. (The Holy Ground movement incorporated some elements from Christianity, including the iconography of a cross.) Edwards told Gardner that this ritual would keep him physically and spiritually resilient. “Our medicine was strong,” Gardner concluded after the meeting, reflecting on the new details he’d learned about the case. He agreed to investigate it himself.

* * *

In the fall of 1952, Gardner and another Court of Last Resort investigator, Sam Hicks, arrived at the U.S. District Court building in Tucson to exhume the records from Edwards’ trial. Among the files was a cache of letters that Edwards had written to his lover. In one of them, Edwards recalled a time he and the woman met in a canyon and “the tracks of our feet in the sand were covered by our shadows.” Gardner admitted to feeling some sympathy when he read the letters. He later described the affair in Argosy as a “brief emotional flare-up, a physical attraction for the comely young woman who had such a graceful, streamlined figure.” Edwards insisted that he’d never stopped loving Margaret, that his affection for his wife had “burned with a slow, steady flame that represents the mature companionship of adults who have shared many of life’s vicissitudes.”

The prosecution had asserted that Edwards had grown tired of his wife, found a younger woman who interested him more and murdered Margaret to get her out of the way. But even when Gardner considered the case through that lens, he found the evidence flimsy. “How absurd it is to think that a man would scratch his initials on a rock, leave it at the scene of a murder, and then protest his innocence,” Gardner wrote in Argosy. “One can well imagine how Sherlock Holmes would have curled his upper lip in disgust at the police reasoning that would have thought this rock an indication of guilt.”

Gardner and Hicks drove to Globe, where they met Edwards’ defense lawyer, Daniel Rienhardt, now in his mid-60s, and Robert McGhee, another attorney who had assisted Edwards. Both remembered the Edwards case. (Rienhardt admitted he was a Perry Mason fan and had recently bought a copy of The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink.)

Together, the lawyers and investigators drove into the mountains north of Globe. They passed through groves of junipers and cedars, crested the high peaks, and descended into the Salt River Canyon. Twisting roads and high bridges brought them to a plateau where the pavement stopped and dirt roads led into the Fort Apache Reservation.

A view from the San Carlos Apache Reservation, one of the areas where Edwards’ religious movement took hold. In recent years, the tribe’s sacred lands have been at the center of a land swap controversy between the U.S. government and a copper mine.

(Ash Ponders)

At the reservation’s police station, Rienhardt asked an Apache officer whether he had ever heard of a custom that compelled a murderer to leave initials near a victim’s body. “In only one case,” the officer replied, “and that happened to be the murder of my mother.” The policeman, Robert Colelay, was Margaret Edwards’ son from an earlier marriage. And he told the investigators that he believed Silas John Edwards did not kill her.

Apache officers escorted the group to the key locations in the case, including the murder site at the edge of the trail. This section of the reservation had not changed much in the years since Margaret’s death. The roads were still rough and many White Mountain tribal members still lived in tepees nearby. Gardner interviewed surviving witnesses and others who had knowledge of the murder. He sketched maps to understand the geography. The visit ended with one of the group’s Apache guides producing a pouch like the one Edwards wore around his neck. He painted crosses in yellow powder on Gardner’s shoulder, forehead and hat.

Nobody Gardner met at the reservation had heard of an Apache tradition involving initials left at a murder scene. One person also challenged the shoe print mold, asserting that a police officer had forced Edwards’ shoe into the original track before the cast was made. “The evidence which convicted him was pathetically inadequate as well as absurd,” Gardner concluded. “The facts strongly indicate an innocent man has been imprisoned.”

Gardner contacted each member of the U.S. Board of Parole to argue for the release of the Apache shaman. Without the inflammatory evidence of Edwards’ adultery, he argued to parole commissioner Joseph Dewitt, “no jury would have returned a verdict of guilty.”

Gardner told the superintendent of the Arizona prison that the Apaches seemed to have “a pretty good general idea” who did murder Margaret. Gardner refused to publish the suspect’s name, but here it can be revealed for the first time in print: He was a White Mountain Apache named Foster James.

The evidence supporting James’ guilt is considerable. One member of the Court of Last Resort, Bob Rhay (who went on to become the longest-serving superintendent of Washington State Penitentiary), spent time looking into it more deeply. “Foster James has admitted on several occasions that he is the actual murderer,” Rhay wrote in a report preserved among Gardner’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas. He referred to “an affidavit from a Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, in which Mrs. Anderson says that Foster James admitted to her, while he was attacking her, that he had killed Mrs. Edwards.” (Efforts to find surviving friends or relatives of Foster James and include their opinions in this account were unsuccessful. He had no children.)

Kessel, an anthropologist and the grandson of the Lutheran minister who converted Edwards to Christianity, says it was conventional wisdom on the reservation that it was James who had killed Margaret. When Kessel interviewed a number of Apache elders for his academic research on the tribe’s religious movements, they said they believed that Edwards was innocent. Just one interviewee departed from that version of events: Foster James himself.

The tribal chairman had asked Kessel never to mention the accusations against James until after James, Edwards and others close to them died—a promise Kessel would keep. James died in 1976.

For Gardner’s part, he’d noticed that tribal members seemed fearful when they discussed James. “None of these Indians dare to raise their voices above a whisper,” he wrote. “None of them will permit their names to be quoted. The murder of Mrs. Edwards was a ruthless, bloody affair and there is still a silent terror which stalks the Indian reservation.” But more than fear kept the Apaches’ lips closed. In the community of the reservation, with its blood kinships and close relationships, the Apaches did not want to out one of their own.

