Swamp thing
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 119
CURRENT EVENTS DEP'T.
They Built This Place, This Camp, to Keep Prisoners Close Together
WHAT DO YOU call the slapdash prison camp in the Florida swamp where people are going to be sent to make them suffer? Donald Trump has been calling it "Alligator Alcatraz," and the state of Florida went ahead and made that its official name: "Alcatraz" because the president previously got a lot of attention by talking about reopening the notorious federal prison, and "Alligator" because the president is propounding the theory or story that if anyone imprisoned there tries to escape, the alligators in the swamp will kill and eat them, the way he likes to talk about how anyone trying to swim from the real Alcatraz will be killed and eaten by the sharks.
People did escape from the real Alcatraz without being eaten by sharks; the president may in fact have been inspired to talk about reopening Alcatraz as an escape-proof prison while he was watching the movie Escape from Alcatraz on TV. The Trump administration declared that it is going to be using its Alligator Alcatraz for the "worst of the worst," which is the stock formula the administration uses to describe whichever group of people it's decided to scoop up and dump in whatever its latest brutal scenario may be. Any actual hardened supercriminals in the mix would presumably be smart and tough enough to break out of a hastily assembled swamp prison, but the administration's policy on detention and punishment exists in a state of bullshit indeterminacy, where the president tells fake stories about how he will confine and hurt the monsters who walk among us and then ICE agents genuinely confine and hurt anyone they can get their hands on.
The other difference between the current migrant detention facilities and Alcatraz is that the government only locked people up on Alcatraz after a public indictment and public conviction, so that everyone knew who they were locking up in the prison on Alcatraz and why. If you asked the government whether some person was on Alcatraz, they would tell you whether they were there or not, and if so, for how long.
The president likes putting deliberately stupid names on things and then making people use them, or threatening people if they don't use them: Alligator Alcatraz, the Big Beautiful Bill, the Gulf of America. Confucius was asked what he would do first if he were given control of the government of the state of Wei, and in one of his best-known replies, he said that he would begin with "the rectification of names" (some translations say "the rectification of characters"). If the names (or characters) are incorrect, he said (in Chichung Huang's literal translation):
speech will not be relevant; if speech is not relevant, affairs will not be accomplished; if affairs are not accomplished, the rituals and music will not prevail; if the rituals and music do not prevail, tortures and penalties will not be just right; if tortures and penalties are not just right, the people will not know where to put their hands and feet.
Confucius spent his life in an era of political chaos, moving in and out of office and exile, studying the question of how misrule might be replaced by good government. The second Trump administration is the work of people who have done more or less the opposite, dedicating their lives to the problem of how to make sure the people will not know where they stand. Their tortures and penalties are capricious and vicious; their rituals are threadbare and vulgarly excessive at the same time; their government's affairs are meant to unravel the affairs of the government; and behind it all is the frivolously, insultingly wrong language.
Right-minded people argued yesterday about what the correct name for the camp would be. Shouldn't it be called an "internment camp"? But the internment camps for Japanese-Americans had schools and gardens and sports facilities behind the barbed wire; they were racist prisons built by a country that still put some value on the appearance of doing things in a decent way. No, the camp was a "concentration camp"—not a death camp, yet, but the Nazi camps didn't start off as death camps, either. The Florida camp was a new and worse place for the government to put the people it was rounding up in its white nationalist purges, to show how little it cared for their lives, even as people were already dying in the other crowded detention facilities. Gatorsbrück. Some people tried out "Alligator Auschwitz," but Auschwitz remains taboo, unutterable, out beyond analogy or bitter jokes.
The point of the bitter joke is that this camp in Florida is a real concentration camp. The jokes feel bad but so does the alternative. If you insist that such a camp is no joking matter, the people who put the camp together will laugh at you anyway. That's what they did yesterday: they laughed. Donald Trump and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and Florida governor Ron DeSantis laughed for the cameras, in front of the cages, about how very very funny it was that they were doing this.
Then they left and a thunderstorm came through and the tent encampment started flooding, because it had been thrown together in a week, in a place unfit for building things. They didn't plan it but that was part of the joke too.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, July 1, 2025
★★ Clouds were breaking up above still-damp pavement and still-damp air. Down in Hudson Yards, the high office windows faced out on more clouds, now performing parallax across at least three different levels of sky and again in rippled form across the glass faces of the other towers. Lower Manhattan turned faded and gray, and the weather app said that rain was falling there, even as a sunlit seagull flew by outside. Eventually that gray or another version of it drew near to darken the immediate view. The blues and whites were gone, and umbrellas were out in the rush-hour crowd as the scattered droplets enlarged enough to feel wet on a shirt. In the midst of the soggy heat, a hand slipping the unclipped identity badge into the bag found a lingering pocket of cold indoor air.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS THE Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Encyclopedia of Cookery; 1001 Recipes, Menus & Rules for Modern, Scientific and Economic Cookery (Vol. 4), by Eugene Christian and Molly Griswold Christian, published by the Corrective Eating Society in 1920, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CHEESE AND NUT SANDWICHES
Use equal parts of American cheese and grated nuts, moisten with heavy sweet cream or olive oil, season with a little salt, and place between crackers, spread with dairy or BeechNut Peanut Butter.
COTTAGE CHEESE SANDWICHES
To one tablespoon of cottage cheese add one teaspoon of thick cream. Mix well and with a dash of grated nuts spread between whole wheat bread or crackers.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
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