← Next Comes What
Next Comes What
Don't Wait
00:25:49
What if we already have what we need to do what has to be done? An unlikely story of magic and surprises, with receipts. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and...
Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:00]
Andrea Pitzer
You're listening to Next Comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Each week we'll figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. In recent weeks, I've been telling you a lot about the expansion of US Detention that repeats concentration camp history.
- [00:16]
Unnamed Speaker 1
Armed masked agents sweeping through cities, raiding.
- [00:19]
Andrea Pitzer
Work sites, arresting people on the street.
- [00:22]
Unnamed Speaker 2
They took your mom.
- [00:25]
Andrea Pitzer
More U.S. citizens are being arrested in shocking ways, too. I got rights to talk, bro. I know, right here I do. Not to mention ongoing violence against immigrants. I mean, it's disrupting everything about our communities. It's disrupting businesses, it's disrupting churches, it's disrupting everything about our day to day lives. A new executive order seems to be expanding abuses against the homeless to push them out of sight, or as will.
- [00:53]
Unnamed Speaker 2
Probably be the case, to push them.
- [00:54]
Andrea Pitzer
Into these concentration camps where they may.
- [00:58]
Unnamed Speaker 2
Be forced into free labor.
- [01:01]
Andrea Pitzer
Colleges remain under attack from the administration.
- [01:04]
Unnamed Speaker 1
The Times reports that President Trump is determined to make Harvard pay more than Columbia. But the Columbia deal didn't only involve a find. It required a series of staffing changes, including hiring a monitor who could watch what the school was teaching on behalf.
- [01:18]
Andrea Pitzer
Of the government and media outlets, too.
- [01:20]
Unnamed Speaker 2
Did you guys hear about the Stephen Colbert thing?
- [01:23]
Andrea Pitzer
I know a lot of people are looking for answers on what to do in the midst of all this. Next week I'll have a very nuts and bolts conversation with an activist on how to deal with ICE in your community, both in terms of what watching out for and responding to ICE raids, and also for how to work to get ICE out of your community as much as possible. But this week I want to offer a different kind of episode to those looking for answers. I have a very strange story to tell you, one about the smallest of things, but also kind of about the biggest of things, too. One that will take a lot of turns and then end with what I think what I hope will be a useful way to ponder how you might move through events in the US and the world today. This story has a true but very odd ending, and I hope you'll stick around for it. Lately a lot of people have come to me with questions about camps. Do you consider those concentration camps and do you deal with them in your book? I started researching the larger history of concentration camps in 2008 and got my book contract for a history of camps at the end of 2014. So it's been more than a decade now of intensive work on how parties or governments round up civilians and lock them away, based more on who they are rather than anything they've done. And during the first Trump administration, the number of people who were willing to see how we were already, even then, transitioning to camps after decades of extrajudicial torture and cruelty, that number was small.
- [03:03]
Unnamed Speaker 3
Has the Trump administration set up concentration camps in Texas for migrants?
- [03:08]
Andrea Pitzer
Sometimes I would pitch an editor to write a story and they would get it, and then they would take that idea to their editors meeting and it would get shot down first. I just thought maybe I wasn't pitching it well. But then with Trump administration abuses along the border in 2018 and 2019, editors started reaching out to me to have me write something.
- [03:30]
Unnamed Speaker 3
In one of her latest articles, Pizza writes, quote, while writing a book on camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done. By this definition, the New Child Camp established in Tornillo, Texas, is a concentration camp.
- [03:52]
Andrea Pitzer
Finally, I thought, okay, people are getting it. We're hearing that they're going to be moving some of these detention sites onto military bases where we'll have less access, we'll know less what's going on. And this goes back to a number of different camps that we've seen in the past, and some did. We still have a lot of ways to take action, but I think that it's very problematic moving forward. This is the kind of stuff we see where you end up with concentration camp regimes. But in other cases, even when an editor had reached out to me, had solicited a piece of, they still ended up not being able to sell the concept in their editor meeting. But six months into a second Trump administration, both the President and Stephen Miller have openly talked for more than a year about detaining millions and millions of human beings.
- [04:37]
Unnamed Speaker 4
Today's top story, Fort Bliss will be home to the country's largest migrant detention facility. The $231 million contract is part of a $1.2 billion project to build a short term detention facility for 5,000 thousand migrants.
- [04:53]
Andrea Pitzer
They now have whole law enforcement agencies that are willing to collaborate in these abuses, even when it has occasionally meant detaining American citizens illegally.
- [05:02]
Unnamed Speaker 4
It is also completely illegal for ice. They have no authority whatsoever to detain or arrest US Citizens.
