There Are No Faces

The White House releases bondage porn.

My phone buzzed: a text message from a friend. “WTAF.” Below that, a link to a tweet. The official White House account. “ASMR Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” There was an emoji of a stereo speaker. I looked up ASMR, a term I’d heard before but with which I wasn’t familiar. Recent vintage; it stands for “autonomous sensory median response.” People refer to it as “tingles.” Wiki calls it "low-grade euphoria," and note that some think of it as a kind of lesser orgasm. There’s a whole genre called “ASMRotica.” No touching; it’s triggered by positive feelings converging with a physiological response to auditory stimulus. Hence the speaker emoji. Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.

Just a screenshot. I’m not linking to the video. I’m not linking to the sound. But I’ll tell you about it. You decide if it makes you feel good. It’s 41 seconds long. It appears to show a man being chained and shackled and marched onto a plane. You never see anyone’s faces. That’s important. There are no people with names here, only bodies. If you pay close attention to the shoes, you realize we’re actually watching four different men being chained, shackled, and marched onto a plane.

But the video doesn’t want you to pay close attention to those details. It’s about the sound. The roaring hum of the engine. The plane is ready to fly. The camera cuts to the back of man in a blue POLICE windbreaker. We can’t see his face. You never see anyone’s faces. He’s facing what looks like—is it?—yes, a row of chains, laid out on the tarmac beside the plane. The camera cuts to the chains. We see hands—no faces, no people with names—pulling chains out of a crate. We hear the chains. They sound like this:

The airplane’s engines seem louder now, but we can hear the chains clink as a man is marched forward, cuffed. We don’t see his face. You never see anyone’s faces. Maybe the regime learned a lesson from a Washington Post article that identified some of the migrants held prisoner at Guantanamo. You could see their faces in propaganda photos of the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, touring a quickly-erected prison camp. She says it’s for the “worst of the worst.” She calls them “dirtbags.” She’s tight wearing bell bottom jeans and big mirrored shades. Dirtbags do not have names. But the regime made a mistake, it showed their faces, and faces have names:

Luis Alberto Castillo;

Tilso Gómez;

Mayfreed Durán;

Franyer Montes;

Diuvar Uzcátegui;

José Daniel Simancas.

Most have no criminal records, one man is accused of a crime after he was detained. None have any known connections to gangs.

Back to the video. Back to the ASMR. Can you feel the tingles?

The camera cuts to a close-up of hands. One man’s hands, in black gloves, and another’s, exposed, pulled behind his back. Listen: you can hear the lock click shut.

Another close-up—shoes, shackled, marching up the steps to the plane, the “Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” The engine is louder now, but you can that chain hit the metal stair, step by step.

Then he’s gone.

Only “he” was never here. You never see anyone’s faces, because these are not, to the regime, people. They are a category: “dirtbags.” “Alien.” Chained. There are two kinds of people in this video: Those who locked in chains, and those who lock the chains. There are two kinds of people in the fascist imagination.

Fascism thinks that’s funny.

To note that this is for fascism not just ASMR, soothing, but “ASMRotica,” sexualized, requires no interpretation; it’s only to state the self-evident. This is, literally, a bondage video. It is presented to us as a bondage video for ASMR, for “tingles.” The sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure. It makes Elon Musk laugh. He gives it a gold medal, next to an emoji of a troll. Haha. Joking. Not joking. Trolling is a kind of complicity theater. Either you look away, in which case you’ve accepted a role—”see no evil”—or you “take the bait,” in which case you’re playing a part, even if, as I am here, you’re in conflict with the whole production. There is no neutrality in complicity theater.

This particular production is bondage porn, but it’s not really BDSM. The wink for a bondage fetishist is that the violence, the control of another, isn’t real; in “ASMR Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” the wink is that it is. The facelessness, the wordlessness, combined with “The White House,” makes the viewer a role player in the fascist imagination, whether you view it with horror or, like Musk, your own pleasure. Those are the choices “The White House” now offers: you can be the one who chains, or the one who’s chained. It’s about migrants, yes, but it’s also about fascism’s understanding of what it means to be human. And it’s a lie.

Here is a photograph of a man with a face, Diuvar Uzcátegui, identified from propaganda photographs of Guantanamo. No criminal or civil record. Said to be devoted to his daughter, obsessed with soccer. On his Facebook page, he posted what appears to be a picture of himself on a beach, standing by an American flag, wearing American flag shorts. He works—or used to work—in El Paso. “Hermano, estoy viviendo el sueño americano,” he told a friend in January, according to the Post. I’m living the American Dream.

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