Daisy Farms was a good place to live. People were mostly friendly, and they mostly believed the world was getting better. Marcos believed all the residents of Daisy Farms were either one of two things: covert fascists or wretches with the wool pulled over their eyes.
Marcos realized someone was pulling the wool over his eyes when he read about a small country in Central America where people lived peacefully, growing and eating bananas. No one ever gave them an Official Certificate to use the land or eat the bananas; it was just the way things had been since they could remember.
Then one day, a company named Chiquitas Bananas said the land and everything built and planted on it belonged to them. They had an Official Certificate to prove it. The farmers had no land or houses anymore, so they became employees of Chiquitas Bananas, picking and putting stickers on bananas and shipping them to breakfast tables in Daisy Farms. After a while, the farmers got fed up with this, so they used the Democratic System to decide they were going to put things back how they were before. That really peeved Chiquitas, but the company had an Ace up their sleeve: the person who wrote all their Official Certificates was the Secretary of State of the most powerful country in the world, and his brother was the director of the country’s Intelligence Agency.
The Intelligence Agency’s main mission was to make sure everyone followed the rules of the Democratic System. So Chiquitas called up the Agency and said: “This small Central American country is lacking in Democracy.” The Agency agreed, so they sent some people off to scalp the faces off children and rape women (100,000, to be exact) and put needles in their eyes until they decided they liked being employees of Chiquitas Bananas, after all.
Recently, the Intelligence Agency had been getting a lot of bright ideas from Daisy Farms, which was full of bright people who knew computer intestines like the back of their hands. They could help with fancy things like remotely escorting GBU-39/B glide bombs from drones to tent camps in Designated Safe Zones. Kids in Daisy Farms played with drones all the time. They made great Christmas gifts. They didn’t drop GBU-39/B glide bombs, though.
Then a man came up to Marcos and told him Daisy Farms was such a nice place, and wasn’t he so glad to live in a neighborhood with so much prosperity. Marcos screamed at him, “Don’t you know about Chiquitas Bananas! Don’t you know about the Rafah tent massacre! They’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes!” And then he left Daisy Farms so no one could deceive him ever again.
That’s how he found himself on a beach in Ceuta in the middle of July. This year, the heat was so bad it melted the railroad joint sealant and shut down the train system for a week. The electric company planned blackouts so that wires didn’t catch fire, leaving people wearing half-washed clothes and eating half-toasted toast.
It was Sunday, día libre. Marcos and his coworker, Iña, took their vomit-green, birdshit-covered car to Playa Bonita to alternate between swimming and napping. Iña rolled a joint, and the two smoked it and argued about whether humans’ enjoyment of music could be explained by evolutionary mechanisms.
Squinting as he took the last puffs, Iña said, “Do you think you could read over an essay I wrote?”
Marcos was in the mood for no such thing. “Ok, yeah, sure.”
Iña handed Marcos his phone. “It’s a first draft. I just want to know what you think.”
It was a Google Doc in single-spaced, 11-point Arial font. Marcos read the title: “Colonial Project(ion)s: The Digital Occupation of Western Sahara in Popular Media.”
Marcos read the essay the same way he watched TikTok, pausing on one segment to read it intensely before skipping past a dozen more. For instance, he paid great attention to the fact that Western Sahara was annexed by Morocco in 1975 in violation of a ruling by the International Court of Justice. Feeling his head begin to spin, however, he skimmed past the number of dollars Christopher Nolan accepted from the Moroccan government for filming The Odyssey in illegally occupied Western Sahara, and how the director’s decision (re)legitimized the Moroccan colonialist project(ion).
“It’s good,” said Marcos.
“Thanks,” said Iña. “But what did you think, though?”
“Did you consider,” said Marcos, “that there are many true ways of telling one story?”
“Yes.”
“Like, you might be able to get your point across without using so many big words and parentheses.”
“It’s a research project for my master’s degree.”