- [05:10]
Andrea Pitzer
The budget just approved for ICE will allow them to expand exponentially beyond the current cruelties.
- [05:16]
Unnamed Speaker 2
You will see ICE now being the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation, potentially with enough funding to hire more law enforcement agents than the FBI and more detention, potentially than the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons.
- [05:33]
Andrea Pitzer
And now so many people are reaching out, because while there might still be some editors who are blind to what's happening or who are deliberately misrepresenting it, a lot of Americans can see what the plan is much more clearly than they were able to five or six years ago. Which means I've been getting a lot of requests for interviews as well as private questions from people who have experience on campaigns or have worked in politics, or even requests from community groups who want me to teach workshops on organizing for them. And sometimes the requests aren't even for anything specific, they're just a recognition that I can see a piece of what's happening more clearly than a lot of people did for a long time, or that I've already spent a lot of time thinking about what happens next when a country is in the situation that we're in and people want me to do something, anything, to change what's happening. This whole dynamic started reminding me of Twitter more than a decade ago, when it was already kind of a pain in the ass, but also often a lot of fun. There was a novelist on Twitter named Brian Morton. He was best known for his novel Starting out in the Evening, which was made into a film do you think people will still be reading you in 100 years? What I wonder is whether people will still be reading in 100 years. I never met him in person, although we occasionally riffed on each other's posts or exchanged little asides in direct messages. But more often than not we just hit like on each other's stupid jokes. And around the time my first book came out, Brian posted that someone had asked him for a blurb without mentioning who had requested it. He wrote the following, which I reposted if you're asking for a blurb from the likes of me, your book is already doomed. The comment was very Brian sharp witted and administering small cuts, but most often using himself as a target. And this was 2013. I was a first time book author who had only recently gone blurb begging for the first time myself earlier that year, but who also had only recently realized that having established authors say nice things about my book was not going to put it on the bestseller list. So by that point I recognize the despair of both the author with the forthcoming book and the despair of the author willing to write a blurb. But who knows, their words are unlikely to deliver the kind of sales punch the requester is probably hoping for. Brian's words have stayed with me since because as I've become a little better known as an author, but am still not a celebrity. I get a lot of requests to write blurbs. I want to read the books before deciding, of course. And I do try to read as many as I can to help out authors, just as I've been helped out myself. But Brian's line is always in the back of my mind, especially with new authors who might be imagining a blurb from me is going to change the reception of their book or their circumstances in some significant way. And I've been thinking about his line again in the Trump era now in a different way, as so many people are coming to me asking for things. And it's not just from me. People are looking for help from anybody who seems to have a handle on what's happening, or from those who are in charge, or from those who are speaking out about Trump and gaining an audience, sometimes in good ways and sometimes in ways that just seemed aimed at building a fan base, which sometimes overlaps with and sometimes is very distinct from an actual community. This is Gavin Newsom. And this is Newt Gingrich. People want leaders. And it's not so much that anyone who asks me for help, to use Brian's phrase, is already doomed. It's more that I know my skills and limitations. So, for instance, the person who had a tremendous amount of community organizing experience and wanted to put it at my disposal for an unformed idea of a movement she thought I might lead had a certain idea of me that I was someone she could follow, who would save her or the country. And the group of people in one local community who wanted me to teach a workshop for them, they were recognizing that what I was saying was real, and they wanted me to tell them what to do next, to train them in what to do. There was absolutely nothing wrong for people asking for things or offering help. We have to reach out to each other, and a real hunger exists to know exactly the right thing to do to fix what's happening. And sometimes someone will write me privately with an idea of how to collaborate, and I can instantly picture how we might work together, or at least have a concept of how I might be useful that we could flesh out over time. I don't want to be here just scaring you. So this isn't a complaint about people asking for things, but sometimes I get the sense that people want someone outside their experience in their community to vest their hopes and powers. In my sense is that there's not going to be one weird trick that's going to do it or one person who has all that knowledge or a leader we can elect who is just going to turn the tables. It's going to take a million planned and improvised actions to shift what's happening.
- [11:03]
Unnamed Speaker 5
You all have been dming me, asking me what to do. I don't know that there's just going to be one answer. Friends, I think that what we know is that there are over 200 different activities that you can participate in that helped build a non cooperation movement in this country. You don't have to take a huge risk and some of us have to take every risk, right, to do this meaningful work.
