Wassailing in the Age of Moral Monsters and Death on the Street
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. –George Orwell, 1984
Is it just me, or has the holiday season reached peak irony – if not horror – this year? ‘Tis apparently the season for millions of Americans to lose their SNAP benefits and millions more healthcare for no other reason than the mandate to fatten coffers and calves for the twisted grinches in the White House and their corporate confederates in Congress. Their ugliness has been so openly on display this past week, they might as well have donned red suits and hats and personally bundled up our roast beast and field roast, brisket, and challah, and shoved them up our collective chimneys, elevator shafts or what have you.
White Nationalist Christmas
Bing Crosby’s White Christmas is no doubt playing on repeat at the White House this year, Christian Zionists happily toasting Mad King Trump, his fictitious “FIFA Peace Prize,” and his fictitious victory against the fictitious “War on Christmas,” while our presidential Bad Santa hands out gold visas to White South African magnates and get-out- of- jail- free-cards to fellow conmen and grifters. Trump’s chomping at the bit to make war on Venezuela for its massive oil reserves, while he slams the door on refugees from countries ravaged by endless war, countries and communities awash in first world toxic waste and carbon emissions. But don’t be looking to Trump’s enablers on the Supreme Court to pull us back from the brink or suddenly warm to P. Francis’ Laudato Si, his encyclical on climate migration and our obligation to refugees. They’re too busy giving their legal omani domani to their Golden Furor, the first commandment and Constitution be damned.
So now we’ve got a mercenary army of cyber Santa ICE agents out combing the streets for hardened criminals like José, Jésus, and Maria. They’re hauling off tamale vendors, teachers, and day care workers, veterans and family breadwinners whose labor – from fields and factory farms, to slaughter and packing houses – puts food on all our tables Meanwhile Trump’s puppet handlers go on revving up a racist, capitalist, mass detention, mass expulsion war-powered machine that ought to scare the hell out of anyone who feels even the remotest semblance of fellow human feeling or even self-interest. While Trump preens about bringing peace to the Middle East, actual bombs go on pummeling babies brains out in Gaza, and the Hanukkah body counts have barely stopped tallying from Brisbane to Brown to Brentwood.
It bears stating that among the many movies that have been celebrated in the wake of the horrific deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, one film that could stand much more attention is the 2024 documentary he produced God and Country. The film is an organizing tool illluminating the dangers of Christian Nationalism. As one IMDB reviewer aptly describes it, the film represents Christian Nationalism as a “clear and present danger…to a secular democratic republic,” as well as to Christianity itself. In that sense, arguably at least, Christian Nationalism is to Christianity what Zionism is to Judaism. You might check out this interview with Reiner, who describes Christian Nationalism as ”a political movement” that has “no connection to the teachings of Jesus.”
The Divine Right of Landlords
“Accumulation by dispossession,” as Marxist geographer David Harvey describes it, is foundational to capitalism – and colonialism – begging the question of how many Americans will be evicted this season while prison profiteers like Geo Group make bank on every bed they fill, giving them every incentive to keep on growing the American Gulag. Today prisons, detention centers and the military are hands down the largest purveyors of public housing in the U.S. And the guy who had, by the 1980s, earned a reputation as a slumlord, the guy who took a sledgehammer to the East Wing, would thoroughly enjoy doing the same to the Bureau of Housing and Urban Development, and the last vestiges of real social housing in the U.S. to all our detriment.
For all the blame the victim, the criminalizing, dehumanizing rhetoric we hear so routinely these days, homelessness in the U.S. is a wholly manufactured preventable and solvable problem; beginning with the defunding of public housing under both Carter and Reagan, the street became a workhouse and stockade, the mission line a perp walk, a rite of public humiliation there to remind everyone but the super-rich of our own precarity, of the need to tow the line and knuckle under, to prostrate ourselves to the boss, the landlord, the cop, and the god they create in their image. The goal is to keep us walking the economic tight rope alone, single file. But even before the Orange Krampus ascended to the White House, liberal West Coast cities like Portland were busy doing the work of landlords, floating increasingly draconian plans to try to sweep the human reminders of intensifying inequality from view.
Sunday, December 21st was National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, an annual event that calls attention to the routine deaths of houseless people on highways, sidewalks, streets, and alleyways across the U.S. No pillow, no hospice, no dignity, but for some, at least, the last rites of kindness so many houseless people routinely perform for each other and the most vulnerable among them.
If you’re looking for more data on the issue and organizing campaigns, check out The National Health Care for the Homeless Council, and Seattle’s Mary’s Place/WHEEL Women in Black. For some 25 years, organizers with the latter group have stood vigil across from City Hall every time someone has died outside or by violence in the city, generating important visibility for the real stakes in the struggle to make universal housing a reality. The average life expectancy of a chronically houseless person in the U.S. is the same as that of a farmworker–about 47 years– both of them relegated to the status of disposable labor, both increasingly criminalized, dehumanized, and driven from public spaces.
Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA
In September, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade blithely called for the execution of unhoused people suffering from mental illness. Not surprisingly Kilmeade got his mean-ass eggs and chickens scrambled. Because anyone whose spent time on them (for the record, I have not) can tell you, if you’re not mentally ill before you hit the streets there’s a good chance you will be soon. But as the National Council for the Homeless report Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA, houseless people are routinely targeted on the street and are far more likely to be victim than perpetrator. Being on the street can and does drive people crazy.
