August 8, 2025
This issue's contents Current issue My Back Pages Search The Ethical Spectacle

Rags and Bones

by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net

CECOT

In January or so, and for a couple months thereafter, I kept planning to write an essay about the CECOT prison,obviously a concentration camp, in El Salvador, to which Trump was sending immigrant people seized by ICE, and daydreaming out loud about sending citizens. Patricia Anthony, the author of several highly unique, beautifully conceived and written, but highly disturbing science fiction novels, beginning in the 1990's, told the story in Cradle of Splendor of a Latin American dictator who has his people convinced that he has opened a wormhole to another, more glorious planet with a much higher standard of living; but when they enter the elaborate entry-tunnel they are then murdered in the darkness. While there was no Utopian spin on CECOT, there were people ready to believe that beyond that particular event horizon, Bukele, possibly the first instance, at least the exemplary one, of a charismatic social media-produced dictator (Trump being social media-aided), was planning to provide adequate food, housing, medical care and exercise to the people interned there, for the next sixty years. And at first, there was no reporting, no information escaping CECOT at all;later, some accounts did get out, confirming that people were starving and dying inside.

My take on CECOT would have been that it was a sort of black hole into which America was sliding, and a daily nightmare for people like me, protesting the genocide in Gaza--or just publishing the Spectacle-- and wondering: could I end up in CECOT?

But, shades of my entry in last month's Rags, "Government by Dicking Around", and with an assist from courageous movement lawyers and clients and the courts, CECOT got deemphasized, Trump and even Bukele backed away, and many of the people sent there got freed. Presently it is Schrodinger's CECOT, flickering on the horizon.

Patricia Anthony

I did a Google search to recapture the name of Cradle of Spendor. I had probably found a novel of Anthony's on a bookstore shelf in the '90's, and been intrigued by the description and, yes, the cover; I bought and avidly read every novel of hers for the rest of her publishing career. She was an author of science fiction novels that did two things at once: like Lem's, they were philosophical and despairing; unlike Lem's, they were "well-made", in the sense that she paid more attention to world-building and Clicks at the end produced by a rigorous application of the Rules. The first novel of hers I read, and re-read three or four times, was The Happy Policeman, in which aliens show up in a rural town and drop a force field around it, an idea which was suggestive of an infamous Twilight Zone episode and was, I suspect, soon imitated by Stephen King for Under the Dome, an inferior work which sold many more copies of course.

Anthony seemed not to want to make any more of these fastidiously engineered, relatable but distressing worlds, and her last published novel, Flanders, disappointed me: it was a messy, subjective, long and (in my impression) rather static tale centered around the World War One battle. I recall (possible inaccuracy, fuzzy memory alert) that there was a single scene in which a character, held in a prisoner of war camp, shares a cell with some space aliens, who are at no other time part of the story, as if Anthony was saying to her publisher, Ace: "You wanted science fiction? Here!" After that, she went silent, her books are out of print, and once a year or so, I would wonder what became of her.

Anthony died in 2013, and the sparse coverage on the Internet does not say how, which always leads me to think of suicide. People writing about her tend to say that they knew her in person; that she had been kind and supportive to them; that they lost touch with her a year or so before she died. She was 66. She in fact had become dissatisfied with her wonderful works, and wanted to create much larger, more mainstream novels; Ace had dumped Flanders, publishing but not supporting it. Anthony bought back the manuscript of her next novel, which has never been published. For the balance of her life, she wrote screenplays, which were purchased but not produced.

Tonight's Cuervo shot (actually, I am so tempted to drink it right now, at 8:18 a.m.) will be in honor and memory of Patricia Anthony.

Sharpeville

After giving glimmers of sociopathy and fascism for years or decades, nations tend to perform some act or another of violence which is later remembered as the moment when they crossed a moral line, and also one in international law, transforming into rogue nations, international pariahs. In the case of South Africa, it was the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, at which police shot dead approximately ninety Black people. The Israelis have now killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza.

Artificial gills

One of the vivid memories of my childhood, which I flash on every year or so for a moment, was a photograph in the New York Times of a man wearing a completely impractical articial gill apparatus: it included some long, fragile skeins of plastic he had to tow while swimming, which would be torn off by the first coral reef he visited. Thinking about this now (oddly, in connection with CECOT, but I choose not to explain) I seem to have found the article, from 1967, but not including the picture so I can't be certain: "I A consulting physicist, who practices here, was granted a patent this week for improved, artificial gills to enable human swimmers to breathe under the water. The inventor is Lewis H. Strauss, son of Lewis L. Strauss, a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a former Secretary of Commerce. ...[O]xygen from the water is drawn in through thin membranes". You can also find the patent itself.

Its my Spectacle, so I can write what I want to,but the artificial gill was announced in a breathless "can do" era which (more or less) ended with (and anyway, resulted in) the Challenger explosion. Everybody knew technology would solve all our problems; I have written about the ridiculous GM Futurama exhibit at the 1964 Worlds Fair, with its flying cars guided by people all wearing white, and the model of a nuclear automobile I saw at a Michigan automotive museum (with baffles to protect the driver as impractical as gills). The world was full then of ideas for things we would all own and use in a few years, which have never come to pass. On the other hand, I tried the Picturephones at the Fair, and spent years thinking that people did not really need or want to see each other when they spoke. About thirty years elapsed, during which the video technology was never propagated on landlines. Today, unlike most of the world, I turn off my camera during Zoom calls whenever I can get away with it (judges and bureaucrats won't let me).