WORKIN' IN THE DARK 'GAINST YOUR FELLOW MAN

DHS runs on

Well, you may throw your rock, hide your hand
Workin' in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

—”Run On” (traditional)

“Run On” (aka “Run On For A Long Time,” aka “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”) is a banger. It’s one of those traditional songs of unknown provenance that just slaps, in a way that has reverberated through centuries.

I used to think the worst version of this song was by Marilyn Manson,¹ but today I’ve found a new contender from a thoroughly unexpected source.

We’ll get there. But as usual when I’m bringing something to your attention that I really don’t want to talk about, I’m going to talk about music instead.

Here are some other notable “Run On” superlatives:

MOST AUTHENTIC “RUN ON”

Odetta’s spirited solo a capella version throws you right into a sweaty Alabama revival tent and pins you down until you confess your sins. It is not the most listenable version of this song, but it hits.

MOST LICENSED “RUN ON”

Hey remember Play? Of course you do, because we’re still hearing every one of its tracks of history's most licensed album all of the time. Moby’s whole thing with putting dreamy piano,² lazy drum loops, and cool effects over traditional—and more often than not Black³—vocal recordings was received well, made him a bunch of money, and in its own way defined the late ‘90s Big Beat era.

But Moby is still far, far from the whitest thing which has befallen this song.

WHITEST “RUN ON”

That would be Elvis. It’s always Elvis. But this is Sunday Morning starched-collar Elvis with suspenders and a bow tie.⁴

MOST DEFINITIVE “RUN ON”

Once Johnny Cash has done a song, the song is done. If you know this song at all it’s probably this version, and if you don’t you should.⁵

WORST “RUN ON”

In today’s late-breaking contender for Worst Version of Run On: The Department of Homeland Security, which is so vain that they definitely think this song is about them.

And it is, but not the way they want it to be.

“Run On” is a song about the hubris of living as if you will never pay for your sins. It is about the flagrancy of extreme privilege, and the ways in which we all have to account one way or another for everything that we do.

And if you gave me only seven words to do it, ”workin' in the dark ‘gainst your fellow man” describes the daily activities of the armed agents of ICE and CBP about as well as anything I could come up with.

The DHS recruitment video which inspired me to write this was only posted on X, so I can’t put up a preview and will have overlook my usual principles to just invite you to watch at least a few seconds of this thing before going any further. (It’s only a minute, but try to make it through to at least a few seconds of when the music kicks in.)

We’ll get to this video’s whole deal momentarily, but I need to emphasize just how bad the choral recording of “Run On” to which viewers are subjected through most of this thing is. The vocals aren’t great to begin with, but the thickly stacked layers of reverb completely ruin them. It is so bad that the whole thing sounds like it was livestreamed by a busload of drunken high school choir kids from a truck stop bathroom. It is so bad that I seriously wondered a few seconds in if it this might be a lost B-side from the J6 Prison Choir, which literally produced a better recording through a payphone inside a federal prison.

“Why are you watching a horror movie trailer?” Casey asked from across the room the first time I played this clip as the music got going. I was about to say that I wasn’t, but as I kept watching I realized: this is a trailer, and it is for the horror movie that we are all about to live in.

THE LORD HAS REMOVED MEN FAR AWAY

The ad starts with four chilling spoken words which I didn't even know that I never wanted to hear from the US Department of Homeland Security:

“Here's a Bible verse.”⁶

We begin with helicopters spinning up as we hear the voice of recent Catholic convert Shia LeBoeuf from an 11-year-old movie I’ve never seen about a WWII tank platoon.

Lebeouf introduces and then quotes a familiar verse from the book of Isaiah, which I will copy in here for reference:

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: “Whom shall I send, And who will go for us?”

Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.”

—Isaiah 6:8

As someone who happens to know the Bible much better than most lefties, I can confirm that this is one of the few lines from Isaiah which most Christians can quote from memory. Like me, however, I would guess that most of them would need to review the sixth chapter of Isaiah to remember the context—which as it turns out is, as you may have already guessed, radically inappropriate for a DHS recruitment video.

Isaiah is the first of the books of the “Major Prophets,” great men of the Christian Old Testament who bore witness to times of previously unprecedented social disorder and spiritual decline. The writings which were collected under his name have a lot to say about social justice in the face of evil and oppression, especially to refugees and the poor—but not really anything that I can remember about the virtues of a terrifying white supremacist police force which sends masked men in unmarked vehicles to kidnap people and cage them in concentration camps guarded by alligators.

The “send me” passage is Isaiah's story of his calling to a life in service to social justice, and even now as someone who now only appreciates the Bible as literature I got a little nauseous seeing it so badly abused by one of the worst law enforcement agencies in the history of Western democracy.

