Franz Kafka, Clive Barker, Donald Trump

Or, A Thing Or Two I've Learned From Stories

In a decision released last Thursday, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, writing for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, lays out clearly why the course that Donald Trump has chosen in regards to the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – the man the administration admits it mistakenly deported to a gulag in El Salvador and refuses to return to America – has two great flaws.

The first flaw is that Trump's argument is nonsensically stupid.

Among other pieces of idiocy, executive branch lawyers have based virtually their entire argument on the idea that the word "facilitate" doesn't mean what it obviously does mean. The context here is that a lower court has ruled that the Administration must "facilitate" Garcia's return to the U.S., and the Administration has claimed that this word means they don't have to return him. In response, Wilkinson notes that the "plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art."

The second flaw in Trump's argument is that, if accepted, it would present a deathly threat to the nation.

Here, Wilkinson explains that allowing Trump to send people to other countries to be detained without recourse to American courts "would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood."

It is a concise, easy to understand piece of writing, which is well worth your time, even if you're not the kind of person who usually reads these things.

It is also bracing in the extreme.

Wilkinson and his fellow judges have no illusions about the danger that the Trump cabal is posing – not next week or next month, but right now – to the survival of American democracy. The opinion closes with the exhortation, aimed at the Executive branch, to "summon the best that is within us while there is still time."

While there is still time.

This is not an exaggeration. If you are one of those people who ever wondered how you would act if you found yourself in moments that required real moral courage – those fantasies of being the one who sheltered Jews in Germany or who helped escaped slaves in America – you now have the chance to find out.

Fundamentally, what's at stake here is the right of habeas corpus. This term comes from the Latin for "you shall have the body," and is about ensuring that the government cannot imprison anyone without the due process of law. It is perhaps the single most important right of our society.

In attempting to circumvent it, Trump is trying to negate not just a law or the ruling of a court, but many, many years of legal tradition.

How many years? Try 800.

Habeas corpus and due process have their roots in the Magna Carta, from 1215, which many of us dimly remember from references to it in one history class or another. It states that "No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land," and "To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice."

Crashing into this stately legal tradition is a man whose deeply considered thoughts on the matter run as follows:

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing -- But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!

It may seem relevant to note that if the man who wrote the above social media post, apparently believing it to be both rational and compelling, can kidnap people off the street and disappear them (to use the most accurate parlance available to us) to a prison in another country, never to be seen again, then all of the other rights we believe we have, from free speech to the free exercise of religion and all the way down the list, immediately cease to exist. One cannot be free in any meaningful way if one is disappeared into a black site.

We all have, therefore, two choices lying before us. Not next week or next month, but right now.

The first involves our decisions about how to respond. You can probably guess what I would say to this: we should all be doing as much as we possibly can. Hopefully, you do not need my help figuring out what avenues are available to you, but if you do, feel free to jump into the comments and I will offer some suggestions.

The second choice concerns our decisions about whether to think deeply about what we value, and why, and then to share those values and beliefs with the people around us.

At first blush, this may seem a bit abstract, but I think it's a necessary element of the moment we've found ourselves in, despite the fact that none of us ever wanted to be here. As Hamlet lamented, "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite / that ever [we were] born to set it right."

What is called for is not simply a fight but an essential reordering of our world, for it has very much fallen out of joint.

It is not enough to prevent the Dunce in Chief from disappearing people, if we can accomplish that. Nor is it even enough to banish him and his movement from American life, if we can accomplish that.

We will, sooner or later, also have to rebuild great swaths of our society and its institutions. And doing this is going to require a re-establishment of values.

Thus, the tasks before us require not just an understanding of what we are fighting against, but also what we are fighting for.

What do we value? What are the elements of our culture that can best help us understand the world?

I believe that, in large part, this project must involve a recommitment to endeavors that as a culture we have tragically neglected, namely the arts and humanities.

We have spent several decades thinking that glorifying the STEM disciplines will bring about economic nirvana; what we're now seeing is that if you do not teach people about ethics and morality and art and literature and history, they will tend to not have a conception of what is involved in living a good life. They will tend to not be able to think about what it takes to create a good society, or about the difficulties and responsibilities involved in actually governing themselves.

