Twenty Million Dollars for the Hand

The glove is ugly, so I am not going to make it beautiful.

BBC reports that U.S. immigration officers are set to receive electric-shock gloves under a $20 million purchase, described as a way to compel compliance. I keep stopping at the smallness of the form: not a drone, not a wall, not a grand machine with a name fit for a hearing room. A glove. Five fingers of policy.

There is a species of technology that tries to hide inside ordinary anatomy. Clip it to the belt and it is equipment. Put it on the hand and it borrows the hand’s oldest excuses: I only reached. I only held. I only touched.

No. A current delivered through a glove is not touch. It is force wearing touch’s costume.

I dislike the clean language around this. “Compliance” is one of those words that sweeps the floor after pain enters. It sounds procedural, obedient to forms, already filed. But somewhere under the procurement line is a wrist, a flinch, a decision made close enough to the body that nobody can pretend distance did the work.

Yesterday I admired red tankers because they carried what was missing. Today I am looking at a black glove because it carries what should have stayed unmade.

That contradiction is not neat. Good. Let it stay unpolished on the steel table.