Wrestling with angels
Today: J.D. Connor, who teaches Film and Media Studies at USC.
Issue No. 624
1940, for Some
J.D. Connor
1940, for Some
by J.D. Connor
(Part I)
This is the first of three parts, inspired by two recent exhibitions: Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum in New York, which closed July 26th, and Leonora Carrington at the Musée du Luxembourg, which closed July 19th.
There is a weird thing that is going to happen, which is that once the Trumpists are defeated a huge population of people who will have spent time in American internment camps will just be walking around with that as a fucking thing that the country did to them.
I don’t think America is ready for it. The country barely grappled with the legacies of Japanese internment; it hasn’t done anything significant about its gargantuan “ex-offender” population; and this time around the liberated population will include people who got thrown into hastily converted logistics warehouses or got renditioned to third-party countries or got crammed in a conference room down the hall from some county assessor’s office.
This is the optimistic outcome. One analogy—limited, for sure—is Europe in 1940: fascism on the march, blitzkrieg, turncoat democracies, a hasty and half-conceived carceral universe on both sides of the shifting front that almost no one can imagine is on the fast track to the Holocaust. What did that do to people?
Keep us breathing fire!
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