“Yeah, but it’s like a Chinese finger trap. The harder you try to convince me, the more my brain locks up and I dislike what you’re saying. You lose me.”
“So did you not understand it?” said Iña.
“No, I got it. I’m just saying, maybe you could let readers draw their own conclusions, instead of lecturing them about why you’re right.”
“It’s supposed to be persuasive. Thesis, supporting evidence. Clear-cut.”
“Right, well, maybe there are ways to make it more engaging to your target audience.”
“You are my target audience.”
“And I said I think it’s fine.”
To wash off their anger they swam, and emerged coated in salt that caked into their pores as they dried in the sun. The two were like the battered and fried merluza they served at the tapas bar up the road.
Ceuta has tapas bars because it’s one of those irresistible morsels of Moroccan land the Spanish can’t bear to part with. They want the 19 square-kilometer peninsula so bad they put two 15-foot razor-wire fences around it to make sure no one takes it back in the middle of the night. They also station 4,000 troops on it. Which means the density of professional killers in Ceuta is more than twice the density of normal people in the rest of Spain. Most of the professional killers in Ceuta don’t like Africans. They like their land, though. It looks nice on the map.
Tapas bars also look nice on the map. They cover it in red pins indicating cornucopias of beer and fried meat. Heaven on Earth, la Comida de Dios, a Party in my Mouth. Some bars even have backup generators, making them holy refuges during the summer blackouts. Under the watchful eyes of the Virgin on the wall, waiters bring trays of fresh seafood, pincers and antennae dangling over oval dishes; marinated intestines and fluffy, grease-coated tortillas floating between tables covered with empty beer bottles. Pillars of culture and patriotism, but, and: nostalgia for fascism. The backs of shirts read, “Legionarios don’t die, they regroup in Hell,” or, “Legionarios: The Boyfriends of Death.” Proud slogans of La Legión, an international branch of the Spanish army whose job is to stick red-and-yellow flags in other people’s dirt.
The other day, Marcos and Iña drove by a barracks with an altar commemorating “The Heroes of La Legión.” One of their heroes was Franco, a Spanish military general who believed in a Judeo-Masonic-Communist-international conspiracy against his homeland. Usually, people with ideas like that don’t make it to the top. But Franco did. First, he did a military coup d’etat in 1936, the same year antifascists in Barcelona organized the People’s Olympiad in protest of Nazi Germany hosting the Olympics. Over 6,000 athletes from 49 nations registered for the Barcelona games, most of them sent by trade unions and communist parties. But the Olympiad was cancelled because a Spanish general named Franco did a coup d’etat and started killing trade unionists and communists. Then he won the ensuing Spanish Civil War with Hitler’s help, became a dictator, and set half a million political prisoners to work as slaves. In 1975, seventy-five thousand people attended his burial and did a fascist salute.
Incidentally, as Marcos and Iña toweled off from their swim, Spain was kicking off in a very big fútbol match against the nation that inspired its Legión: France. The French Foreign Legion, created 100 years before the Spanish Legión, was a socially progressive elite military group whose code of honor said: “Each legionnaire is your brother in arms whatever his nationality, his race or his religion might be.” The French Legion had sent multicultural killing machines to conflicts all over the world, including the Gulf War, two civil wars in the Ivory Coast, and the war in Afghanistan.
On a plasma TV precariously placed on Playa Bonita, Spain moved the ball up the field against their role models in foreign occupation. A group of sunburnt Spaniards swayed and burst into song.
“It’d be kind of nice to join the army,” said Marcos.
Iña looked at him blankly. “Do you thirst for blood?”
“No. But listen: this world drives you crazy with choice, and no one tells you who to be. All you can do is buy such-and-such brand or subscription service or stripe of flag to show the world who you are. Even better if you make a post about it. But no one ever says: ‘Be careful! Commodifying your identity is exhausting and precarious!’”
