ICE isn’t cool
By:
July 4, 2025
A Modest Proposal
It’s Friday, July 4th, 2025. Yesterday, the country of my birth seems to have freely decided to fund an internal police force loyal to a mad king, to the tune of 150 billion dollars. International military budget figures differ wildly and so do exchange rates, but let’s say that this is an internal policing budget which falls somewhere around the entire military budget of Russia — ₽13.2 trillion Russian Rubles.
That’s a lotta cop.
And I was up most of the night with all of them sitting on my chest.
I was thinking a lot about the woman who was my mom’s hospital roommate at the end of her life, who would wake my mom up every night screaming in a desperate, warning voice “פּאָליצייַ, פּאָליצייַ”
Politzei, Politzei.
Latke. Shamus. Copper. Flatfoot. Fuzz. Pigs. Popes. Smokey. Elroys. Jakes. Po-Po. Full grown bear. 5-0.
I was never a great believer in American exceptionalism, and while I am genuinely shocked every day by the cruelty and cowardice I have seen in individuals, I can’t say I am shocked at this authoritarian breakthrough. I have always felt it brewing there.
I say that I have always felt it brewing there, and this is unsurprising. I am a dissipated old punk, a middle-aged lady in Brooklyn with a tattooed head, a child of the shabby Bohème. I grew up in the junkie hotel of record, and I’m on a first-name basis with all the old-house DJ’s from WFMU. I’m a weirdo, like, professionally.
But you have also always felt it brewing there, haven’t you? Fascism under the surface? Starting one-inch down? You, whoever you are?
You, Freddie Mercury, haven’t you always felt it brewing there? You, Fred Hampton, haven’t you always felt brewing there? You, Fred Rogers, haven’t you always felt it brewing there? You, Fab Five Freddy? You, Fred Ho?
You, Joe Rogan? You, Buster Keaton? You, Sun Ra? You, right-radicalized yahoo with the Confederate flag on your bicep, haven’t you always felt it brewing there? Isn’t that your point? Isn’t your flag one of sedition?
Americans really, really do not like to be told what to do. Americans are deeply mistrustful of the police. And Americans have always felt this brewing.
Even the law officers in our Western foundation myths are drunkards. The sheriff’s drunk! Call John Wayne!
In America, outsider violence is cooler than state violence. In the American imagination, cops just aren’t cool. And this will, I think, be an extraordinary lever in all our communities in the coming months.
21st century America is not 20th century Germany in a couple of critical ways. America has no tradition of blood and soil. Americans are from everywhere, and most of us are proud of this. Even Ronald Reagan was proud of this. And 21st century Americans live their lives in public, on social media, and are interconnected in instantaneous and parasocial ways none of us even understand yet.
Most of all, to bring this all the way home, what young American man has ever listened to Public Enemy and wanted to be 5-0?
What young American men fear most of all is — shame.
It shouldn’t be that hard to convince them that ICE is uncool. We managed to make Teslas uncool in a matter of weeks. (We, just a bunch of middle-aged people with cardboard signs, led by Alex Winter, the poet of stoned benevolence). And while it may be too late to save the concept of checks and balances in our government or to save the 14th amendment, it is not too late to make ICE uncool.
Heroically uncool.
It can be done in our own communities. It can be done online. We can make state violence socially toxic. We can make it so that no one wants to do this work. We can start that right now.
I’m an old lady and no one’s idea of a good satirist. I offer you this tepid one — Temu Brownshirts — and beg you to take this ball, and run with it. Lock in, Bro.