Cause and effect reversibility… I get into reading Jean Baudrillard because this philosopher bends language reminiscent of poets. Change and times passage are interchangeable, the given of our experience on this planet. We tip our hats to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic thinker who famously said that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. Another of his turn of phrase: ‘everything changes, and nothing remains.’ You can take that to the bank!

These times demand a bending of language. Yesterday I happened to catch a few moments from the evening news. The clip featured the just inaugurated President announcing that he plans to utilize Cuba’s rocky promontory called “Gitmo”, military slang for Guantánamo, a military base to house 30,000 immigrants nearly all from Mexico and from Central America. According to the New York Times the President said,

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” he said. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.”

I am not gifted in mathematics. But I do understand that Euclidean space is a two dimensionality which is customary to day-to-day living. Cause and effect are linked. We assume a rough predictability.

I have known quite a few immigrants over the years, individuals not native-born to America, of various legal status. None have impressed me as “the worst criminals” simply due to their legal status. Some have been good friends. All appeared to focus on getting-through-the-day exactly as every native born citizen.

We are in a non-linear, non-Euclidean space now.

Where is the Trumpocalypse headed, what is the end-game of this full-bore effort to rid the country of a certain category of individual? Never mind they are needed to harvest vegetables and fruit, wait tables, replace shingles, or nail the 2x4s of construction. This is a screaming contradiction! Harbingers of camps behind barbed wire in Poland of the last century. Auschwitz redux? A racial cleansing of “brown people”, a Federal dragnet of racial profiling?

Baudrillard wrote, –The end is, in fact, only conceivable in a logical order of causality and continuity. Now, it is events themselves which, by their artificial production, their programmed occurrence or the anticipation of their effects – not to mention their transfiguration in the media – are suppressing the cause and effect relation and hence all historical continuity.

This distortion of causes and effects, the mysterious autonomy of effects, this cause-effect reversibility, engendering a disorder or chaotic order (precisely our current situation: a reversibility of reality and information, which gives rise to disorder in the realm of events and an extravagance of media effects), puts one in mind, to some extent of Chaos Theory and the disproportion between the beating of a butterfly’s wings and the hurricane this unleashes on the other side of the world. — from The Illusion of the End, trans. by Chris Turner, page 110.

Deborah Fleischaker, an ICE official during the Biden administration, said that detaining immigrants at the base would be particularly difficult.

“Gitmo is very small and very remote,” she said, using the military’s nickname for the site. “Moving materials and people in and out would be a logistical nightmare. And the makeup of who would be held there is very important. Only men? Women and children? If women and children are there, the housing challenges become even more difficult.”

Returning to Baudrillard writing about Chaos Theory:

...has any concern been shown in Chaos Theory … for the potential hurricanes which end in the beating of a butterfly’s wings?

This is the point where music is juxtaposed with the material we’ve read, considered. This magnificent ballad, November Rain by Guns N’Roses. Do wait for the guitar solo about 4 min. in.