Just give it a slight knock

How to crack open a jar of jam

Jam jars pose a difficulty. When I’m working at the shop where I work—as one does—I occasionally come across jars—of jam, Branston pickle, cranberry sauce, Sandwich Spread, Patak’s Balti curry sauce, or even Baxter’s sliced beetroot (yum)—that are not screwed down tight. A less reputable grocer might simply screw these caps down and hope that the unsuspecting customer wouldn’t notice. But we, mindful of the health hazard posed by exposure to the ambient, microbe-carrying air and the propensity of some customers to sneeze without covering their noses, as high-class grocers, withdraw such items from stock and consign them to the bin. But the jars whose caps are adequately screwed down, forming a sealed vacuum within the interior of the glass vessel, can nonetheless present the unsuspecting customer with a quite different difficulty: getting the bloody things off.

Getting a cap off a jam jar can be a bit like deciding how to approach the menace of ICE on the streets of the USA. The first barrier is fear: jolting the cap off the jar might risk dropping it, and smashing it on the ground, or a sudden release that spills beetroot juice all over you. One effective antidote for fear is humour: laughing at the prospect of showering yourself with beetroot juice does not alter the indelible character of the spillage, but it does allow you to summon up the courage to give the cap-removal process a go. Humour banishes fear. “Here, don’t you know there’s a war on?” was such a classic British means during World War II of chiding those who cannot have been unaware of the fact, who were perceived as making demands inappropriate for a wartime period.

The next barrier to opening a jar is scepticism: a self-doubt that the jar can ever be vanquished. The difference between a jam jar and a paramilitary invasion of your city is that, if you fail yourself to get the lid off the jar of conserve, anyone standing nearby will willingly ask “Here, let me have a go.” The readiness of the onlooker to take up the cause for which you have lost the stomach in the case of a paramilitary invasion tends on the whole to be less.

The final barrier is the sheer daunting scale of the task. Even if you managed to release this jar of pickle’s lid, there still remain so many pickle jars whose lids need to be removed. If you managed to get ICE out of Minneapolis, would that necessarily get them out of other cities? Get them abolished? And, if they were abolished, with what would they be replaced? And with whom in their ranks?

What is currently muddying the picture in the political echelons concerning the policy of immigration is the widespread received wisdom that the United States has to have controlled immigration: a closed border. Everywhere, after all, that counts itself as a nation state has a closed border. Closed borders are fundamentally the basic defining criterion for being a nation state. And yet there do exist open borders in some parts of the world, such as Europe.

Trump has identified Europe’s open borders as being a recipe for civilisational downfall, although I’m not sure whether he is referencing the external border of the European Union or its internal transnational borders, but no one is really sure in any case what Mr Trump ever references when he speaks in his six-inch broad brush style. The fact is that, for many decades, the US’s “open style of closed borders” served well the needs of some of its seasonal industry sectors, like agriculture, and, even if there was some cheating and a little crime along the way (there always is), that old system of immigration contributed far more to the Treasury’s coffers than the billions being expended at the present time in terms of staunching the flow of willing labour into the industries that so desperately need it. The ice storm will pass, and the summer will come, and fires will need fighting and fruit will need to be picked, bread baked, toilets cleaned, gardens kept tidy, and rodents exterminated.

Let us for a moment suppose that all this deportation policy makes sound economic sense, that the forced expulsions will end up saving the Treasury the tens of billions that Homeland Security is expending. Let’s not forget that these tens of billions are provided out of tax revenues collected from the very levels of society that these ICE invasions are endangering. Their effect is to segregate markets into areas of international trade (free or otherwise) that nonetheless lack the quality of free labour mobility. And the purpose of free trade is, after all, first, not to be free and, second, to allow the owners of the means of production to move their factories to where these undocumented individuals are being sent to. That allows them to depress wages in the central and south Americas, and, when the toilets get dirty, to dictate terms for those they allow to return to the States to carry out the menial tasks that by now will be being neglected.

But the ICE operations are not simply a matter of economics. They are quite clearly axed on a criterion of racial engineering: the replacement theory and a clear strain of racial hatred that has simmered since Jim Crow. And what’s more, the element of fear, of aggression for the sake of aggression, is patently regarded by the ICE operatives as an intangible benefit of the job: they’re bastards because they enjoy being bastards, not because it’s their job per se. They’re like disco bouncers—selected for their ability to get into a fight with an aggressive patron and win that fight—who are told not just to keep order at the entrance, but to beat up anyone who wants into the disco, and relish the experience into the bargain.

The remit of ICE would appear to be born of an irrational scepticism on the part of the MAGA crowd that voted Trump into office—we presume, so at least. What ICE is now doing is disseminating that scepticism throughout American society. Driving wedges of doubt and mutual dislike between individuals, neighbourhoods and regions. And what the good burghers of Minneapolis are showing is that American society is in fact more resilient to that kind of social manipulation than ICE and the DHS had thought. It started in Los Angeles last summer. New York followed in the autumn, with its overwhelming support for Zohran Mamdani. And the present winter sees Minneapolis now showing that even extreme weather cannot dampen the power to resist.

When that jam jar gets handed around, those who fail to budge the lid at the start will complain that they have already done the heavy lifting. That the later ones who want to have a go, have a far lesser task. It is true. Tipping the country into large-scale resistance to ICE won’t happen at the first attempt. Nor even the second. The genius, of course, is the person who takes the jar and lightly taps it against the side of the kitchen sink. With that, the lid is off in a trice. All it takes is one simple knock. So, what translates in reality to that kind of a knock against the side of a jam jar?

There is a technique that is encountered time and again in films and theatre. If a character does something once, that is “plot progression”. If they do it twice, the purpose is to “plant” the fact in the audience’s mind (a good example is in The Godfather, when Fabrizio says, not once but twice, that Michael has been “struck by a bolt of lightning” when he sees and falls in love with Apollonia, so that, when his father back in New York tells the mob bosses that all bets are off if anything happens to Michael (“Such as him being struck by a bolt of lightning”) the audience wryly thinks “Well, it seems that that has already happened ...”).

If the character then does this thing three times, the conclusion in the audience’s mind is, “They do it all the time.” They have, with the third occasion, confirmation of who they are dealing with. Once is plot progression; twice establishes a coincidence; three times means they do it constantly.

Now, ICE has killed more than Ms Good and Mr Pretti. But Good and Pretti are of a category. They were both 37, and that’s an interesting coincidence (or would be if this were a stage play). The idiotic thing is that these two victims of unwarranted violence are at this stage only a coincidence, because there’s only two of them. The non-white victims of ICE are horrendous cases as well, but the audience doesn’t really know their names. Isn’t that a strange thing?

So time for some astrology: there will be a third victim. White. Mid to late 30s. And when there is, all hell will break loose. That person’s death will establish in the audience’s mind that this is something ICE does all the time. And that will be their undoing. At last.