We know from the disclosures of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, Chicago, and on and on that sleep deprivation is as effective as any other form of torture government ghouls with the Department of War (DOW) have no doubt been skilling up on since its inception in 1789. Sustained periods of sleep deprivation can and do induce psychosis.
And then there’s head injuries. A 2019 study in the preeminent Lancet Public Health journal, the largest study to date of the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among unhoused people, estimates that one out of two unhoused people have sustained a TBI, with houseless people being 2.5 to 4 times more likely than the general population to suffer a TBI.
Sexual assaults don’t just happen to unhoused women, but the threat of becoming houseless routinely forces women to tally the odds between facing violence and/or death from intimate partners in the home or from total strangers on the street. Assaults aside, there are so many ways to get injured or killed sleeping – or not sleeping– rough night after night. Bodies and judgement break down. Is it so hard to understand why people without access to healthcare choose to medicate with illicit drugs?
But anyone want to lay bets on how long before we see the vultures in the White House throwing in with the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández’s drug trade? Now we’ve got Epstein’s Trump branded condoms, should we next expect Trump brand Adderall, meth, speedballs or study buddies? Kiddie coke, dexies, and black beauties? Just where do we draw the lines? And if those were actual drug boats in Venezuela, would the miser in the White House have bombed that big stash when he could have just confiscated it the way his D.O.W. is doing with oil tankers?
No matter Hernández, a guy Trump “greatly respect[s], [who was] treated very harshly and unfairly,” and who profited from ensnaring people like Nick Reiner, who spent the better part of his teens cycling in and out of treatment centers. With all due respect to the Christian Right, doesn’t the whole thing about God choosing Trump because he’s an imperfect vessel beg the question of why God chose Donald Trump rather than Jeffrey Epstein? And just how low and how long will the Christian Right go with Trump’s moral limbo dance before other people on the Group W Bench start backing away?
A Christmas Carol in Portlandia
On the dispossession end of things, if you study the issue, I’m pretty sure you’ll find there’s no shortage of CNAs– certified nursing assistants – on the streets. I’ve certainly met a few. Their low wages are no match for rising rents driven in no small part by Wall Street housing speculation. Firms like Blackstone have made a killing buying up foreclosed properties in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. More of us than ever are only a paycheck – or a payday loan –away from homelessness, but what we rarely hear is that the streets are a death sentence for many, including caregivers – both paid and unpaid – whose backs and bodies have grown twisted and worn dressing and bathing the bodies of the sick and dying.
Subbing twenty years ago at a drop-in center in Portland for houseless and low-income women, I drove a woman to a shelter that thought they had an open bed, only to find there was no room at the inn. Not that she was about to give birth, but she was sixty and lugging around a suitcase filled with the last remnants of her worldly goods. And having suffered a series of strokes, she had no idea anymore just which Portland bridge she’d been sleeping under. After we found the spot under the Burnside Bridge, it turned out the bedroll she’d left behind a dumpster next to a loading dock had been taken out with the trash. But two or three young friends she’d made on the street were there to greet her and try to help her as best they could. The community of the streets.
That’s some serious Dickensian shit, I’m sure you’ll agree. Mark that under things you never saw on Portlandia. if you hang out in shelters and drop-in centers long enough, you’ll find those stories and struggles all over the country. But it actually turns out, as Street Roots reporter K. Rambo wrote in a June article in ProPublica, Portland – Multnomah County – is a West Coast outlier with staggering rates of death on the street that are, “more than twice the rate of those in Los Angeles County “ and King County/Seattle. The death rate, as Rambo recounts, spiked over a two-year period when city leaders effectively began making war on the city’s most disposable workers, including the elderly and infirm, people with disabilities whose wheelchairs and walkers are now routinely on display across the city.
Amid rolling waves of evictions, as Rambo recounts, “City leaders [in Portland] began moving homeless people out of public view by removing tents at a rate far surpassing those of its West Coast peers. Since 2021, the city carried out 19,000 sweeps, and it dismantled over 20 encampments per day in 2024,” burning through money that could have gone to public housing.
“Sweeps” as they’re euphemistically known, might better be understood as the theft and destruction of peoples’ very means of survival, stripping them of whatever worldly goods they might have managed to somehow salvage. Everything from blankets, sleeping bags, and backpacks, IDs, journals, and the last remaining photographs of dead spouses, siblings, and children. And lest we forget: people’s glasses, their antidepressants, anti-psychotics, their insulin and statins.
To put a human face to the problem, you can check out the story of Debbie Ann Beaver, who was arguably killed by a sweep in 2019, in Street Roots. And while you’re at it, check out Frann Michel’s Greetings from Charming, War-Ravaged Portland in Counterpunch, for more context on the structural roots of houselessness in the City of Roses.
This New Year’s let’s resolve to redouble our efforts to stop sweeps, militarism, and mass incarceration in all its forms. Let’s refuse the logic of lifeboats and austerity and plug into the Poor Peoples Campaign. Let’s commit to rebuilding public housing in the recognition that public housing floats all boats – except the yachts of the super-rich. Everybody on the Ark. Nobody out.
The preceding opinions most definitely do not represent the opinions of my employer Washington State University Vancouver. Thanks are due to Frann Michel, Mikel Clayhold, and Linda Cargill for reading and commenting on drafts. All errors are my own.
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