"We Are All Going To Die"
Necropolitics, karma, MAGA
Hello friends.
I’m coming to you this week resourced and rested. I had a solid week away. I ate most of my meals outside, took lots of walks in the woods, hung out with the red efts (pictured), and got a start on my new book.
The world, of course, kept turning, wildfire smoke drifted over New York City, and when I plugged back into the news, this thing happened which I can’t get out of my mind.
Joni Ernst, the Republican Senator from Iowa, held a town hall meeting to defend the Republican urge to cut Medicaid to give more money to rich people.
These cuts, say the Congressional Budget Office, would increase the number of uninsured people by a net of 7.6 million. Uninsured people die at higher rates, according to multiple studies and common sense. So kicking people off this care would clearly lead to perhaps tens of thousands of excess deaths. This, for no other reason than to further enrich people who are already obscenely rich.
Forty-one percent of the births in the country are covered by Medicaid, so surely some of these deaths will be deaths of mothers and babies.
As Ernst was answering a question about Medicaid eligibility in Trump's tax cut bill, she was interrupted by a woman in the crowd, who shouted, "people will die!"
"People are not — well, we all are going to die," Ernst said, prompting shouting from the audience. "For heaven’s sakes, folks."
Ernst affirmed that they are going to try to kick undocumented people off state health insurance programs—even if people are working here, paying taxes, raising American citizen children, they don’t deserve to go to the doctor if they get sick. They should go ahead and die. That’s the official Republican position.
Then she doubled down, posting a video filmed in a cemetery :
“I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth, so I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the Tooth Fairy as well.”
Although she does not believe in the Tooth Fairy, she did aver that everlasting life comes from another mythical figure, “my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”
That’s a nice thought for those who believe, but personally I do not want to achieve lasting life through Jesus. I want to achieve it by not dying before my time because I have consistent access to lifesaving medical care.
In asserting that her party’s legislative priorities should be accomplished at the expense of the lives of innocent people, Ernst is making a specific move.
Necropolitics.
Coined by Achille Mbembe, historian and political scientist, originally from Cameroon. From his 2006 article:
This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.
There's a common concept in political philosophy of the “state’s monopoly on violence.” In other words, the reason we have order and peace is because cops and soldiers, and only cops and soldiers, are allowed to have guns.
But Mbembe goes farther. It’s not just that the state has a monopoly on violence. It’s that violence wields a kind of monopoly over the state, tending to usurp or overshadow its other functions.
Hence, to kill, or to allow to live, constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes.
To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.
When you see depraved indifference to human life at the hands of state actors, this argument goes, you should not be surprised. Because this is, in a way, what it means to be a state.
The state is an apex predator, like a leopard; eating faces is its nature.
To wit; Elon Musk and Marco Rubio have denied that anyone has died from the elimination of US programs that bring lifesaving food and medicine to people. Yet, hundreds of thousands of people have reportedly died. These people are in other countries, and that’s a notable feature of necropolitics—states asserting their will by causing the deaths of people far away.
To wit: In Gaza in the last few days, Israel has set up only four aid sites in a place where millions are facing starvation, and has opened fire repeatedly on Gazans trying to get food, killing dozens of people each time.
Necropolitics doesn’t just mean the state killing people, or allowing them to die, or normalizing their deaths. It’s also, per Mbembe, condemning them to a kind of death in life.
Disappearing people, imprisoning them without charges, dehumanizing them with our use of language, erasing their identities from government research or statements, are all examples of necropolitics.
Ernst’s flippant dismissal “We all are going to die” also, strangely, reminded me of a teaching I return to frequently, the Buddhist Five Remembrances.
Here are the first four:
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
It is good to keep the inevitability and universality of death, aging, and sickness in mind. Even if we had perfect, peaceful, benevolent governments, we would all still age, fall ill, and die.
But the fact that we’re all going to die, is not exculpatory. It doesn’t mean you’re not a wicked woman if you knowingly cause many deaths by denying people health care.
Buddhism, in any case, is not so nihilistic. This is the 5th remembrance.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
Karma, baby.
Some Links
I traveled the solar system with some kindergartners in South Dakota
I appreciated the chance offered by The Greater Good Science Center to check in on the situation of kids and the pandemic after five years.
“The world has moved on to other horrors. But a large array of evidence is showing that young people broadly still have not recovered—not from the pandemic itself, nor from the policies adopted in response to the pandemic, particularly extended school closures.”