When did extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean become a line item we file under maritime, somewhere between hurricane forecasts and cruise itineraries? I am asking because I genuinely cannot remember the moment the country agreed to it, and neither, apparently, can anyone on my block.
Eliza had us over Wednesday for what she insisted on calling a ‘pre-Halloween dinner,’ which meant the pumpkins were lit on the porch and there was a small bowl of candy corn on the bar that nobody was eating. The Navy had reportedly destroyed its fourth vessel of the month that morning. Six dead, give or take, depending on which agency you asked and what hour. We talked, instead, about whether full-size bars had become ostentatious.
The consensus, struck somewhere between the first and second pour, was that full-size bars are now expected on certain streets and resented on others, and that the resentment is the point. Eliza’s husband said his neighbor in Spring Valley had gone to king-size Reese’s two years ago and ‘set a tone.’ Everyone nodded as if this were a matter of zoning.
The bipartisan lobbyist was there — you know the one, he describes himself only as ‘bipartisan,’ which is what people in this town call themselves when they would prefer you not look up the client list. I asked him, lightly, what he made of the strikes. He examined his cufflink. He said the administration had been ‘careful about the legal architecture,’ a phrase I have now heard four men use this month, none of whom were lawyers.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has the disposition of someone who watches paper outlive presidents, mentioned over the salad course that the strike notifications to Congress have been arriving as one-paragraph memos. One paragraph. She said it the way she says things when she wants you to repeat them in a column without attributing them to her, so I am not.
Here is what I keep returning to. The administration is blowing up boats in international waters, killing the people on them, and declining to produce evidence that the people on them were doing what the administration says they were doing. This used to be the kind of thing we held hearings about. Now it is the kind of thing we mention, briefly, between the cheese plate and the question of whether the Hendersons are doing a haunted-house thing again this year.
The Hendersons are doing a haunted-house thing again this year. Eliza walked me through the layout — a fog machine on the walk, a teenager in a Scream mask at the gate, a strobe in the hedge that her insurance broker has ‘flagged.’ She is worried about the strobe. She is not worried about the boats. I am not saying these worries should be the same size. I am saying I have noticed which one comes up at dinner.
Around eleven, when the lobbyist was putting on his coat, somebody — I think it was Eliza’s brother, the one who teaches — said, almost to himself, that you cannot run a republic on one-paragraph memos. The lobbyist laughed, kindly, and said you absolutely could, you just had to be consistent about it. Then he asked Eliza for the recipe for the lamb.
Tonight my doorbell will ring forty or fifty times. I have laid in the full-size bars, because I live on the kind of street where that is now expected, and I will hand them out, and I will smile at the parents, and somewhere south of Puerto Rico the Navy will or will not destroy a fifth vessel, and we will or will not be told about it in a paragraph.
Eliza texted this morning to confirm I’d had a nice time. I said I had. We did not say the word Caribbean once all evening. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.