It was true. No one ever went around saying that. And if you painted such a thing on a billboard, as Marcos proposed to his comrades of the Daisy Farms Militant Democratic Socialist Regiment for Peace Through Direct Action (DFMDSRPTDA), the innovative people of Daisy Farms would paint over it with an ad for a more efficient way to digitally share your new personality trait with everyone else.
“Our images of ourselves are so fragile,” Marcos continued, “and choosing who you want to be every day is like walking down the toothpaste aisle in Target. I mean, whose idea was it to package the same six ingredients fifty different ways? Going about your day is like that: like choosing between fifty ways to package your six personality traits.”
Actually, it was no one’s idea to make the toothpaste aisle like that. It was just a fact of life that sometimes a few ingredients got sold a lot of different ways. There was a reason it happened that no one really understood, but everyone kind of pretended to. Something to do with efficiency.
“And it’s a vicious, frustrating cycle, and at a certain point it makes you throw your hands up and say fine, World, just tell me who I’ve got to be. And then you meet an Army recruiter outside Safeway who tells you that if you join, they’ll tell you exactly who you are.”
“But your job is to kill other humans.”
“You get to stop banging your head against the wall trying to change who you are. You get told when to wake up. You eat whatever someone else feeds you. You go where they tell you. There’s no burden of choice, and this world is a casino of forks in the road. So some people find freedom in stability. In absolute structure.”
“I don’t know anyone whose idea of freedom is being told what to do every hour of every day.”
“The body works so the mind can be free.”
“Arbeit macht frei. Sounds like fascism to me.”
And then the beach erupted in a collective “Oooooo!” with the rising intonation that indicates a ball is maybe, possibly, going into a net. Then, the release: “Awwww!” Just wide.
While Marcos and Iña argued and the beach oooed and awwed, I was preparing to go through airport security in Tangier, Morocco. Before the snaking grid of stanchions, I was confronted with a sign explaining in simple words and with ample diagrams what was and was not permitted in flyers’ bags. Even though these rules have not changed for a long time and I have flown many times, I forgot them while packing and put my special Curly Hair shampoo (400ml, significantly over the 100ml limit) in my carry-on. Oops! I tossed it in the garbage. I also had a liter of water in my backpack, which I mimed dumping in the trash to an airport attendant to confirm that this was the appropriate receptacle for a liter of water. He shook his head and mimed waving me through. When I got closer, he said no worries, my water could pass right through! Well, this was news to me. I thought of my poor shampoo, which I had apparently dumped out for nothing, and decided to retrieve it from the plastics bin, firstly because I am shameless and secondly because I know the value of a good Curly Hair product.
When I put my bag through the X-Ray, I explained to the inspector that the guy at the door said it was alright, my oversized liquids could pass right through!
Not seeming to hear me, he removed my water bottle from my bag. “What’s this?”
“Water.”
He opened it, sniffed it, and put it back. Then he grabbed the shampoo and examined the label. “What’s this?”
“Shampoo.”
He opened it, sniffed it, and spat a single word: “Forbidden.” He put it in the trash and rubbed a thin swab of plastic on my bag and hands to see if I was using Curly Hair shampoo to traffick drugs.
Luckily, no one forbade me from wearing my wide-brimmed straw hat. Airports are great places to wear unnecessary accessories for lots of people to see. There are people called Airport Anthropologists whose job it is to document all the weird things people do in airports. There is one such anthropologist who calls airports “non-places.” I don’t know what he means by that, but I agree wholeheartedly. I wonder what he would have said about my hat.
After boarding, a lady came around with a clicker to count the people on the plane. It was a sound I’d know anywhere: my baseball coach used to use the same counter to count our pitchers’ pitches. I know the sound so well because I sat on the bench a lot, so I’d listen to him click. After registering a pitch, he would nestle the device in the crook of his crossed arms. I would watch his SWAT lanyard sway from his pocket and guess what ugly words he would yell at us, the scrawny, obsequious 13-year-olds that made up his Junior Varsity baseball team, after the game. Our parents probably thought the main point of putting us in sports was to make us more respectful, stand-up, collaborative humans, but my baseball coach thought berating minors about the tightness of their assholes and their inability to fucking capitalize with runners in scoring position was the point of sports. He made a closed circle with his thumb and index finger to indicate our sphincters’ minuscule apertures.
