My memory of the movie Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society is that my memory of it is fuzzy. Even for Ghost in the Shell, it’s a little too murky, with less promise of a reward than the similarly complicated Ghost in the Shell 2. Still, it’s an appropriate sendoff for Stand Alone Complex, refocusing the story to the “what” of the Major from the “why.” After having fun playing hacker pirate, she returns to Section 9, though her continued employment is nevertheless a question. It actually frustrated me how indecisive the show was, as if afraid to muss the continuity. One of the things I do remember is mention of Dejima, the island of migrants whose manipulation into declaring itself a nuclear state by a rogue intelligence agency bent on returning Japan to prewar imperialism was the subject of the show’s second season. By the finale, Dejima’s hero Kuze has been executed, with the criminal mastermind behind the manipulation, Gouda, assassinated by the Major – his head a-splode. Where does that leave Dejima? According to Solid State Society: nowhere. The immediate threat is over, but the broader problem remains unresolved. In this case, the indecision is useful.
I can’t, at present, remember if the “broader problem” is framed as “too many refugees” or that the people of Dejima are considered second-class citizens. But there’s something depressing about a situation ending up where it began. Nothing ever changes. This was also the thematic resolution of The Wire, a TV show often considered the greatest ever but not particularly remembered for a whiz-bang finale (in contrast to, say, Breaking Bad). The Wire is about at least two things at once: things occur in cycles, and the cycles get worse. It’s Cutty trading his .38 for a semiautomatic pistol. “The game done change,” he says. “The game’s the same,” Slim counters. “It just got more fierce.” In the end, we see how the new generation has become the old: Michael is the new Omar, Sydnor is the new McNulty, and so on. It makes for a fun, almost self-aware closing montage but it, too, is depressing. All those big dreams – career cases, renewal at the ports, Hamsterdam, educational tracking – collapsed, saving a few individual souls but never presaging real institutional change.
Wallace, portrayed by Michael B. Jordan. What ever happened to that guy?
So, that’s one lesson from two different TV shows, both of which resonated with me at a time when I was desperate for something to resonate with. A second lesson comes from Game of Thrones, or rather, one podcaster’s summation of it, in the aftermath of Oberyn Tyrell’s head-crushing death at the hands of his sister’s rapist during trial by combat: “The bad guys always win.” That phrase stuck with me as a shorthand for making sense of the presidential and inter-presidential career of celebrity con man Donald Trump, who maliciously broke so much and needlessly endangered so many (I’d say he has blood on his hands, but that’s more to do with the fact of his office than his still cringe-inducing occupation of it). In the period of 2020-2024, he got away with it all. Again and again, it was a deluge of bad, weird headlines. We were introduced to new terms like “partial gag order” and “ignored subpoenas” to describe his lawlessness. On the eve of his reelection to the presidency, he was convicted on a felony charge, not for inciting an insurrection but for something far more white collar.
By the time this is posted, I’m sure it’ll already be old news, but let’s use the phrase anyway: the latest development is the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan. She’d given the DEA and FBI the slip when they interrupted a criminal proceeding to apprehend an illegal immigrant – something we’re still doing. I mean, using the term “illegal immigrant,” for starters. It’s amazing how much we (and other countries) police the inevitable movement of people across the globe, convinced it’s for economic reasons and not racism. I think we’ve seen in the last few weeks – days – that immigrants are, in fact, not the biggest threat to the U.S. economy. Anyway, this was a genuinely shocking moment, a violation of normalcy so upsetting it’s difficult not to reach for hyperbole or, indeed, a handy old phrase. The bad guys always win. Interestingly, though, the report from The New York Times ends with a note about a similar case from 2018, that of Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph.
From the linked article from 2022, “The Justice Department moved on Thursday to end the criminal prosecution of a Massachusetts judge and a court officer who had been charged with helping an undocumented immigrant escape from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at a courthouse in 2018. The judge, Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, and the court officer, Wesley MacGregor, were indicted in 2019 on charges that they had prevented the ICE officer from taking the man into custody by allowing him to sneak out of Newton District Court in Newton, Mass.” Instead, it appears the lesson is: Nothing ever changes. But it can be both. The Trump administration hasn’t tallied a lot of wins in its first hundred days, though the damage has been catastrophic, mostly for deported immigrants (to say less of, like, middle-class Americans like me anxious about the economy).
The flashpoint has undoubtedly been the Deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which I capitalize to reflect its Wikipedia article. “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador who was illegally deported from the United States on March 15, 2025, in what the Trump administration called ‘an administrative error.’ He was imprisoned without trial in the Salvadoran maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), despite never having been charged with nor convicted of a crime in either country. El Salvador has an agreement with the U.S. to imprison U.S. deportees there for payment. The administration has defended the deportation by accusing him of being a member of MS-13, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, an accusation based on a bail determination made during a 2019 immigration court proceeding, which Abrego Garcia contested.” An administration error? Isn’t that literally the plot of 1984? Or at least Brazil?
Since January, there’s been a lot of terrible developments, but nothing permanent or even immediately reversed. I think President Trump likes to put on a show, but his hollowed-out, circus government doesn’t have the ability or fortitude to carry out the most extreme policies. The treatment of Kilmar Garcia, however, isn’t something that can be taken back. It’s what should’ve been prevented. It’s the price of more affordable gas and groceries for us precious Americans, even if that came to pass. But look: the problem is deportation. Just as it was during the first Trump administration, just as it was during the Biden administration. Only, during Biden’s presidency, we didn’t have U.S. senators going to foreign countries to meet with the victims. I mean, we might have, but we didn’t care. There’s that protest sign that goes around every now and then: “If Hillary was president, we’d all be at brunch.”
I don’t know if I’d forgotten about the case of Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph or never even heard about it, but either way, it was news to me tonight. While appalling in itself, it was a strange source of comfort: what happened to Judge Hannah Dugan isn’t, at the very least, a novel violation. But I don’t like what it says about me, and my selective attention, empathy. I had this flash vision of the near future, in the days after the Trump administration (which I know, aren’t guaranteed). If we’re fortunate enough to return to “normalcy,” comparable to what we enjoyed after the first administration, we’re still gonna be deporting people like Kilmar Garcia. We’re still gonna be drilling for oil on Native lands. We’re still gonna be complicit in illegal assassinations and war crimes the world over. I do believe that we make incremental progress as a species and even as a country, but as has been said, the bad guys always win. Sometimes the bad guys are easy to point out, and sometimes the bad guys are us.
This could be read as a bad or needless take during a time of crisis in America, but this is a blog whose daily clicks only occasionally break three digits. I am absolutely outraged by the arrest of Judge Dugan and the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and not just for the moral wrongness but for the people responsible, too. Trump and his cronies are so unqualified, so criminal, so maddeningly hypocritical, so grotesque – the worst of America, utterly immune to satire, occupying seats of power at a time when we need adults in the room. We’re closing in on that long-teased moment we sell Ukraine out to Russia in the ultimate, irreversible act of cowardice. They’ve also coopted antisemitism in a bizarre battle against educational institutions (though the Trump administration versus Harvard is a real “Let them fight” situation). I mean, the list is endless, and what makes it worse is you know these people will never face justice. If we survive all this, they’ll get away with it. But that’s no reason to despair, honestly. Remember: they’re only getting away with it again.
With Eyes East 