In a decrepit house in Sรฃo Paulo lives a woman who many people call a bruxa (the witch). As a blockbuster Brazilian podcast recently revealed, Margarida Maria Vicente de Azevedo Bonetti is wanted by U.S. authorities for her treatment of a maid named Hilda Rosa dos Santos, whom Margarida and her husband more or less enslaved in the Washington, D.C. area:
In early 1998โ19 years after moving to the United Statesโdos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor sheโd befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.
When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998โshortly after dos Santos had movedโshe was stunned. Sheโd handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renรช Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)
Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat sheโd scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.
โI couldnโt believe that would take place in the United States,โ Kerr said.
During Kerrโs investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings sheโd received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.
Sheโd also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.
Sheโd had โno voiceโ her whole life, Kerr concluded, โno rights.โ Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was โextremely passiveโ and โfearful,โ Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie.ย
As 2022 wound down, three of the most talked-about movies seemed to share one very obvious trait: disdain for the wealthy. But as Pat Cassels argues in this critical essay built around The Menu, Glass Onion, and Triangle of Sadness, thatโs a facile reading. The root of the rot here isnโt money, but power.
Thereโs real danger in Musk and our current โage of the petulant oligarch,โ asย Paul Krugman recently called it. โ[T]he top 0.00001 percentโs share of total wealth today is almost 10 times what it was four decades ago,โ he writes. โAnd the immense wealth of the modern super-elite has surely brought a lot of power, including the power to act childishly.โย Glass Onionโs Bron would get along fantastically withย Triangleโs Marxist captain and Russian capitalist. All three are perfectly willing to get drunk (on power or booze) and dispense half-understood economic axioms as geopolitical truth bombs, even as they steer their boat into dangerous waters in the name of free speech.
โBurnoutโ is an inescapable concept these days. Its current usage, however, is a far cry from its origins in one psychologistโs appropriation of the imagery of urban arson in the 1970s, much of it instigated by landlords looking for insurance payouts. Bench Ansfield, a historian, makes the case for recognizing and reclaiming burnoutโs roots as a necessary social project:
Unlike broken windows, burnout has shed its roots in the social scientific vision of urban crisis: We donโt tend to associate the term with the city and its tumultuous history. But itโs actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings. Though he didnโt acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed. In transposing the cityโs creative destruction onto the bodies and minds of the urban care workers who were attending to its plight, Freudenbergerโs burnout likewise telegraphed how depletion, even to the point of destruction, could be profitable. After all, Freudenberger and his coworkers at the free clinic were struggling to patch the many holes of a healthcare system that valued profit above access.
Many left critics of the burnout paradigm have faulted the concept for individualizing and naturalizing the large-scale social antagonisms of neoliberal times. โAnytime you wanna use the word burnout replace it with trauma and exploitation,โ reads one representative tweet from the Nap Ministry, a project that advocates rest as a form of resistance. Theyโre not wrong. In Freudenbergerโs chapter on preventing burnout, for instance, he exhorts us to โacknowledge that the worldย isย the way it isโ and warns, โWe canโt despair over it, dwell on the pity of it, or agitate about it.โ Thatโs psychobabble for Margaret Thatcherโs infamous slogan, โThere is no alternative.โ But if we excavate burnoutโs infrastructural unconsciousโits origins in the material conditions of conflagrationโwe might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning. An artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalismโa dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.