Who knows how much weight this can bear. But the vision brings together key features of our present and near-future. High-tech mass murder and next-day delivery; the dream of the open shop and the dream of the driverless truck; anti-state ideology with limitless federal money; Trump and anti-Trump GOP; evangelicals and the woke Pentagon. The US and Israeli tech sectors, always in need of hype, will have a new story to sell. There might even be a way to save the poor relations in the Delta, by locating a new
“Joint Logistics Distribution for Chemical and Biological Defense” at Pine Bluff. This capacity which could ultimately “enable rapid deployment of military hardware to global destinations via the Arkansas surface transportation network” and “regional air opportunities.” The “long-term redevelopment program” also explores “the advantages of privatizing energy at Pine Bluff Arsenal.”
Another synergy is obvious. One day, the US-Mexico border could be droned and surveilled by the same Arkansan defense-logistics complex whose driverless trucks connect Wal-Mart outlets backwards to the Tyson chicken plants where
wages are repressed by intermittent ICE raids. The defense workers might use school vouchers to send their kids to Christian schools, to be trained in apologetics and aeronautical drafting. On their way to clock in at the Iron Dome factory, US citizens (with security clearances) can drive past agricultural workers, working outside all day, without papers. They probably won’t even notice the drones loitering above
the prison farms, where unpaid “hoe squads” work the soil of former plantations for the benefit of Tyson and Walmart. Different legal regimes—different lifeworlds of mobility and arrest—for racially-differentiated groups sharing the same haunted land. There used to be a word for that, but by this point certain historical analogies are no longer permitted.