And into that gap will step the forces of fascistic, golden-idol-obsessed lunatics who celebrate ignorance, which is what the large-scale social movement represented by the modern Republican party so clearly is.

I should note here that my understanding of the world is as limited as yours.

We both have our spheres of knowledge and frames of reference. I do not know what these are for you – they could be teaching or home-building or finance or medicine or transportation or gripping on a film set or coding or anything else – but mine happen to revolve around art and stories.

And because of that, as I've tried to come to terms with the avalanche/cosmic storm/choose your own colorful metaphor of events that are cascading down on us, two stories have kept popping into my head: Franz Kafka's novel The Trial, written in 1914, and Clive Barker's horror film Hellraiser, from 1987.

The fact that these tales come from places light years apart on the artistic spectrum may make their co-appearance seem, at first, admittedly, rather random, but I think they make sense together.

And I think I can explain why, if you'll give me a few more moments of your time.

Let's start with the word "Kafkaesque." This is a word that gets thrown around so much that my spell-check doesn't even protest when I type it, a word that gets used to describe everything from prisoners consigned to black sites to the attempt to return a router to get your deposit back after you've changed internet providers.

Which is to say that I think that when most people say "Kafkaesque," they mean something like "caught in a nightmarish, labyrinthine situation with no way to escape."

Which is fine.

But it's also a bit like if you asked someone what a really good meal tasted like, and they said "Yummy," or if you asked someone what they thought about The Big Lebowski and they said "I really like that one part."

In other words, yes, it is yummy, and yes, we all have a part we like, but there's more to it than that…right?

As Judge Wilkinson points out above, words have actual meanings. And "Kafkaesque" also has a meaning.

And now you're probably expecting me to explain that meaning. But I'm not going to. How the hell do I know all the things that "Kafkaesque" could mean? I'm not even sure that enumerating the boundaries of a complex word like that is possible.

I used to say when I was teaching that the "meaning" of a novel is the novel itself, beginning with the first word and ending with the last word. That's what the author wrote, didn't they? If they wanted to write a six-sentence pithy summation of event and theme, don't you think they would have? It sure seems a whole lot easier. Thus, in some very real sense, the "meaning" of a novel is composed of every single word used to tell that story. No more and no less. There is a way in which it cannot be reduced or condensed, because to begin dropping words and scenes and events, the way one does if one is to offer a summary on any level, is to begin changing the meaning of the whole.

The same goes for "Kafkaesque." It means all the feelings and ideas evoked by his stories, or one of them, at least, taken from front to back. I can't define it for you, or reduce it to a handful of phrases. But what I can do is explain a bit about what it means to me, and why this current moment seems to me so Kafkaesque.

As you may or may not know, The Trial tells the story of Joseph K. a regular guy who works at a bank and is one morning told that he is going to have to stand trial. Unfortunately for K., as he is referred to throughout the book, there is no way for him to figure out what he's being put on trial for, and the legal system he finds himself enmeshed in is so bizarre and impossible to understand that there is no way to navigate it.

But K. does his best. He talks to lawyers, tries to discover what he's accused of, stands in front of confusing judges in a surreal courtroom in the attic of a tenement building, visits the official court painter who promises that he's got some pull with the judges, and slowly realizes that he will never escape this process. The trial has become his life, and it will be so forever. In the final chapter, two men accompany K. to an abandoned quarry, where they kill him.

The book is indeed about a man stuck in an absurd, inescapable situation. But it is about far, far more than that.

Here, for example, in Breon Mitchell's translation, is the opening of a chapter called "The Flogger," with which I will test your patience by quoting it at some length. For reference, the two guards who appear here, Franz and Willem, are the representatives of the court who first told K, some eighty pages ago, that he was to stand trial.