- [11:26]
Andrea Pitzer
One of the reasons I quit teaching martial arts for a living after several years of doing so was because people were willing to vest so much authority in anyone who wears a black belt and credentials can be helpful in figuring out who to listen to. But I saw how much power people were willing to concede, how much faith they would have in their instructors, including me. But for what felt to me like not great reasons. It sometimes made me squirm. And a little over a week ago I mentioned Brian Morton's line from a million years ago to my husband, though after a decade it had morphed in my head to pity the person who wants a blurb from me. And I mentioned to him that what I was trying to say with my newsletter and this podcast is that you don't always need to look for someone who knows a lot more or who has more power than you to do the things that need to be done. Nobody is a superhero, or maybe everybody is a superhero. So really we're just choosing our battle partners or forming our Justice League. Let's see how far I can torture this metaphor. Anyway, I've wandered pretty far from the blurb analogy here, because of course blurbs aren't really a cry for help or a need to have the book approved of in a deep psychological way. They're just part of the publishing business. The way it's done now, and people approaching me this year because of this podcast, or because they connect to the things I'm saying in public about concentration camps is mostly a really good thing.
- [13:01]
Unnamed Speaker 2
What I emphasize, and that comes a lot from you, and maybe that gravitated to your podcast also because of that. But the emphasis on community, on talking to your neighbors, on building that big tent.
- [13:10]
Andrea Pitzer
But I still think of Brian's line whenever I worry that people are wanting something from me that I can't give them, or that maybe won't be as transformative as they seem to hope so my husband suggested I write about all this, using Brian's original tweet to frame the post. But here's the thing. Brian left Twitter while Trump was still in his first administration, and when I went to look, his account had been deleted too. His tweets are all gone. We haven't engaged with each other in years and years, and in those intervening years I've missed him in that strange way that happens when you feel connected to somebody but never having met them in real life, or maybe even sometimes if you have, you don't know if they have any sense of attachment to you. But fleeting contact on Twitter was the only way we knew each other, and I pondered reaching out to him and at the college in New York where he teaches. But I thought maybe that was a little too strange to write someone I'd never actually met and hadn't interacted with on social media in seven or eight years about a casual comment they made in 2013. So I plan to just write the post without him or referring to him by name. On July 22, I set up a draft entry as a placeholder in my newsletter so I wouldn't forget. I just used a quick sketch of a draft title. I feel bad for the person who wants a blurb, and I didn't work more on the post at the time because I'd gone to the cabin of a friend who let me borrow it for a week to have a solo writing intensive, in theory, away from all these requests for interviews and opinion pieces on concentration camps that people want right now so that I could get caught up on my next arctic book, Snowblind, which I'm on deadline for. But those requests kept coming even while I was at the cabin, because people very reasonably want information and answers about what's happening. And honestly, as a journalist and author, writing stuff and in being interviewed and interviewing people is very much in my wheelhouse, and I want to be doing it still. I was trying to limit agreeing to do anything else last week while I had this precious time to focus on my next book for 16 or 18 hours a day. Most of the requests that came in I got done before I left for the cabin or put off until I had returned. But I did make one exception, agreeing to talk to Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer because his column was going to run before I got back. Will and I have never met either, but we post each other's work sometimes, and in a strange twist, bear with me here because I promise this is all going to come together at the end Will had just helped me out in January. I wrote him about something that had happened back when I ran a record store in D.C. more than 30 years ago. Even though it was a fleeting connection, I'd always remembered the person involved. And when I went to see what had eventually happened to that person, I found out he died not long after I encountered him. This person was someone society had forgotten about long before he died. But a young Washington Post reporter did two stories on him in the 1990s that were heartfelt attempts to figure out what had happened. That Washington Post Metro reporter from the 1990s went on to be Will Bunch's boss. Today, the editor in chief of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Gabriel Escobar. So in the slow and weird way I have of gathering string on stories, sometimes across decades, I had asked Will Bunch for his boss's contact info in January so that I could reach out to him about this man who had died decades ago in Washington, D.C. and he was kind enough. Will was kind enough to introduce me to his boss and to vouch for me. And I'll tell you the story of that man who died another time. But for now you might see why I felt that I really ought to help Will out, and his column was going to run the next day. So I agreed to talk that evening. But I bitched enough about how busy I was that he put it in the column, saying that I was trying to finish an unrelated project but kept getting interrupted by pesky journalists. After Will and I talked, I went back to work on my book. Will's column went live last Thursday afternoon, July 24, under the headline, this column on US concentration camps is the one I hoped I'd never write. And then I went back to working on my book. But late that evening I had to go into my newsletter database to look up someone's account and see what had gotten messed up for them. And there, at the top of the list of subscribers, the newest