The politics of death

By: 
Robert Maharry

It only took three words to transform the case of Mollie Tibbetts from an unfortunate tragedy into the definitive political lightning rod of 2018: “federal ICE detainer.” At that moment, she forfeited her status as a young girl who met an inexplicable fate, an idealist with a strong passion for jogging, mental health and reproductive rights, or a fellow Iowan who couldn’t wait to get back to the best college town in the world. She will, sadly, no longer be remembered for the person she was: she will be remembered for the ideology she now represents—however contrary to her own it may be.
           
No matter what we’re told or how many times we’re scolded, we’ll always use death as a political rallying cry for obvious reasons: it’s the ultimate catalyst and the most irreversible end result. To anti-war activists, the body counts in faraway lands like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kent, Ohio, are proof that armed conflicts do more harm than good, and for pro-lifers, the millions of fetuses aborted each year illustrate a nation disintegrating into an abject moral rot.
 
Mass shootings instantly prompt new calls for gun control (and, conversely, bizarre “false flag” conspiracy theories), and terrorist attacks lead to Muslim bans, erosions of civil liberties and the rejection of refugees. Names like Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and Eric Garner sparked a massive and incredibly controversial movement against police brutality inflicted on African-Americans, and the madness and carnage in Charlottesville, Virginia, a year ago left many wondering if the alt-right and neo-Nazis had finally gone too far.
 
President Trump, who was bound to weigh in with Pavlovian reflexes after hearing the three aforementioned words, did so while celebrating an industry that’s killed thousands of Americans—most recently, 29 of them in 2011—through a combination of understood workplace hazards, lax safety standards and long-term illnesses. I’m certain that thought never crossed his mind while he stood onstage and absorbed the adulation in West Virginia, but struggles between miners, their bosses, labor organizers and police are among the bloodiest civil conflicts in this country’s history, not to mention the literal explosions and crippling effects of black lung.
 
In this context, it’s not unprecedented or at all surprising that advocates for a more restrictive immigration policy and more aggressive deportations of foreign citizens living here illegally have seized upon Tibbetts’s death and dubbed the president’s most ambitious pipe dream “Mollie’s Wall” because Cristhian Bahena Rivera is a Mexican national who should never have been in Brooklyn, Iowa, in the first place—although, as we’ve since learned, even the status of his documentation or lack thereof is now a point of contention.
 
But that’s where it gets complicated: Rivera worked for none other than GOP bigwig, Secretary of Agriculture candidate, former Iowa Farm Bureau Federation President and former Board of Regents President Craig Lang, and following the retraction of a statement claiming he’d passed through the E-Verify system, the muddy waters got muddier. He may or may not have been employed under another name, and he may well have never had any prior contact with law enforcement. 
 
Each revelation invites more questions: how can an agricultural state like Iowa that supported Trump in 2016 but is filled with Latinos—some of them here legally, others illegally—working in meatpacking plants, on dairy and egg farms and in cornfields, square away these conflicting ideals? How could an individual like Rivera who resided in this sparsely populated rural county without any “sanctuary” policies for at least four years avoid the attention of ICE? In the era of #MeToo, what drives a man to stalk a young woman so viciously that he kills her simply for asking him to go away? Perhaps most importantly, how did he manage to escape scrutiny for an entire month, and why didn’t the individual with the surveillance footage come forward sooner?
 
Predictably, a few of the national liberal partisans have already—shamefully—sought to downplay or ignore the story: while salivating over the convictions of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, an MSNBC contributor referred to Tibbetts as “a girl in Iowa that Fox News is talking about,” and Elizabeth Warren jumped onboard by arguing that she was a distraction from the policy of family separations at the border as if it’s impossible to be heartbroken by both.  
 
For better or for worse, Mollie Tibbetts is no longer an individual who, according to her social media accounts, opposed Trump (even pointing out that his wife is an immigrant two days before she disappeared), stood up for Planned Parenthood and people struggling with mental illness, wanted to be a writer and urged others her age to get active in making the world a better place.
 
Tibbetts is now, and will remain, a political Rorschach test in the tradition of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Trayvon Martin, Vince Foster, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and Heather Heyer—to name a few—despite the amazing grace and humanity her family members have shown since her body was found. She deserved so much more than that.
 
By Friday morning, the president had reverted back to his usual tweet routine: best economy in history, “NO COLLUSION,” demanding that Jeff Sessions dig into Hillary Clinton’s emails and ordering a CIA investigation on the plight of white farmers in South Africa, while most of the media shifted its focus to breathlessly eulogizing John McCain and attempting to claim him as one of their own over the weekend. If you were wondering how much they really cared about Mollie Tibbetts, there’s all the proof you need. 

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