I later learned that “tight-ass” is a name for PE teachers who wear SWAT lanyards and yell profanities at boys and girls after they lose a bat-and-ball game.
In addition to my oversized hat, I also brought with me a highly volatile bag of leftover Chinese food. Like a good US American, my last meal in North Africa was vegetable noodles and spicy tofu at a Chinese restaurant with plastic tablecloths and a 14-page menu. And, like a good US American, I ordered more than I could eat and took the excess to go.
The waiter packed my food in two containers with foil bases and paper lids and put them in a plastic bag. To test how this would hold up in my flight, I tilted the containers sideways slightly. Bright red oil ran out and soaked the lid immediately. I decided to put my faith in the bag, shoved the whole thing in my backpack, and got a taxi to the airport.
When I checked on the structural integrity of my leftovers mid-flight, the situation was this: the sharp corners of the foil bases had poked tiny, unidentifiable holes in the plastic through which trace amounts of oil were making their escape. I stuffed tissues around the disaster zone and decided not to look again until I landed. My goal was to make it to a McDonald’s in the airport, ask for a fork and plate, and eat the schmorgesport before it exploded.
But when I deplaned, the odds were looking grim. There were no restaurants in the arrivals area, and in any case, I was in a hurry to meet a friend for the France-Spain World Cup semifinal. I did not particularly want to pull up to the bar with a leaky, pungent bag of smashed lunch—or be wearing sandals and a straw hat, for that matter—so I found an unpopulated corner of Charles de Gaul airport to clean the oil, change shoes, and Tetris my carry-on bag to fit the straw hat without crushing it. Finally, I turned to my lunch, now in its death throes, and sighed deeply. A garbage can was within arm’s reach. It was time to say goodbye.
But just as I was reaching for the abomination, a sanitation worker appeared—and what was he rolling around but a cart of scented, industrial-grade trash bags!
“Excuse moi,” I said in a high voice, as if there were not a life-or-death situation on the floor behind me. “Could I please have a sachet?”
My savior didn’t ask a single question. He simply unrolled a long, fresh, gloriously robust bag, handed it to me with a smile, and kept walking.
I felt unbridled delight as I wrapped the dilapidated leftovers in another, heavier-duty layer of plastic. It was heroically strong and impossibly soft. I felt safe and clean and protected.
I made it to the bar in time to watch the French national team lose for 30 minutes. At midnight, I sliced through the protective layers of my tofu like a body bag, dumped the contents on a plate, and scarfed them down with a beer.
The Spanish Civil Guard had no use for body bags. Their victims washed up on the shore of Ceuta bloated beyond recognition. Sometimes their families called Marcos and Iña wondering where their children were. Spain told the families their sons and daughters made dangerous and irresponsible decisions, swimming four, five, eight hours in the dark of night—and for what? A better life? Banal.
A few days before Ceuta makes headlines, I visit a history museum in East Germany. I learn that the closed-minded, freedom-hating elite of the Soviet Union built the Iron Curtain to keep people penned in; manipulated; propagandized. An authoritarian form of population control. The pure cruelty of punishing people for seeking a better life! Every life lost crossing the Wall was a tragedy; evidence of the failure of the system that built it.
And, but: are walls that keep people out less cruel, closed-minded, and freedom-hating than walls that keep people in? Is there even a difference? In 2025, at least forty people died trying to cross the border into Ceuta. In the last three days, at least a hundred. Are their deaths also tragic? Are they also the result of a self-preserving elite that builds walls to control the minds, bodies, and movement of people? Or is the Ceuta border more justified, more moral, more acceptable than other fatal walls because it flies a blue flag with twelve golden stars?