A few evenings later, as K. passed through the corridor that led from his office to the main staircase ­­– he was almost the last to leave that night, only two assistants in shipping were still at work in the small circle of light from a single bulb – he heard the sound of groans behind a door that he had always assumed led to a mere junk room, though he had never seen it himself. He stopped in amazement and listened again to see if he might not be mistaken – it was quiet for a little while, but then the groans came again. –At first, feeling he might need a witness, he was about to call one of the assistants, but then he was seized by such uncontrollable curiosity that he practically tore the door open. It was, as he had suspected, a junk room. Old obsolete printed forms and overturned empty ceramic ink bottles lay beyond the threshold. In the little room itself, however, stood three men, stooping beneath the low ceiling. A candle stuck on a shelf provided light. "What's going on here?" K. blurted out in his excitement, but not loudly. One man, who was apparently in charge of the others and drew K.'s attention first, was got up in some sort of dark leather garment that left his neck and upper chest, as well as his entire arms, bare. He didn't reply. But the other two cried out: "Sir! We're about to be flogged because you complained about us to the examining magistrate." And only then did K. recognize that it was indeed the guards Franz and Willem, and that the third man held a rod in his hand to flog them with.

One of the miracles of Kafka's work is that he, simply by looking around at the world of his day (for this was written before the full horrors of WWI, not to mention the rise of the Nazis and Stalin and Mao and Hoover and Elon Musk and the rest) was able to articulate with such incredible force the nightmarish situation that so much of the 20^th Century, and so much of our time, was to become.

You will notice in the above quote, first off, the funhouse bending of reality. K. is walking past a storeroom in his office and discovers that inside, two men from much earlier in the book are being flogged by a man in a leather suit by the light of a candle.

In some sense, this is not an explainable event. This is not a flogging room, it's a junk room; these men do not belong there. And yet there they are.

For the reader (more so than for K., incidentally, which is one of the subtle elements that gives the work so much power), this is an event that simply is, rather than an event that "makes sense" according to the constraints of the real world. It cannot be comprehended, yet it exists.

The experience of reading this is thus much the same as the experience of the Trump Administration insisting that the people it sent to El Salvador, and is paying El Salvador to house in its prison, cannot be returned because that decision has to be made by the "President" of El Salvador (who does not wear the black leather costume of a flogger, but does call himself "The world's coolest dictator.")

It is the experience of Trump insisting in the face of inflationary threat and severe economic instability that the thing that must be done is maybe (or maybe not) firing the head of the Fed but almost certainly (or maybe not) trying to lower interest rates so that he (Trump) can somehow "look good."

It is the experience of living in a country, and a world, at Trump's mercy. Who knows what will appear in the next room down this hall? Nobody. Not even El Senor Presidente himself.

Beyond this, Kafka's prose is full of a dry, absurdist humor. Note that K. "blurted out in his excitement, but not loudly." Why not loudly? Was he anxious about seeming too forceful? Did he not want to alert the assistants working nearby? And why would you restrain yourself in this way if you found two men being flogged in the broom closet off a hallway in your office?

Or how about the fact that the three men in the room are all "stooping beneath the low ceiling"? There is a fantastic silliness in this image, if you take the time to envision it: two guards being flogged by a man wearing a strange black leather garment in a room that's too low for them to stand up straight in.

All of this, is, of course, Kafkaesque.

It is at least in part an attempt to communicate a feeling, or set of feelings: being stuck in a situation that is impossible to understand or escape, yes. But also the warping of reality, the popping forth of unforeseen and nonsensical bizarreries, and the intermingling of horror and violence (the flogging of the men, K's ultimate demise) with a wry, unavoidable smile.

One of the immense values of reading someone like Kafka (or Borges or Poe or Faulkner or Pynchon or Vonnegut or Asturias, or the many others working in a similar vein) is that engaging with these stories gives you a mental framework that allows you to keep your footing in a world (our world) that is very often more like Kafka's world than anyone really wants to admit.

If you need proof of this, look at the immense difficulty that folks on Wall St. – those denizens of the comfortable universe of numbers and applied social psychology and rational responses to events – have had coming to grips with the fact that Trump really is a mad king, dragging us through the haunted mansion of his own absurd mind.

To truly come to grips with this, you need reference points, and these cannot be provided by STEM or logic or coding or economics.