In the vision Isaiah describes here the prophet has answered an angel’s call, and he does not know when he volunteers to be sent where he will be going or what he will be doing there. God proceeds to explains that he will be sending him out as a divine messenger—but that his mission will be doomed to fail because his society is so badly lost its humanity that no one will hear him.

And he said: Go, and tell this people: hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed. —Isaiah 6:8-10

Within three verses of the one DHS is badly twisting for its own purposes, God grimly describes the uncaring world to which Isaiah is being commissioned to bring this new message.

Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate and the Lord has removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land. —Isaiah 6:11-12

I sat up a bit when I got to “and the Lord has removed men far away.” Maybe you did too. It’s so painfully on point, and so true: mass removals of people living in a place is a desolation. It is a forsaking in the midst of the land.

So there it is: the first of the Bible’s “major prophets” was sent to preach to close-minded bigots who had abandoned all humanity and reason, in the understanding that nothing would change until it had all burned to the ground and many people had been “removed far away”—and a central part of Isaiah’s message would be that his society had lost its way by not properly caring for refugees and the poor.

Anyway.

WHAT’S DONE IN THE DARK WILL BE BROUGHT TO THE LIGHT

I already quoted it above, but please just take a moment to appreciate that this is the verse of “Run On” which was chosen to drone underneath the inapposite scripture, the atrocious cover, and the dumbass fash porn:

Well, you may throw your rock, hide your hand
Workin' in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

They’re trolling us. They have to trolling us with this shit.

The footage which plays over all of this is unpleasantly kinetic, all shot on the move from the cars, trucks, helicopters, and boats which propel our righteous agents of the light forward. Much of it is inscrutably dark, with the colors balanced as badly as the audio to the point that for at least half of these sixty seconds I could barely tell what was supposed to be going on.

Until the final seconds, the only people in this video are the anonymous heroes of CBP, armed agents gazing out over empty deserts and barren roads as they carry out their righteous mission of—well who knows, really. This has to be the only recruitment video in the history of recruitment videos which doesn’t even attempt to hint at what the job actually is.

DHS’s interpretation of “what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light” is painfully literal: there is a lot of scary night vision footage in here, culminating in the final shot below of what appears to be two people trying to… climb over a tree? Unclear. It’s all just unspeakably creepy, and it’s hard not to notice that these two barely-human figures look much more like innocent border crossers than the vicious cartel killers the BORTAC types are always gassing themselves up over.

This video would be merely silly if it were put out by the FBI or the ATF, both of which do at least occasionally actually hunt down legitimately dangerous people. But it is nothing less than sickening when you remember that these people are not criminal law enforcement officers. The armed agents of ICE and CBP carry out intrinsically racialized civil immigration statutes as the postmodern successors to the 19th century federal Chinese Inspectors, a force which was exactly what it sounds like it did under the auspices of INS’s Chinese Division.

DHS is about to become⁷ the world’s most funded law enforcement agency. It is about to receive nine times the funding of the entire federal prison system just in detention centers alone. The money spigot that Congress has just cranked open will accelerate a wild new rush of hiring not seen in DHS since CBP was createdcrimi—a surge which resulted in an average of one nal arrest for misconduct per day between 2005-2012.

Most Americans who didn’t already know who and what ICE is have already come to see in the past few months that it is not what Trump promised it would be. ICE has never been less politically or socially popular as an organization, to the point that a majority of Americans (including a substantial number of self-identified Republicans) now agree with the statement that “ICE has gone too far.”

But nothing we have seen so far could possibly compare to what is coming once this monster is truly unleashed. All of the wild rumors about J6ers and other white supremacist types cosplaying as ICE won’t even matter when they start letting them in the front door with pay and benefits.

No doubt every generation has misinterpreted Isaiah’s offer of “Here am I! Send me” in its own way, but the call to social justice has never been stronger. It is too easy to be disheartened in the face of such rank, stinking stupidity, but never forget: they can run on for a long time, but—well, you know the rest.

Here’s a Bible verse:

Learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed.

—Isaiah 1:7

1. not even linking to it, don’t bother

2. I will freely admit here that I love the ethereal piano line on this, it is by far Moby’s best contribution to the song

3. I do wonder if this gloss on Bill Landford’s work would be as well received at a time when we are (rightfully) so much more wary of white appropriation and repackaging of Black art. At the very least, Moby should have thrown the Landfordaires a parenthetical “featuring” here, since he is at best providing a shiny new frame for their work.

4. I will confess to loving this version (and also to being approximately 97% Northern European)

5. It has become so definitive that the coverage I have seen of the video I am here to tell you about refers to it as incorporating “a Johnny Cash cover.”

6. I should have mentioned this sooner, but this whole thing is wicked Christofascist. It is both made and meant to be enjoyed by the kinds of people who want their immigration agents to be doing their unholy work in the name of the Lord.

7. with demonstrable thanks to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s cowardice