ICE’s performance is intimidating and deadly, but also farcical

 Seeing large men dressed in goggles and trenchcoats echoes the camp fascism of musical comedies

 

Emma Brockes 

 

An aspect of ICE’s deadly performance in Minneapolis that goes hand-in-hand with its mission to intimidate is the absolutely farcical tone of the ICE aesthetic. Broadway numbers like Springtime for Hitler in The Producers and, more recently, Das Übermensch in Operation Mincemeat, a showstopper performed with a German techno beat and Nazi boyband – “Third Reich on the mic” – vocals, present fascism as an essentially camp enterprise and we’re reminded this week that ICE fits the mould entirely.

It’s always about the costumes, isn’t it? Here’s border patrol chief, Greg Bovino, swishing around Minnesota in his long, green trenchcoat – as Gavin Newsom, the governor of California put it, “as if he literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb” – while rank and file ICE agents were described by Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, as prancing about in “full battle rattle”. The vests, the fatigues, the goggles; I swear most of these goons are only in it for the accessories and an opportunity to admire themselves and each other under cover of rugged co-combatant team spirit. Meanwhile, as Lydia Polgreen pointed out in the New York Times, their sheer incompetence adds a darkly slapstick layer to events via videos of, for example, large men dressed for war slipping on ice and going “ass over teakettle”.

If you laugh in their faces you run the risk of being shot, but there’s nothing to stop it going on behind their backs. If I were an editor in New York I would send someone to Broadway to report on how recent events are affecting audiences at Operation Mincemeat – specifically, how they react to a line that passed unremarked in the London West End production, but has been stopping the show in the US: “If people like us just blindly follow orders, the fascists won’t need to bash the door down. They’ll have already won.” Friends who saw the show two weeks ago reported that the performance ground to a halt at this line as the entire theatre rose to its feet, screaming and clapping. One can only imagine how long the interruption is now.

GUARDIAN