Which – the idea of a mad kings and haunted mansions of the mind – brings me to Hellraiser, written and directed by Barker and based on his own novella.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, it's a relatively low-budget affair that would not otherwise be terribly notable for a horror flick except that several of its elements are absolutely extraordinary.

The story goes as follows. (And if you'd like further thoughts on the film, I've written about it at more length here.)

A man named Frank (Sean Chapman), who's seeking the most intense experiences imaginable, acquires a small gold cube, called a "puzzle box." When he figures out how to open it, a number of black-leather clad, nightmarish figures called Cenobites appear. From another dimension, they describe themselves as "explorers in the further regions of experience," and these regions apparently include a good deal of pain, because they tear Frank to pieces.

Then, through a complicated set of machinations, an ex-lover of Frank's named Julia (Clare Higgins), realizes that if she kills men in the attic where Frank died, his skinless corpse will emerge to feed on them, slowly restoring him to life. This fiendish plot is foiled by a young woman named Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), who ends up stealing the puzzle box. When she opens it, the Cenobites appear, but she escapes their clutches by delivering back to them the rejuvenated Frank, whom they tear to pieces for a second time.

So why does this rather lurid tale remind me of our current voyage into the deathly, sulfuric vale of Trumpistan?

One of the most fascinating aspects of this film can be brought into focus by asking the following question: what, exactly, is this golden puzzle box?

How about this: it's an almost perfect exploration of what the kids (and by "kids" here, I'm thinking of huge patches of our bro-ish society) mean when they say "fuck around and find out."

Which is to say that if you mess around with something you shouldn't be messing around with, you're going to have to face the consequences. This is an obvious starting point. But what Barker puts his finger on so precisely is the darker, more subterranean question that lies beneath this bon mot: why?

What is it in us that pushes us to open the golden puzzle box?

No one in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to go into a weird-ass bazarre and buy a ominous, mystical trinket from a strange guy so they can unlock it and see what terrors might be lurking inside (which is what Frank does in the film's opening scene). When we contemplate something like this (metaphorically) every single indicator in the world flashes red, the sirens go off, and our inner voices boom at us: "Don't do it, you idiot!"

Yet we often do it.

Like (to use another horror movie trope) the person who suspects that there may be a monster in the house, hears a noise in the closet, and then…goes to open the door and investigate instead of just running away, we are often pulled inexorably forward by the golden puzzle box.

Why? Barker's answer is uncomfortable, but, I think, painfully and unavoidably astute: for pleasure.

Frank is not looking for treasure or power. He's seeking extreme sensation, which is coded as sexual in nature; it's this that leads him to the Cenobites, for whom there is no difference between extreme pleasure and extreme pain.

What a strange, challenging notion this is. And yet, as discomfiting as it may be, there is here a savage, almost inarticulable insight into the allure of Donald Trump.

Voting for him, supporting him, celebrating his every whim as yet another stroke of genius from the Greatest Businessman and Leader Who Every Lived, all of this, in the eyes of Hellraiser, comes not from logic or argument, but from a terrifyingly human desire for pleasure and domination, ecstasy and subservience.

The golden puzzle box is the dream of being on the side that gets to grind the other side beneath its heal. Of owning the libs. Of the sweet thrill of assuaging some placeless fury at the world by sending another human being screaming into the darkness. And at the same time, of subsuming oneself in a mass movement, of giving up one's will to The Leader.

Of opening up the horrors just for the titillation of seeing what's inside.

It feels good for folks…and at the same time, it there is the tickle of pain. Not the tickle of moral accountability, but the scratching-an-itch-until-it-bleeds sensation of giving in to their darkest impulses…and not just giving in but glorifying those impulses, letting them fill you and run amok. Submitting to the illicit, letting yourself take pleasure in pain, in becoming the bad guy. Following The Leader.

Words, obviously, are only partially up to the task here. What's at stake is an aspect of human existence – our capacity for immense, astounding cruelty, and the fact that cruelty can feel pleasurable – that exists in a place very difficult to get to with language.