* * *

On August 1, 1955, Silas John Edwards walked out of prison and returned to reservation life. Though Edwards was already eligible for parole, Gardner’s efforts apparently tipped the scale and persuaded the parole board. Edwards shared the news with Gardner in a letter. According to Gardner, the first thing the newly freed man asked him to do was to thank the readers of Argosy. It’s not known how many of the magazine’s devoted readers wrote to federal officials to protest Edwards’ continuing incarceration, but the response may have been considerable.

A prickly pear cactus on the San Carlos Reservation. “The scenery is really beautiful,” Gardner wrote in an article for Argosy describing his travels through Arizona on Edwards’ behalf. “The desert is not, as so many people think, a barren expanse.”

(Ash Ponders)

Edwards’ followers had kept his movement alive the whole time he was incarcerated, and when he returned to the reservation, he resumed his role as a prophet, albeit with a lower profile. During the 1960s, he led his last Holy Ground snake dance. Soon afterward, he fell back into the more modest role of a traditional medicine man.

Gardner visited Fort Apache again, about a decade after Edwards’ parole. At first, he didn’t recognize the septuagenarian, who was chopping wood: “The man looked even younger than when we had seen him years before in prison.”

Kessel remembers visiting Edwards toward the end of his life, when he was living at an American Indian convalescent home in Laveen, Arizona. “There was no grudge against anybody for anything,” Kessel recalls. “He was a gentleman to the end.” Edwards died in 1977.

William Kessel, an anthropologist who was born and raised on Apache reservations in Arizona, holds up a portrait of Edwards with a snake around his neck. The photo was taken by Guenther, Kessel’s grandfather, who spent 50 years ministering to Apaches.

(Ash Ponders)

The religious movement he founded has at least one practitioner, Anthony Belvado, who was born on the San Carlos Reservation and makes traditional musical instruments. He carries the same kind of buckskin pouch that Edwards wore around his neck, filled with hadndin, and practices as a healer in the Holy Ground tradition.

Life on Arizona’s reservations is still hard, decades after Edwards’ time. More than 40 percent of White Mountain Apaches live in poverty. Covid-19 has devastated the community—at one point, White Mountain Apaches were being infected at ten times the rate of other Arizonans.

And wrongful convictions remain a problem in Indian country. In 2015, an Alaska judge ordered the release of the “Fairbanks Four,” Indian men who had spent 18 years in prison for a murder they hadn’t committed. A 2016 report from the University of South Dakota found that Indians were dramatically underrepresented on juries, partly because of a cumbersome process that makes it difficult for reservation Indians to register to vote.

Meanwhile, the legacy of Perry Mason lives on. The Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has cited the character as an influence, quoting a line spoken by a prosecutor on the show: “Justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and when an innocent man is not.” This past June, 50 years after Gardner’s death, HBO premiered a new Perry Mason television series. For many Americans, the fictional defense lawyer remains a symbol of due process done right.

The Edwards story was “one of the most peculiar murder cases that we have ever investigated,” Gardner said. The invention of a false Indian custom, and the jury’s willingness to believe it, landed an innocent man behind bars for more than 20 years. “If I were writing of this case as a work of fiction,” Gardner told the readers of Argosy, “I would call it The Case of the Autographed Corpse.”

#History

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the-outer-topic · 4 years

Photo

El Coyote

Introduction for non Spanish readers

For a quick summary, use a web translator to read the wiki article, for my own description, read on:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Coyote

As the name suggests, this was a postwar long series, of pulp western novels numbering about a hundred issues, by a Spanish author, a remake of the Zorro character of novel and film, in fact in the story the hero draws the inspiration from the example of the earlier hero and moved forward in time to the Far West times of the California Gold Rush and later decades (1849-1879). In fact they are the best Western novels I have read, and told from a Spanish perspective. El Coyote starts as a defender of the local Californian Spanish and indians against the abuses and violence of the American gringo invaders and criminals in the wake of the Gold Rush, and later on becomes a crime fighter, as law and order are established and the native Californians get equal status as US citizens, often helping American people and not just the Spanish speaking Californians, up to the point that despite his sympathies for the Confederacy, he strives to keep California loyal to the Union, if only to spare its population the ravages of civil war, and later on at one point renders a good service to President Ulysess Grant.

For a hack writer, Mallorquí, the author, was a very good writer with a great culture, knowledge of the history of the West and California, and a flair for character relationships, and a wide variety of plots other than the usual topics of Western films, including action packed shootouts, murder mistery, courtroom drama, and political intrigue to name a few. Since he wrote so many novels to pay bills, the quality is uneven. Some are great, others formulaic, and most of them just a entertaining, pleasant reading, in itself not a mean achievement.

About the character, the merit of Mallorquí is about making the Coyote a more complex character than the Zorro, and his public persona, that of wealthy, peaceful if not downright cowardly, bon vivant, and cynical landowner César de Echagüe and his family life as interesting as his heroic exploits as a masked avenger, combining in one man the duality of the Spanish character with its virtues and vices, half Quijote, half Sancho Panza.

Don Diego de la Vega is a fop, but it’s just an act to avoid suspicions while Don César de Echagüe, while also pretending to be a weakling, is a highly intelligent man, that makes him a hard realist and he sees the futility of the struggle against the new American order, but he fights injustices and abuses as El Coyote anyway out of a sense of justice and Christian morality but also as a thrill seeker in his youth, and driven by a death wish in his mid-life crisis after the death of his first wife while giving birth to his son.

