Hey, y’all!
I am newly returned to Texas from my Arizona-based master’s program, and I’ll be wandering the coast from a home base in the central part of the state for the foreseeable future. Is there something happening on the coast you think I should know? Let me know in the comments below or at gaige@deceleration.news.
— Gaige Davila
Rio Grande Valley Horrorculture and the Fight to Protect & Restore Native Roots
Gaige Davila | Deceleration
Two seemingly unrelated things have captured my attention of late, both of which are related to Texas’s sins: miswritten Hemingway quotes circulating on Twitter (X, whatever the hell), and Joey Santore’s war against non-native plants in the Rio Grande Valley.
The miswritten quote, attributed to Hemingway, is written as:
“Dying for your country is a patriotic fairy tale. In reality, you will bleed out in the mud like a butchered dog for absolutely nothing."
The actual quote is better, and I can’t imagine bastardizing it in a way that doesn’t even sound like Hemingway wrote it. I also can’t imagine surveying the Rio Grande Valley or the Texas coast’s last remaining expanses of natural native beauty and bulldozing it, replacing it with flora from somewhere else, then believing that one is doing a good thing, making a good country. But there are people that happily do all of this, intentional distortions serving the same sanitizing purpose.
It’s not just plants, but people, too. Because the only political imagination around the Rio Grande Valley is one where there’s no politics at all, only the appearance of it. And that appearance becomes something more detached from reality every day, the consequence of elected officials not capable of responding to the needs of their communities or not wanting to. That couldn’t be more obvious today. People are being chased and kidnapped off the streets of Texas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Most elected officials in the RGV say nothing about it. To understand why, just look to the metastasizing suburbs and strip malls in any of the Valley’s four counties, and the sapling oak trees and St. Augustine grass installed in them that so often die before construction is even finished.
Tamulipan thornscrub is just “brush;” brush is “undeveloped land;” mesquite, ebano, coyotillo, coma, and hackberry trees are all one amorphous entity, something to be removed; neighbors, los cocineros, Don Juan de la tienda, Southmost, el sur de la condados Hidalgo, Cameron, y Starr, are just “Mexicans;” Mexicans are “illegals,” “wetbacks,” “prietos;” and all of them must go.
How we describe these things matters. And obscurity—that is, erasing of living beings through generic or imprecise language—is a key tactic of developers. Obscurity is also a core tenant of the political and social culture of the business and political classes of the Rio Grande Valley and the United States at large. Obscurity is in the language elected officials and even some members of the community use as their neighbors disappear into the border deportation industrial complex, a system that is centered and perpetuated in the Rio Grande Valley’s detention centers and Harlingen’s airport, where the federal government regularly flies people out to countries to which they have no connection.
Kidnappings are “enforcement operations”; people are “encounters” or “aliens”; thousands of dollars, tests, and years of waiting just for the chance at citizenship is the “right way”; running for your life is “resisting”; harassment is “enforcing the law”; turning a steering wheel is “ramming” someone with a vehicle, a reason to empty a clip like its your first day at the gun range; exercising your rights to document these arrests becomes “interfering” with a federal investigation; and saying any of this is somehow, according to the most racist and colonized of the Rio Grande Valley’s residents on Facebook, “being a Democrat.”
This language intentionally hides the roots of the area, whether those of plants or people. It hides the multiple kinds of ongoing violence that came from the area’s first colonization. This “horrorculture,” I’ll call it, is the only prism that our governments, their sycophants and the misguided alike, use to resolve problems. People passively watch films fictionalizing maiming and death for entertainment and stimulation, and this is no different.
Desensitized, apathetic politicians and their constituents live in a reality that doesn’t recognize the humanity of people being taken from their communities. So it all becomes online fodder to dismiss or “debate,” a conditioning centuries in the making to ensure that anyone who speaks the truth of our condition is discredited. It is a conditioning so goddamned pervasive that it’s beyond a historic baseline. Because it seems like there has never been a time in the Valley’s written history where a majority of its people were not taught to hate themselves and the world around them.
But there’s another use to this kind of language. It obscures war and doctrine, to convince countless people to welcome their segregation from the area’s business and political elites while believing the opposite is happening. It also further dehumanizes the most vulnerable in our communities, where a friend, family member, neighbor, colleague can become an A-Number and never be seen again and, most importantly to those classes, no one ever says a fucking thing about them again.
Speaking of war, this is the full Hemingway quote, one that comes from “Notes on the Next War,” which was published in Esquire in 1935:
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
“Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it's only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the jamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just below the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness; but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies.
"But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
“The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.”
I wrote last month (See: "Brownsville’s Saronic Autonomous War Plans Echo a Confederate’s Post-Civil War Profit-Seeking Killings") that I believed that elected officials in the Rio Grande Valley were afraid of death and wanted to live forever. They aspire to immortality in the way that many of those before them have done through securing their names on parks or proclamations or plaques, not in the way that many billionaires now aspire to literally live forever. Instead they look to something more localized, something to get praised for by backslapping peers while they’re at Sea Ranch on the island or whatever pseudo-haute cuisine is in downtown Brownsville now.