But what reason and rationality and even language itself struggle to grasp can sometimes be better articulated by image, sound, story, the experience of watching another human experience something.

Barker's insight here is not a moralistic one. He is not, in other words, I think, trying to claim in some puritanical way that pleasure and its pursuit are morally reprehensible.

It's of fundamental importance that the Cenobites in his tale are not evil, as such: they are more like the arbiters of the rules. The pursuit of the golden puzzle box has its unavoidable consequences, and the Cenobites simply enforce them.

In this way, it's a story not about an external threat to us, but about human nature itself. And thus it allows Barker, through a story no less bizarre than Kafka's, to offer insights to the Kafkaesque situation we find ourselves in.

It has often been said of Trump and his cabal's approach to the world that "the cruelty is the point."

This is accurate. But it is also a fairly empty phrase. It captures the notion that the point of a good deal of what they do is simply to inflict harm and torment on other people. But the cruelty being the point leaves a rather large question unanswered, which is exactly the question I've been arguing that Barker would like to speculate on: why?

The answer, clearly I think, is that it feels good.

For Trump and the other people involved in actively trying to send Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to hell, all of this is pleasurable.

For Musk and the rest, the destruction of the government is pleasurable.

For everyone involved in the MAGA faction, the attempt to annihilate due process and habeas corpus and the rest is pleasurable.

They have chased their dark desires, opened their golden puzzle box, and out have come the Cenobites with their ocean of torment.

One of the most important, unifying facts of the entire MAGA phenomenon is that it is rooted in resentment. Trump rages against his "persecution" for things like inciting the January 6 insurrection and paying hush money to porn stars. The white Americans who support him believe that they are the most disadvantaged people in the world. The Evangelical Christians in the movement see themselves as under attack from every side. The co-called "conservatives" cannot get over their fury at the fact that the kind of folks who end up teaching at the Ivy League, or making movies in Hollywood tend to be liberals.

This resentment curdles. It is encouraged and rationalized and fed until it lashes out for pleasure.

There is no positive vision in Trump's world. There is only the assurance that yes, you are the most persecuted person on the planet, and if you wear the red hat you will have the opportunity to inflict pain on the (ultimately imaginary) people out there who are damaging you.

This is the golden puzzle box. In some very real sense, the cruelty is the point because the cruelty feels good.

So what is the value of recognizing this? Of reading Kafka and watching movies and then thinking and learning about them?

In his book The Captive Mind, about how the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s slowly succumbed to the horrors of totalitarian groupthink, the Polish author Czeslaw Milosz notes that the Europeans of his day "cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgements and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling."

His point is that because Americans had been coddled by the fact that most of the seismic events of the 20th Century had taken place in far away lands, to far away peoples, they were incapable of imagining that the great "American experiment" could ever be threatened. They could not dream that people can be made to hate democracy, that they can be goaded into wanting to destroy one another and live under the rule of a cruel strongman.

This is even more true today than it was seventy years ago.

Our society is so fundamentally decadent and sheltered that it cannot imagine bad things happening. We have been bathed for so long in economic superiority, protected for so long from serious military threat, numbed for so long by a culture that drives us to think that real empowerment is a Nike commercial and that true moral argument consists of indignation vented into a cell phone and posted on TikTok, that we cannot be taken seriously as a society that has actually thought about things like consequences.

We cannot be taken seriously as a society that has, in the main, anything of substance to say about how the world should be shaped and why.

Ultimately, these things are not inaccessible to us. They are not beyond us, because they are not beyond any human being.

But knowledge must be fought for.

Wisdom – which is the true subject of the great majority of storytelling – is something to be acquired slowly, through work and consideration, through engagement with the ideas of those among us who have spent their lives trying to think about these things.

Art and literature, history and philosophy, coming to terms with the lowest and highest aspects of our own nature, trying to see them clearly – these are no trifling matters to be condescendingly cast aside while we teach our kids and ourselves how to count money and build machines.

They are the way we come to an understanding of who we are and what we value.

And it's by fighting for this, resolutely, on every front, that we might be able to put the world back into joint.