subscriber. Just before midnight on July 24, I saw an email address that had the name Morton in it. Something else in the email address made me think it belonged to a New Yorker. And it occurred to me that Brian Morton, whose long ago tweet I wanted to write about this week, taught writing in New York. I sat and stared at that email address a long time, wondering it was such a strange and beautiful development if this was my Brian Morton, that it seemed impossible not to write this person, to see if it was him, summoned, as if through the repetition of his name. In my conversation with my husband A few days before, I was a little worried that it might not be, and I would unnecessarily alarm my new subscriber, some other Morton guy who would feel that I was accosting him and would immediately discover that his mistaken identity was a disappointment to me. But the next morning I sent an email to Morton anyway, and luckily for the other imaginary Morton, I had found that Brian Morton, the one I was looking for. Or he had found me, or we had accidentally found each other. He replied the next day, saying he had been off social media for years and hadn't much missed Twitter, but that there were some people that he missed being in touch with, including me. On Friday, I explained to him that I wanted to write this post and do this episode about his tweet, and I wanted to use it, but I didn't know if he actually remembered the line he'd written at all. Maybe, I wondered, had he exported his Twitter archive before he got rid of his account? And so Monday he sent me a screenshot of not only the tweet, but also my reposting of it from 2013. What was it that made him think of me just as I was thinking of him? After barely knowing each other and not being in contact for several years? It was that he had read Will Bunch's column on concentration camps in that day's Philadelphia Inquirer. Now, some people will tell you that they don't believe in coincidences, but I absolutely do. I think the world is full of strange, wonderful moments, most of which we pass by without ever noticing. And I can be a real misanthrope at times, so I probably fail to notice the majority of those moments myself. I feel the burden of requests that I don't have time to answer, or that are for things I probably can't deliver to people who imagine I can. But at the same time, I also believe that we are all going to be finding our own answers, not alone, but together, in concert with other people. And they're not all going to be conveniently organized under the banner of a leader whose direction we follow, or who has all the answers. I'm thinking of the person who's become known as the Lululemon lady.
- [21:29]
Unnamed Speaker 4
Kidnapping people.
- [21:30]
Andrea Pitzer
On the street, yelling at ICE and shaming them for not letting her get the number of an immigrant they're dragging.
- [21:37]
Unnamed Speaker 4
Away when masked, armed, unidentified gunmen are standing in the parking lot of our local shopping centers. This is not how we lawfully and ethically enforce our laws.
- [21:54]
Andrea Pitzer
I'm thinking of the lawyer who was there filming the interaction. Each of those two people critical to the world learning the story.
- [22:03]
Unnamed Speaker 4
I won't be silenced. I will continue to speak up. We all need to continue to speak up.
- [22:09]
Andrea Pitzer
I'm thinking of a Los Angeles area neighborhood that came together to tell ICE to fuck off. I'm thinking of the Massachusetts town of Milford that came together to protect 18 year old immigrant Marcelo Gomez da Silva, a beloved high school kid who was detained by ICE while driving to volleyball practice. I'm not saying that their answers to their local situations are exactly what everyone should do all the time. And next week I'll come back with a coherent way shared by an actual organizer for how you might think about taking action in your neighborhood. I hope the lesson that's taken from this if there is a lesson, is don't come after members of our community target the bad guys if there's bad guys. But remember, each of us are finding our own way through this darkness. And a lot of us, I think, are prone to imagining everyone else as in somehow much better shape than we are. Maybe they're wealthier or have more influence or happier, or seem more easily able to weather what's happening. And while it's a great idea to reach out to people you think might have answers for you, you don't wait for the perfect plan or permission, don't wait to be led. You can also reach out to people near you, just a couple friends, and do something locally that meets a need where you are right now. Today, we each have our own world in which we are thinking of each other and changing lives in ways we can't predict. You might be thinking of someone from years ago, remembering what they said and how it's affected your life. Or maybe you're being an ass to someone who has reached out to you for help, emphasizing just how busy you are, but you help him out anyway, because it's one hour of your time. And who are you? Jesus? And besides, he's doing something good anyway. He had helped you out not long ago too, and you doing that might deliver to your doorstep the very person you had been wanting to talk to the next day. All by chance, though, that person had disappeared from your life years ago. So many bad things are happening, so many terrible surprises unfold every day. But by reaching out and responding to one another, some of those surprises will be good ones. Making our way with tools and people around us, people we know online, or those already in our lives or part of our community, is the way that we are going to shift everything that's happening now of course there's hard work involved too, but so much of the time we already have the means to do magic close to at hand. Don't wait to notice it, and don't forget to embrace it. And that's it.
- [25:14]
Unnamed Speaker 6
Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.
- [25:28]
Andrea Pitzer
If you do have the means, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber. And you can do that@Andreapitzer.com and and just go to the newsletter link, which is in the first paragraph of the homepage, and you can sign up from there. Thank you for listening and thank you for watching.