Had Mallorquí been born in the USA he would have became famous, as it was, in his lifetime his books were published in other European countries and were very popular, of all places, in Finland.

These wonderful covers are from a reprint in the 1980s for nostalgic middle aged people that read them in their youth in the 1940s, and to save printing costs, they combined two novels in each volume. As a teenager I found the artwork gorgeous and the books mind blowing, and highly inspirational as they presented for me a Spanish hero as a counter to the American Hollywood culture that steamrollered over Europe, and on a personal level I was fascinated by one female character that appeared as one of the various lovers of El Coyote, an American adventuress that pretended to be a Russian princess made me feel intrigued and interested in that far away country and among other things lead me later in life to meet my Russian wife, who by a coincidence has the same name as the fictional princess.

It took me about twenty years to complete the collection as my older brother hadn’t bought them all when they were first reprinted, and I had to find them by chance throughout the years in flea markets and found the last ones thanks to the internet. Reading them in maturity, they don’t have the same impact as when I was impressionable uneducated teenager, and a few of them are formulaic and trite, but I still find them great reading, though I was shocked by the casual killing and the grisly realism of depictions of death, even though it doesn’t indulge in sadism, though torture is often mentioned as a matter of fact. Just like violence in the American Western movies, come to think of it.

Looking back, I must have been a bloodthirsty psychopath in my teens (so what has changed you may think). On the other hand these novels were written in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War for a generation that had gone through war and mass political murders and repression so I guess readers, children included, were desensitized to killing and brutality back then. Though one thing that makes them apart from the American films and novels, is the strong moral values throughout. Not the American values of law and order and the Protestant work ethic, but Catholic values of justice and equality. El Coyote is a violent man that takes justice in his own hands, but also a Christian and there are strong injuctions against social divide, racism and exploitation of the poor by the rich.

And that’s all I can think of. I will try to scan and post more of these covers if there’s interest.

PS: dor some reason and due to the vagaries of color printing, the Mexican "charro" costume of the Coyote appears in these covers in a range of shades from purple to blue and with gold trimming. Actually both in the novels and the original period covers the suit is black, with silver piping, wich makes sense since the Coyote, as an outlaw usually acted at night and the black color made him a harder target. One has also to bear in mind that a eye mask and a sombrero were enough disguise at a time when there was no electric lighting and nobody could get a good look at his face.

#spanish pulps #pulp art #western

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socialjusticeartshare · 4 years

Text

THE TRUMP CHILD ABUSE SCANDAL

IT’S BEEN TWO years since the peak of public outcry over the Trump administration’s decision to begin separating the children of unauthorized migrant families from their parents at the Mexican border, yet the massive crisis that policy spawned remains arguably the darkest chapter in Donald Trump’s very dark presidency.

MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff has been back and forth from the border and Central America covering the family separation saga since it began, a story he chronicles in his new book “Separated”.

Jacob Soboroff: I think it’s a slow-motion, ongoing, decades-long American tragedy.

[Musical interlude.]

Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Mehdi Hasan.

Whatever happened to all those kids who were stolen from their parents at the border? Why did we just forget about perhaps the biggest scandal, the worst crime, of the Trump presidency?

JS: It was not thought through. There was no plan. And today, we’re still picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

MH: That’s my guest today Jacob Soboroff, NBC News and MSNBC correspondent, and author of the new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.” He’s been covering this crisis, this scandal, at the border from the very beginning.

So, on today’s show, the war on migrants and, especially, the theft of migrant children from their parents: How and why did it happen, and is it even truly over?

Do you remember this?

[Audio clip from ProPublica of children crying at the border.]

MH: That was a recording of 10 Central American children, sobbing desperately after being separated from their parents in June of 2018, here in the United States. That was a recording obtained by ProPublica and which promptly went viral and grabbed newsheadlines — it was even played in the White House briefing room.

That recording helped make ordinary Americans aware of the abuses that were being perpetrated at their southern border, in their name, by the federal government, by the Trump administration — specifically, and shamefully, the deliberate, systematic separation of thousands of brown-skinned migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border on the orders of President Donald J. Trump.

And, for a few months in 2018, what was called “child separation” was the biggest story in America, if not the world:

Newscaster: Families are being torn apart. Thousands of them.

Anderson Cooper: Kids taken hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from their parents. Young children — toddlers, even — housed in so-called “tender-age facilities.”

Jeff Sessions: If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring him across the border illegally.

Prime Minister Theresa May: The pictures of children being held in what appeared to be cages are deeply disturbing.

Newscaster: The Pope labelling it “immoral.”

MH: Two years later, though, we have kinda moved on, as a media industry, and as a nation. To be fair, so many other Trump scandals have sucked up so much oxygen since — whether it was the government shutdown, the Mueller inquiry, Ukraine and the whole impeachment saga, the attacks on protesters in recent weeks, and, of course, the ongoing catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. There’s so much to keep track of — and to keep us outraged.

Still, for me personally, it stands as the biggest, most outrageous, most shocking, most inexcusable scandal of the Trump presidency so far. What’s blandly called “child separation” was, in fact, racism, kidnapping, and child abuse all rolled into one.

In fact, Physicians for Human Rights in a report earlier this year said the Trump family separation policy constituted “torture.” Torture! On American soil. The torture of kids. Kids!

It is difficult to overstate the sheer inhumanity of it all: children were forcibly removed from the arms of their parents; babies were ripped from the breasts of their mothers. And the border agents who did all this somehow went home to their families, to their own kids, and slept fine at night.

