“I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE BONES COME FROM”
On death and dehumanization at the border, and the long arc of American fascism
by Max Granger, June 25, 2025
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” -Walter Benjamin, 1940
In this moment of spiraling state and stochastic terror, as the imperial boomerang slices through the Middle East like a mad butcher, bending back, blood-stained, to sling its terrible shock homeward, we might be inclined to focus on the unfamiliar—to perceive our apocalyptic present as a rupture from some stable past. This, to say it simply, is the myopia of privilege. It is the liberal analogue, or inversion, of Make America Great Again: a grasping for an era or ethos that never really was, at least not for the people whose graves paved the way for its “progress.”1
“In America, we have due process.” “In America, we don’t have kings.” “In America, we don’t go to war without congressional approval.” “In America, we welcome immigrants.”
But what is due process to the thousands coerced into private prisons by plea deals or churned into detention camps by the bipartisan “consequence delivery system” known, officially, as Operation Streamline.2 What is a country without kings, when it is ruled by capitalists? What does it matter, to the victims, if Congress rubber stamps a war or the president unilaterally makes one? What does it mean to “welcome” some immigrants—displaced, in all likelihood, by U.S. destabilization—at the expense of a million more trapped behind the walls of our militarized borders? What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?