Prairieland: Like Staring at the Sun

Three repeating row of eightsnapshots in cerulean. The nine defendants are smiling, hugging, blowing kissed and feeding a squirrel respectively

During Trump 1.0 everybody online kept admonishing each other not to get distracted. No one quite agreed about what was the priority and what was the distinction. It got heated. In the end, we more or less agreed that it was all important. We needed to grab the firehose of bullshit wherever we could. Still, over the last few weeks, I found myself reminded of the distraction discorse as I was both grasping at the more unserious moments of the regime and getting mad at other people for doing the same.

Some heinous shit went down. The regime sentenced the Prairieland noise demo participants (or friends of participants) to between 15 and 100 years and people wanted to talk about reflecting pool's the algae bloom. Great. Wonderful. No notes. I was disgusted. Then I used the time I was going to spend writing this feeding my schadenfreude habit by looking at the empty National Mall where Trump's American State Fair unfurled with all the splendor and majesty of a regional airport.

I understand why people don't want to think about Prairieland. Thinking about Prairieland feels like staring at the sun. It's hard to even consider that activities we thought of as protected; protest, the freedom to seek like minded company, could carry longer sentences than most murders. I also don't want to write about it because its implications terrify me. Not writing about it feels like a betrayal of everyone doing the work against fascism. Instead of talking about what happened last July, I want to share a poem with you.

“Prison Art”

There's a Charizard in Segregation Cell 210

It's big, 10 feet off the ground

I don't understand

How it was drawn up there

Flame breath and iconic tail

Claws, wings, and fangs

It's the best Charizard I've ever seen

It fills me with wonder

I'm lucky to see

Like my first Artist Alley

or time on Akiba's streets

There, surrounded by filth and prisoners' screams

It's a peaceful somehow Holy scene

The author, Benjamin Champaign Song, was sentenced to 100 years in federal prison for shooting near a police officer when the cop jumped out of his car and started pointing his gun at people protesting outside the concentration camp. The state piled a bunch of bullshit conspiracy and terrorisim charges on top of that. They want to make it clear that no one will ever be able to stand up for the people the state is detaining and not be destroyed.

So many people are ready to throw Song away. If people are willing to think about the case at all, it's easy to enlist their outrage when they find out someone was sentenced to thirty years for moving a box of zines. Most people agree that supposedly having fireworks at a noise demo on July 4th isn't the same thing as being the explosives expert for an ANTIFA cell. People's moral imaginations atrophy when it comes to Song. They know both a fascist regime and concentration camp when they see one but still go out of their way to say, ‘I'm not defending the person who shot at the cop [if you believe the state]. I just think the charges against the other defendants are wrong.”

You know what stopped the nazis? Bullets. People resisted slavery with poison in the enslavers’ food, machetes in the night. Harriet Tubman carried a gun. John Brown didn't go to Harper's Ferry to hug it out. If you can celebrate women who seduced and killed nazis, if you can admit Nat Turner had a point, why can't you see that same spirit in Song?

Part of the problem is that the delusion of American exceptionalism colors our perceptions so thoroughly that we cling to our sense of who we are as a country even when all recent experience countervenes that narrative. I don't blame people for trying to square what's happening with the world they know but seeing what's happening should change what you know about the world. Your sense of the world shouldn't cause you to disbelieve your own eyes. We know Song was outside a concentration camp. We know the cop pointing a gun at protesters was defending a concentration camp. Still, people cling to our old stories about the state, its legitimacy and virtue. Despite all they've seen in the last few years, they still look at the cop and see the reasonable imposition of order because the vestiges of Officer Friendly in our heads isn’t guarding a concentration camp. The story has to be something less scary, more American. Never mind that for its underclass, this has always been America.

We look away. We squint. We see the imposition of order instead of the brutality. That's what fascists always want you to see. They want you to know the South just had a different way of doing things and that the nazis are filled with love of the volk. Fascists thrive when reasonable people undermine resistance by prioritizing order over justice. It's why the regime traded Greg Bovino for Tom Holman. They know Americans have a distaste for mess and they want to be sure all of the disorder is coming from our side.

If you truly believe Prairieland is a concentration camp, if you truly believe we live under a fascist regime, stop fucking helping them. Stop policing how the people putting their bodies and freedom on the line show up. Do you think past collaborators all said, “this is evil and must be stopped but I'm a spineless worm?” People collaborate with a thousand little quibbles and rationales. They're just being fairminded, practical. They slice and dice the conduct of the resistance until they justify their own collaboration. How do I know? I see friends and acquaintances do it every day. If you have castigated Benjamin Champaign Song or other people who the state claims stood up to fascists in ways you find distasteful, you should stop doing that. Maybe send a little to the defense fund way of apology.

If th regime interred anyone I love in a concentration camp, I hope someone would be outside singing, making noise and doing whatever they can think of. I hope my loved one would hear the songs. I hope the guards paid to abuse and humiliate them would be put on notice that detainees are not forgotten and neither is the cruelty of their jailers. Seeing a protester’s firework, I would hope my loved one would feel free even just for the time it sparkled overhead. If anyone I love was outside doing the singing, making the noise and some maggot cop pointed a gun at them, I hope someone would defend my loved one however they could. The state sure as shit won't. How, then, can I castigate Song?

The support committee has a list of other ways to help. In addition to writing letters and raising money, I'm going to ask that you do something simpler: take a minute to connect with the Prairieland defendants as people. Read their stories. Look at their pictures. Make a little space for them in your mind.