Meanwhile, the people in Washington who gave them those orders, who made the cruel and inhumane policies, they’re either still in government, having never faced any real consequences for their part in these crimes; or, in the case of former Trump Chief-of-Staff General John Kelly, or former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, they’re making money in the private sector. In fact, Kelly is on the board of a company called Caliburn International which operates shelters for migrant children! You cannot make this shit up.

These people are vile. They have no shame. Many current and former members of this administration — including the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions — claim to be evangelical Christians. And, yet, they have defended — excused — the torture and abuse of not just refugees but refugee children. They’re not following in the footsteps of Christ; they’re a moral disgrace.

Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration is believed to have taken at least 5,500 kids from their parents at the border — although the real number could be even higher than that. No one knows for sure. In February of this year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said, “it is unclear the extent to which Border Patrol has accurate records of separated [families] in its data system.” And as reporter Jacob Soboroff writes in his new book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy”: “There are families who were quickly put back together, and children who were, as predicted, permanently orphaned.”

As I pointed out on this show back in 2018, that was not a side effect of having a tough immigration policy; that was their tough immigration policy. That was the goal, the prime objective — of an administration filled with white nationalists and apologists for white nationalists; an administration whose immigration policies are drawn up by a man, Stephen Miller, who late last year was revealed to have sent white nationalist literature and racist stories about immigrants in internal emails. No discussion, in fact, about the immigration policies of this administration can be complete without mentioning the racism, and white nationalism, and just pure cruelty that motivates and drives those policies.

So yes, this administration has used kids, targeted kids, migrant kids, refugee kids, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, the most powerless of the powerless, to achieve their policy goals at the border: to crack down on immigration, to placate their far right base, and keep brown people out of the U.S. by any means necessary.

And here’s what’s so important to remember as we sit here, overwhelmed by news and scandal, in the crazy, chaotic summer of 2020 — it never really ended. Hundreds of migrant children continued to be detained in facilities across the country this year, even as the coronavirus spread inside of those facilities, and infected guards and detainees alike.

Last month, a federal judge in LA ordered the release of those kids by the middle of this month. And guess how the Trump administration responded on Tuesday? By telling the court that if they’re forced to release the kids, they won’t release any of the parents who they might be detained with. Got that? Family separation, all over again.

Imagine being the parents of those kids. Keep your kids with you and risk the coronavirus, or have them taken from you and sent out into the world, and who knows if you’ll ever see them again?

What’s called “child separation” is still with us, is still a policy dream of the Trump administration, and yet a total nightmare for the thousands of refugees and asylum seeker families who arrive in this country from Central America every year, seeking protection from war, from violence, from rape.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: My guest today is one of the tenacious, and I should add, deeply compassionate journalists who helped uncover the Trump administration’s vile policy of child torture at the border back in 2018, and who not only contextualized the story for us on our TV screens, but also humanized it.

Jacob Soboroff, of NBC News and MSNBC, was, in fact, one of the first reporters to gain access to the notorious child detention facilities in Brownsville and McAllen, Texas. Here he is, reporting live on MSNBC from outside one of them in the summer of 2018, and not holding back:

JS: There’s a big mess going on right now, and even the Border Patrol inside this building says they’re overstaffed, they don’t have enough resources; the system is just getting stressed out because the Trump administration decided to put this into place, and the consequences really haven’t been worked out, and the biggest consequence of all is thousands of young children, in a way that has never been done before, taken from their parents. And when you hear the Trump administration saying: This has been done before, this is Democrat policy, this is not unusual — that’s B.S., frankly.

MH: Jacob’s reporting earned him the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.

Now he’s written a powerful and, at times, heartbreaking new book about the entire saga, called “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” — and he joins me now from Yuma, Arizona, just yards from the southern border with Mexico.

Jacob, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.

JS: Thanks, Mehdi.

MH: You’ve written this new book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy,” having covered the 2018 crisis at the border with those kids in cages, with those children taken from their parents, almost exactly two years ago. Is this book, Jacob, about a chapter in recent American history? Or is this a book about what’s still happening right now — ongoing American tragedy?

JS: I think it’s a slow motion ongoing, decades-long American tragedy, Mehdi, and this is the first time I’ve ever done a podcast sitting 20 to 30 yards away from a 30-foot tall border wall installed by President Trump, which is exactly where I’m sitting right now, in Yuma, as I wait for him to arrive here.

You know, the wall, and Donald Trump, have become a symbol of United States immigration policy. This is an immigration policy, however, that has, as I said, spanned decades, and Democratic, and Republican administrations. And since an official Border Patrol doctrine in 1994, called “Prevention Through Deterrence,” the goal of which was to deter migrants from coming to the United States to make them go on a dangerous and deadly journey, where they very well could die trying to get into the United States. Deterrence, pain, and suffering has been a part of U.S. immigration policy and family separations, which I had the misfortune of seeing with my own eyes, was Donald Trump’s extreme extension of that policy.

MH: Yes, the extreme extension, as you say. You’re right to say that this started on previous presidents’ watches — you know, Bill Clinton in the 90s, George Bush, Barack Obama, “the Deporter-in-Chief,” and then you have Trump escalating in this grotesque way. A total of around 4,300 children I believe, “separated from their parents at the border.” This all came to a head in May/June 2018.

So a question that I think a lot of listeners will want to know the answer to — I know I do — do we know for sure, Jacob, if all of those children were eventually reunited with their families?

