CounterPunch
I felt a familiar chill reading reports last week that ICE agents in Colorado have been leaving “death cards”—Ace of Spades cards custom-printed with the words “ICE/Denver Field Office”—in the vehicles of immigrants they have detained. The gesture is theatrical and unmistakably deliberate. It’s not just that these cards recall the actions of American GIs in Vietnam, who sometimes placed them in the mouths of dead enemy fighters or scattered them on trails to intimidate. It’s the way the symbolism works: jaunty and threatening at the same time. The point is not only to frighten, but to make cruelty feel clever, dressing violence up as a joke.