They Won't Stop Lying Because They Can't
A poem about the televised theater of cruelty.
Whoever wears the badge to grind us down Never has to say why: the microphone his, The podium his, the lie his to spin "He charged me," they'll say, "he lunged," As we watch our brown senator Pressed to cold marble, steel around his wrists, His voice still saying "I am a US Senator" While they call him wildly inappropriate.
We witness the heart of the sealed-off room, Check each breath for the violence They're already justifying on the apps, What might snap before it does, Democracy? Their masks? The pretense That any of this was about law and order?
When you work the crowd from the outside, When you ask the forbidden questions About the raids, about the families Torn apart while cameras roll, They will tackle you. They will smile While doing it. This secretary With her plastered certainty Looking down to find the pattern The uppity one who dares speak For Echo Park and Boyle Heights, and the ones they want disappeared.
What does the Speaker already know, Grinning behind his podium, Calling for censure before the bruises fade They would defend shooting him In the back of the head With the same righteous voice, The same lie about charging, The same smile splitting their faces With a wound that can’t heal.
I cannot tell what I need to tell About a country that handcuffs Its own leaders for asking questions, Then calls them thugs For bleeding on the flag; Us, still in our beautiful doomed hunger For something they call democracy But spell f-a-s-c-i-s-m, Our elected voice shoved down, Silenced, his one hand raised In the old American question Which never waits for permission, Never bows to their particular Bottomless cruelty.
Each day democracy paid out Not by our small resistances Those are finished now But by how long we can stand To watch them lie About what we all saw, How long before we name What they are doing to us, What they have always Been doing to us, What they will do Until we stop them Or disappear trying.
Author’s Notes
I watched the video of Senator Padilla being thrown to the ground and handcuffed for the crime of asking a question, and I thought: here it is again. The old American song, the one we've been humming for centuries now. The melody of power maintaining itself through violence while calling that violence order.
People will say I'm being dramatic. They always do. They said it when I wrote about 2016, when I wrote about Charlottesville and January 6 and November 2024. "Surely," they said, "you're exaggerating." "Surely it's not as bad as all that." And then the cameras rolled, and the world saw what we had been seeing all along.
The cameras rolled yesterday, too. Everyone saw what happened to Padilla. And still they lied about it. Not in private, whispered conference rooms, but in broad daylight, grinning while they did it. "He charged her," they said, as we all watched him standing still. "He was inappropriate," they said, as we all watched him being brutalized for asking a question in his own state to the federal official stating she wants to “liberate” his constituents from their elected leaders. Their chosen representatives.
This is the American theater of cruelty: the performance is as important as the violence itself. They don't just want to hurt. They want people to watch them hurt, and then they want us to thank them for it. They want you to call your own brutalization "law and order” and join in on the conspiracy theory.
I keep thinking about the word "inappropriate." It's doing so much work in their telling of this story. What's inappropriate? A brown man asking questions? A senator refusing to be silent while families in his jurisdiction are torn apart? Or is what's inappropriate the fact that they can't say the quiet part out loud yet, that they believe some people simply don't have the right to speak, to exist, to breathe in the same room as power? Fact check. Many of them are already saying this.
The most chilling thing about watching this unfold wasn't the violence itself, though that was terrible enough. It was the speed with which the lie was constructed, disseminated, and thoughtlessly defended. Before Padilla was even back on his feet, they had already decided he was the aggressor. Before the video was even uploaded, they had already written the story in which he was the villain.
This is how fascism works. Not with jackboots marching in the street—though that’s here as well—but with the slow, methodical redefinition of reality itself. Today, asking a question is "charging." Tomorrow, breathing while brown will be "resisting arrest." And they will smile while they say it, because the lie isn't a fluke or a mistake. It’s a tactic.
We are living through the end of something, and the beginning of something else. I don't know what comes next, but I know this: they will not stop lying because they can't. Not until the lie machine breaks down completely, until the theater of cruelty becomes too expensive to maintain, until we refuse to pretend along with them that any of this is normal.
Until then, we bear witness. We name what we see. We refuse to let them speak of us without us in the room. Even when that room is behind bars, even when that room is underground, even when that room is the last room any of us will ever see.