JS: We don’t. And if it weren’t for the ACLU and a federal judge in San Diego, the vast majority of them may never have been. It was a negligent, dangerous approach at putting this policy into place — sloppy. And the mechanism by which the separations were tracked, I think it actually would be even generous to call it a mechanism: It was not thought through, there was no plan. And today, we’re still picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

And you mentioned a number in the 4,000 range. I think the most recent number according to the ACLU, and this is a constantly evolving number, is over 5,000 children, including children separated after the policy had nominally ended, when Donald Trump signed the executive order on June 20, 2018, ending a policy that days earlier, he said, didn’t even exist.

MH: Yes. First it didn’t exist, and then when they stopped it, it still carried on, as you point out, even after the judicial and executive order fallout.

Um, let me ask you this: One thing that bothers me, and I don’t want to knock the title of your excellent book, because I know how hard it is to come up with a title, and I know that separated is the word that’s been used by everyone — even by me, on occasion, as shorthand — to describe this zero-tolerance policy at the border, and what the Trump administration did to migrant families back in 2018.

But, for me, “separated” always feels like an understatement. It feels too clinical, an empty word. Because what happened was child theft; it was child kidnapping. It was, in many ways, child abuse by the U.S. government. And I worry sometimes that our journalistic shorthand often ends up underplaying how bad things are on the ground; they sanitize things too much. Am I being unfair?

JS: No, I think your point is well taken. And the reason I chose “separated,” as well, is that for me, it doesn’t just describe torture, frankly. And that’s the word that Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization has used subsequently to describe what these children went through: It meant the clinical definition of torture. But it also described most Americans’ mental separation from how we got to this point; inability to understand and comprehend —

MH: Yeah. Good point.

JS: — how the government did this to children and, in some cases, babies. And that also includes me! I was covering the border even before Donald Trump became president, when Barack Obama was president and was dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief,” as you mentioned, by immigration activists. I, you know, I was on what I thought was the front lines of immigration reporting, and frankly, I completely missed it myself until it slapped me in the face.

And that’s what I wanted to make clear in the book, is that separated is not just the physical act of what happened to these parents and children, but it really also is a mental state of most Americans about the way that we deal with immigration in this country. So, you know, again, your point is well taken. I think that it’s much more vile what happened to these children than the simple word or simple act of being taken from their parents, but I think that the word also applies to many of us in our everyday lives.

MH: No, that’s a very fair point. And I would urge everyone to read Jacob’s book. It’s an excellent book. You tell the story of José in the book, a young boy from Northern Guatemala, that story is a central thread throughout your book. He fled with his father Juan to the United States in order to escape drug traffickers who were threatening his family. Can you tell us a little bit more about José? Why did you choose his story?

JS: Well, the truth of the matter is, and this is a bit of a spoiler, but I ultimately met his father Juan, and Juan and José are pseudonyms that they picked themselves to protect their own identity and the identity of their family that they left behind in Guatemala. But they come from the northern state of Petén. And Petén, which is actually a place I haven’t been to, and they asked me not to go to — I’ve been to Guatemala on several occasions, but I didn’t go to their home because they were worried about what might happen to their wife they left behind.

They were threatened with violence. Juan was the owner of a small convenience store, and basically got into trouble after a vehicle that he sold was sold to someone else, and fell into the hands of what he tells me, and told the United States government in his asylum application, were narco traffickers, he suspected. And until he would turn over the rights, the documentation, which he no longer had to his car, they were going to put a threat on his life.

And so he decided to pick up and leave with José, come to the United States, go to Arizona, where he had crossed twice successfully before to come and work earlier in his life when his son was was younger, but, for the first time, decided to pick up and leave with his boy to protect him.

MH: Yeah.

JS: And once they got to the United States, to the place where they thought represented safety and security, I’m actually sitting probably 10 miles away from that exact spot right now — and the president will visit almost that exact spot, as I speak to you today, as we record this — they were taken from each other in a way that nobody could have ever anticipated, even though it was going on by the time they left Guatemala and started their journey to the United States in May of 2018.

MH: So, it’s interesting, you mentioned in the context of Juan, that he had crossed twice before, for work, this time he came to protect his child. We have this great debate, of course, as you know better than me, about are these people refugees and asylum seekers or are they all economic migrants coming to work? In your anecdotal experience, having interviewed so many of these people, having covered their stories, what were they? Especially back in 2018, when it kind of hit the headlines in that huge way, when everyone in the country is talking about: Why have they brought children with them, etc, etc?

How many people you were talking to, were, in your, you know, the story you just tell of Juan, that sounds like a genuine asylum application?

JS: And I have no reason to doubt them.

MH: Yeah.

JS: You know, and I think the vast majority of people I came into contact with were coming to the United States from Central America — from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador — in order to seek asylum.

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And when I was writing the book, I was thinking a lot about this, that nobody’s perfect. And actually, when I heard the Reverend Al Sharpton deliver the eulogy for George Floyd and use the biblical example of a rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, you know, in our conversation about race, and about police brutality, and violence, it made me think of covering immigration at the border.

Nobody is perfect. Nobody comes here with a sparkling clean record or the perfect story that you want to hold up and make an example to change the entire country’s imagination on immigration.

MH: Yes.

JS: He had come here before, twice, illegally. He freely admitted it to me. And he laughed and smiled when he said: They didn’t catch me previously. And I think it’s not mutually exclusive; you can be an economic migrant and also, later in your life, become a refugee from violence. And I think, too often, we boil it down to: it’s one or the other.

MH: Yes.

JS: But these stories often intersect. And I think we do a disservice, or the general public does a disservice, when we try to distill it to one or another because, oftentimes, that really isn’t the case.

MH: And it’s not just Latin American families that we’re talking about, of course. You describe a Congolese mother and her daughter who was separated trying to enter the U.S.; you say “the mother was taken to an adult immigration jail in San Diego, and her daughter was sent to a shelter in Chicago.” You also say that when she was told her daughter was in Chicago, she did not know what the word meant.

How do people like that woman and her daughter a) end up at the southern border? And how is their story different to some of the more familiar Latin American stories that you tell in your reporting?

JS: Well, I think that the southern border has become an entry point for people from around the world looking to seek refuge in the United States and seek asylum. And if it wasn’t for that Congolese woman and her daughter, who later became known as Ms. L., none of these 5,000-plus families would have been reunited, because she became the plaintiff, the original plaintiff, in the ACLU case —

MH: Yes.

JS: — against the government. And so what happened to her, and her story, was slightly different. She presented legally at the San Ysidro port of entry in between San Diego and Tijuana, where you can legally walk up and declare asylum as part of an internationally recognized legal process. And the United States government told her they didn’t believe her, took her away from her daughter, and not until a DNA test confirmed it, were they placed back together. But that wasn’t soon enough to stop the thousands of separations, you know, from happening.

And that’s another example, Mehdi, of it’s never a perfect story. You know, she thought she was doing it the right way, but the United States government challenged her on that, and it set off, you know, this whole chain of events.

MH: I think we’ve learned over the last four years that, for this administration, there is no right way of claiming asylum or coming into the country.

JS: Sure. That’s right. That’s right.

MH: They just don’t want people coming into the country.

You describe in the book the moment in June 2018, when then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen infamously tweeted, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”

You say, in the book: “My eyes widened when I saw it. You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. Come on.”

Where were you at that moment? And why did that tweet from her so stun you?

JS: Because earlier that week, I was inside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center — they call it Ursula in the Border Patrol, and that’s in McAllen, South Texas, where they let us in.

Katie Waldman, who later became Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, and now the Vice President’s communications director, was, at the time, a spokesperson for Kirstjen Nielsen. She invited me and another group of journalists into that center to see with our own eyes what family separations look like, because I think they believed that with outrage from the general public based on media attention, Congress would do what the Trump administration wanted, which was pass more restrictive order regulations. Of course, that backfired.

And the reason that I was was so flabbergasted by what Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted is that days earlier, if not hours earlier, I had been inside the center where I saw, with my own eyes, separated children sitting on concrete floors, covered by those silver blankets, under a security contractor in a watchtower. It makes me sick every time I talk about it. It gives me the chills every time I talk about it, as — then — the father of a two-year-old boy.

It was — and I don’t know —I really don’t know another way to describe it other than disgusting, to see social workers standing around Border Patrol agents, not allowed to touch the children, all because of official government policy when many of the families in there didn’t know what they were about to experience themselves, you know, to this day leaves me speechless. And to hear the Secretary of Homeland Security, who I didn’t know at the time, but I now know in writing the book, had signed the policy into place — it is just wrong. There’s no other way to say it.

MH: I mean, this is an administration that says openly: Don’t believe the evidence in front of your eyes, don’t believe what you see with your own eyes, and don’t believe what you hear with your own ears. It’s the gaslighters-in-chief.

You say, early in the book, you sum things up this way, you say: “What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe, made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points.”

In what sense, Jacob, was it avoidable, given that we already had a president clearly bent on implementing harsh border policies? Who or what around him could have stopped it?

JS: Well, in particular, you know, Scott Lloyd, who was the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, was warned on multiple occasions about the damage — the long-lasting trauma — that family separations would do to children. And, ostensibly, this was the man who was the custodian of the thousands of migrant children in the custody of the United States government. And, in particular, Jonathan White, commander in the U.S. Public Health Commissioned Corps, under Health and Human Services, has testified publicly to this — that he warned Scott Lloyd about the long-lasting damage that separations would do to these children. (Scott Lloyd, of course, is the same official who tried to ban abortions in HHS custody for young migrant girls.)

And the bottom line is when you look at the actions of Scott Lloyd, he did anything but stop family separations from happening. One official later told me that he believed that this was the greatest human rights catastrophe of his lifetime, in seeing this take place under the leadership of Scott Lloyd. And had the career officials in HHS, child welfare professionals, whose motto is not only to do no harm, like in the medical profession, but to put the best interest of the clients first — and that’s the children — this never would have happened. The best interests of the children were very obviously not put first here.

MH: Yeah.

JS: The officials of HHS and the professionals were certainly pushing for that all along.

MH: And there were a lot of people involved in this process, none of whom resigned on principle, none of whom came out and became a whistleblower at that time, which says a lot about how certain people’s morals are corrupted working in this administration.

Just to go back to an earlier point you made about this being a decades-long tragedy, a lot of Trump officials and Trump supporters — and some on the left — say it’s unfair to pin what you call “an American tragedy” wholly on Trump, because it was the Obama administration that built many of the cages that were used in 2018; it was the Obama administration that put unaccompanied minors from Central America in detention. There was a big overlap between a lot of their policies and practices at the southern border, between those two administrations. What do you say to them?

JS: Well, in some measure, they’re right. I mean, the Obama administration did build the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center where I saw the children in cages. Those cages were built by the Obama administration. And they believe that that was the best option at the time. Certainly activists and immigration rights lawyers and such didn’t believe that, and were extremely vocal in voicing their opposition at the time.

The Trump administration had the opportunity to go in a different direction. They never signaled that that was their intention. In fact, they always signaled a harsher immigration policy than the Obama administration. But they didn’t have to institute the family separation policy; the Obama administration considered implementing the family separation policy. Some of the same officials within the Department of Homeland Security brought it up. And in the book I talk about how on Valentine’s Day, 2017, less than a month into the Trump administration, some of the officials that overlapped from the Obama administration into the Trump administration, basically revived — resuscitated — a policy, a rejected, discarded policy, that even the Obama administration, which was was not beloved by immigration activists, put the side.

MH: Yes.

JS: And this was a conscious, deliberate decision by the Trump administration to move forward with something that they knew all along was a deterrence policy, that was so bad, it would try to scare people away from coming to the United States. And John Kelly, when he was the secretary of homeland security in March of 2017, admitted freely on CNN.

MH: So, just to be clear, what Trump did in 2018 at the border with these “separations” is much worse than anything Obama, or, for that matter, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton did at the border; that is fair to say based on your own reporting and research in this book?

JS: Well, the reason I say that this was unprecedented was that it was “systematic child abuse,” in the words of Physicians for Human Rights or American Academy [of] Pediatrics, at the hands of the Trump administration — deliberate, systematic child abuse or torture.

The Obama administration, the Clinton administration, the Bush administration all had their own very harsh deterrence policies; I’m sitting in Arizona now where hundreds of people have died trying to cross in the desert because of border infrastructure walls, like the ones I’m looking at in front of my face as I talk to you. But never was the policy directed specifically at children for the purpose of hurting parents and children. And therein is the difference.

MH: Good point.

JS: I mean, that’s where the Trump administration took it to a level that had never been seen before. It doesn’t mean that, for a long time, there haven’t been cruel, harsh, and deadly immigration policies.

MH: But, in this case, it was a stated policy to cause harm in order to stop people from coming.

JS: That’s for sure. And they would never admit that, that the purpose was to hurt children. But when you say deterrence, you have to be deterred by something — and the something, here, was trauma.

MH: So, you paint a picture in the book of a president who — shock! horror! — is, you know, over his head. You know, he’s out of control, but he also doesn’t know what he’s doing. There’s a huge culture of fear around him, you say, in the White House. You talk about the chaos surrounding this policy; obviously, we know very much about the Trump administration’s incompetence when it comes to any area of public policy.

But in my view, there’s also not enough discussion in our industry, Jacob, in the ‘liberal media,’ about the ideology that drives a lot of Trump’s immigration policy. This is not just them trying to look tough or messing up. You have a White House that openly plays footsie with white nationalists.

JS: Mhmm.

MH: And a top Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, who leads on this issue, and who is at best, an apologist for white nationalism, at worst, a card carrying white nationalist himself; this is a guy who the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC, has thoroughly documented by his own leaked emails, has promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories, obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols. And yet, we just don’t talk about it as much as we should. It’s like we’re too polite to mention the open white nationalism from this White House when we talk about immigration and border controls.

JS: Another way to put it is that the target of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies are more often than not brown people —

MH: Yes.

JS: — who come to the southern border where the majority of people who enter this country illegally, or ultimately stay in this country illegally, come via airplane from countries other than Central America or Latin America by overstaying visas.

And the Trump administration has not — or did not, at that time — target visa overstays as their primary concern, when that was, by definition, by numbers, where most people who were in the United States ‘illegally’ were coming from. The policy has always been, the ire has always been targeting people with a different skin color coming from the southern border, and not at the majority of people who are entering the country and staying in the country illegally.

And, you said it. I mean, that’s why this policy is, or was — I guess you could still say is, family separations are still happening — racist. I mean, this is not a policy that is being targeted at people who are flying here and staying here after going to school or getting a job or some other form of immigration to the United States. He’s targeting people who come through the southern border, period.

MH: Just to clarify for our listeners, you say family separation is still happening. Just briefly, how is it still happening?

JS: Well, the Trump administration is giving families an option: either separate, or be deported, or held indefinitely in family detention. That’s called binary choice. It’s the type of policy that’s being put forward.

You won’t be surprised to learn, Mehdi, that nobody is selecting family separation as an option when they’re presented with it.

MH: Yeah.

JS: But it is still an option that the Trump administration is giving migrants in custody. It’s a catch-22 situation, you know? Either get kicked out of the country and your child stays here, and be in indefinite family detention with your child, or separate from your child, let your child go free, but you won’t see your child, because you’ll, you know, you’ll continue to be detained. It’s just family separation with a different mechanism.

MH: The ‘family separation crisis of 2018,’ I think we would agree, Jacob, was one of the biggest crises, one of the most horrifying episodes of the Trump presidency. And given how many big crises and horrific episodes there have been over the past four years, that’s a pretty high bar that it met. And even by the standard of awful Trump scandals, this one stood out.

And yet he survived. The people around him survived. A lot of people just forgot about it. Washington, the media, largely moved on. If we hadn’t moved on, if there had been consequences — for the lies, the law-breaking, the racism, the child abuse — do you think we might have avoided or even been better prepared for many of the other Trump crises that have since followed it?

JS: It’s such a good question. I would like to think so, but that goes back to the separation from the American public about what’s happening and why.

And so often, I find, that too many of us are disconnected from the reality of what’s going on in our country. It’s too easy to look around in our own neighborhood —

MH: Yep.

JS: — to talk about our own concerns versus what’s happening at the border.

I’ll give you one example. I went to Tornillo, where they had that tent city in the wake of the separation crisis and all the migrant boys housed there. And I write about this in the book, I asked a local farmer growing pomegranates what his main concern was, and he said the production of food. And this was a man that was a stone’s throw away from thousands of kids being locked up in a tent in 100-degree heat in the middle of the South Texas desert.

And, you know —

MH: Wow.

JS: — I’ll never forget that. Because, you know, if, if he’s gonna forget about it, or if it’s not going to be top of mind for him, it isn’t going to be for people in suburban America either. And which is why, I think, you know, just it was so important to me to write this book, not just to remind people of this, but to answer those questions for myself: How could this possibly have happened? How could we possibly have moved on? You know, and what is it gonna take for this to not happen again?

MH: Well, I’m so glad you wrote the book and one of the issues that really bothers me is that there’s been very little accountability for the main players in this saga.

Former Trump Chief-of-Staff, former DHS Secretary General John Kelly went off to work in the private sector. He even joined the board of Caliburn International, a company that operates the largest shelter for unaccompanied migrant children —oh, the irony. His successor as DHS secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was invited as recently as October last year to speak at Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Women’s Summit in Washington, D.C.. There doesn’t seem to have been much accountability.

JS: Not just no accountability, many but some of these people have been put in charge of the response or at least on the team to the coronavirus outbreak that’s killed over 100,000 people in this country. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, I remember sitting at home on lockdown like everybody else, watching, up on the podium, Chad Wolf, now the acting secretary of homeland security — then, a top deputy to Kirstjen Nielsen — who, as my colleague Julia Ainsley first reported, was involved in the drafting of the initial family separation policy to be presented to her.

Katie Waldman, as I mentioned, was the spokeswoman for Kirstjen Nielsen and is now the spokeswoman for the Vice President of the United States. It seems as though the people that were involved in the family separation policy have not been disciplined, or reprimanded, or faced accountability; on the contrary, they’ve been elevated to new positions. And you mentioned John Kelly, who’s started working with Caliburn, this company that is profiting off of the detention of child migrants in multiple facilities now, along the southwest border.

I would say that it’s baffling and stupefying, but, again, it’s just like you said — it’s another one of these consequence-less actions of the Trump administration that, you know, they seem to benefit from when, you know, common sense would say they should be punished.

MH: By the way, at that Fortune summit, my good friend Amna Nawaz of PBS News asked Kirstjen Nielsen if he regretted the so-called family separation policy.

Amna Nawaz: I’m asking you if you regret making that decision.

Kirstjen Nielsen: I don’t regret enforcing the law, because I took an oath to do that, as did everybody at the Department of Homeland Security. We don’t make the laws; we asked Congress to change the law, Congress reviewed the law in 2006 and decided to continue to make it illegal to cross in that manner.

MH: When you hear Nielsen saying that, Jacob, what’s your reaction?

JS: The same bewilderment that I felt when I saw her tweet that: “There is no family separation policy. Period.” I thought that that interview, by the way, was spectacular.

MH: Yeah.

JS: And the line of questioning was perfect, because Kirstjen Nielsen is an expert in slipping away from questions about the family separation policy. If anyone should face accountability for the policy, it is her.

She had to sign, and I outline it in the book, a decision memo that sat on her desk with three options to implement the end of what was known as catch-and-release: the idea that migrants who come to the southern border would be released to the interior, with their families, until their immigration case would be adjudicated in the courts, until they had to show up for court. And by the way, many migrants — most migrants — do show up for that process, because they want to attain asylum in this country.

She chose of the three options, the most severe, the most punitive of family separations. It was a deliberate and clear decision by her; she had to sign her name — literally on the dotted line — for the policy. And the idea that she doesn’t face any responsibility for this, that it wasn’t something that she ultimately would come to regret, I just don’t believe it. I don’t — knowing what I know about her, having sat face-to-face with her at the start of this policy — I do not believe that that is truly the way that she feels. And I know, certainly, that she knows the responsibility that she bears for it.

JS: And like every ex-Trump official, especially once he leaves office, everyone’s going to be spinning how they were actually resisting inside the administration — they were the good guys pushing back against awful policies from the top.

And we focus a lot on Trump, and we should focus also on these ex-Trump officials who are trying to rehabilitate themselves; they should really be shunned by polite society. But sadly, we know Washington, D.C.: they won’t be, they aren’t being shunned. And that’s depressing.

One last question for you, Jacob. Given what you saw with your own eyes, what you heard in terms of testimony from some of these parents and children — the trauma of it, as you put it — how hard a book was this for you to write.

JS: Well, certainly not as hard as being separated from your child, indefinitely, in the minds of a lot of these parents. It was — it was difficult to revisit. But covering family separations is something that will have changed me, forever, for my entire life. I think there’s a lot of people out there who, having watched the story — not just from my coverage, but from the wonderful journalism that was done, you know, during and after this policy — you know, it’s changed a lot of people.

And, for me, this was something that I wanted to do to answer questions that I didn’t know the answer to in real time. And it’s also something that I wanted to do for Juan and José, because the reason that they decided to participate in this story with me was so that it never happens again. And I really mean that. You know, I don’t know if it’s kosher to say that as a journalist, that covering this, and writing this book, you know, for me has a specific and — what I hope — is a positive outcome. But that’s really what this was about for me.

And to revisit it was, was difficult. But it’s nothing compared to what Juan and José and 5,000 other children went through.

MH: Jacob, congratulations on an important book. Thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.

JS: Thank you, Mehdi. Appreciate it.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: That was Jacob Soboroff, author of the new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.”

And that’s our show! And we’re going to be on a little bit of a summer break, here on Deconstructed. The show will be back in August. Hope you’re all able to have a break too. Stay safe while we’re gone!

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice: iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at [email protected]. Thanks so much!

See you next month.

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