Thracian Girl

I only go home two or three times a year. It’s expensive to fly to the midwest, and the truth is I never cared much for Port Huron, Michigan. As much as I have always wanted to run away from where I came from, though, it didn’t change the fact that Port Huron was home. Unlike a lot of the people I know who moved around growing up, going home has always meant going to the same place for me. My parents bought our house in 1983, a year before I was born for $30, 000 dollars. Its a two story green house with a front porch and backyard, and a block from the beach. My parents divorced my junior year of high school, but the same house stayed home. My dad moved about five blocks away, and Port Huron isn’t very big, so it wasn’t much of a change.

I remember the feeling of home-coming, as they call it, from when we would go to Ohio every summer to visit my grandparents. All 4 of us piled into the old Chrysler K-Car with Molly, our dog. There wasn’t any air conditioning, so, by the time we road I-94 East to the end, and I could see the Blue Water Bridge, I felt home.

I guess Port Huron has always had a very flat feeling about it. Compared to Massachusetts, where I have lived for the past four years which is full of rolling hills, and even DC, where I live now, which is full of tall buildings–Port Huron feels flat to me. A distant suburb of Detroit, it’s hay-day came and went before I was born with the rise and fall of the auto-industry. Like most any-where America towns, Port Huron was hit hard by the recession. St. Clair Country, at points, actually had the highest unemployment rate in the country. A couple years ago when I was driving home for Christmas I saw a sign that said “Are You Facing Foreclosure? HOPE We Can Help 1-800-HOPE”. I knew it was bad then, but I didn’t know how bad it was going to get.

When I was in high school, I remember lively weekends, and even weekdays. We used to go cruising downtown, hangout at the bowling alley, and even spend days rollerblading on the boardwalk. We had a China Light, and Pizza Hut, and eventually the shopping mall came and the Olive Garden, which was really exciting, because we used to drive down to Detroit for both. I remember when Old Navy opened in the mall, and everyone talked about it for a week, because for some people, where I come from, it was a big city store.

Like most towns with water, Port Huron has always had its share of noveau-riche. There are private cul-de-sacs blocks away from the lake and mansions along the water with private stretches of beach. You could easily have a million dollars in Port Huron and live like the swells of any good suburb. Most people in Port Huron don’t have millions though, and the class line has always been visible. My house, much like myself, straddles the line between poor and rich. If I walk out the door and go left I end up on the North end, and if I walk right I end up near blocks of subsidized housing and parks I was never allowed to go to.

When we pulled into Port Huron last Friday morning, the first thing I noticed was that the feeling of home-coming had been replaced by a feeling of barrenness. I didn’t see a single body. One of the car dealerships right off the freeway had been completely torn down. McDonalds still sat adjacent to Tim Hortons, but Pizza had been replaced by a generic Asian restaurant. The Times Herald newspaper building downtown had been emptied out and moved to East Lansing. My dad told me it was cheaper for them to just print the AP wires there. There was a whole block of empty store-fronts downtown, fore-sale lines littered lawns like it was election season, and Old Navy had apparently left a while ago. Someone told me their rent was too high.

It’s strange to go home, and see my family in a place I barely recognize. The lake is the same, but the life guards are gone none. The downtown is still there, but you can dance in the middle of the four-lane street. If you want an obituary picture for Main St., just go to Port Huron, because there’s no one there now. And it’s strange, because I know I’ll keep going home, to that same green house, on that same street near the bridge, because that’s where home is–because that’s where my family is.

For the past couple of months I have been trying my mind at meditation. Aside from practicing at home, there are usually a few moments at the end of yoga class where we sit, mindfully “watching our breath and observing our body”.

When I first started doing yoga about five years ago I remember sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed and experiencing feelings of intense anxiety. It wasn’t so much that I thought other people in the room were staring at me, so much as my eyes literally would not stay closed. My lids flickered and flinched and desperately fought the forced meditation. Eventually, I began to think of it as a kind of personal challenge to settle down, and after a couple of months my eyes settled into my head, and accepted the fact that this practice wasn’t going anywhere.

This past weekend, at the end of a yoga workshop as I was fighting to still my ever-busy mind, I was suddenly flooded with a series of memories from my childhood and teenage years. And, all of sudden I realized what mediation was, what I have been struggling to find.

The first memory that came back to me was when I tried out for the soccer team my sophomore year of high school. During try-outs they made us do all sorts of endurance, strength, and skills tests. I hated running (still do), wasn’t ever great at juggling a soccer ball, and I definitely hadn’t been doing any strength training. On the final day of tryouts they made each girl do a pull up. The idea was to hold your chin above the bar for as long as possible. When my chin was above the bar, I closed my eyes, and started repeating song lyrics in my head. Almost as soon as my eyes closed I forgot where I was; I forgot what I was doing. I was essentially no longer there, and after two-and-a-half plus minutes the couch poked me in the side and said: “Hey, are you coming down?” The moment he brought me back to reality my arms began to tremble and I fell to the floor. This form of dissociation from the world around me enabled my mind to do something that my body otherwise could not have done.

The second memory was sitting in math class, taking a test, and feeling a radical detachment from my body. It was like my mind created a bubble that reflected my thoughts back so I could hear what I was thinking. At the time I thought I was going insane, because there were quite literally two of me inside my head. The one struggling working on the problem, and the other one that was listening to it, and calming it down. I ended up getting an A on the test, because somehow my mind new what it had to do to settle my more immediate, present mind down.

The last memory is one I have carried with me for a while. And probably the reason I began going to yoga classes. At the end of a long day (which was rather often), when I was growing up, I would close my bedroom door and move through a series of stretches. I worked my way up into shoulder stand, tucked my knees around my ears, and popped out into table top. I was always flexible, but stretching for me has never been about range of mobility. When I was done I always felt better, calmer, and at ease. Last summer I learned in a yoga class that shoulder stand helps to calm the brain, relieve stress, and anxiety. It is amazing how my body had known what it needed to do. Even if I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing, my mind knew how to relieve the stress and anxiety of the material world I was trapped in.

Sitting in meditation, trying to watch my body, watch myself sit there, through these memories I realized that somehow my body had taught itself how to meditate. I realized that all of these moments were connected, because they were moments when I had found my real self inside myself. In each instance, I was overwhelmed, anxious, burdened by life in one way or another, my mind was racing, I couldn’t think, and each time I was able to detach and listen to the real me talking from inside.

Mediation, I realize now, is learning how to open up that space to talk to the mind which incessantly jabbers away. Oh, the endless to-do lists of life, asking what is next, worrying about what was. Finding space to be at peace in our world is a difficult thing to do. Sometimes, I think we forget, or at least I know I do, that when we detach from the world around us, and just rest, or focus our mental energy on something else, like meditating, the mind doesn’t stop. The funny thing is, it actually seems to be more productive, and more positive.

It sounds funny to be thankful for one’s body and mind, but I am thankful that somehow they knew where they were (and are) leading me, as long as I was (and am) willing to listen.

“The End Times are here!
Death sits upon a horse, a pale rider;
the world, as we know it, is over.”

Maybe they knew that: The world
would always be suffering,
That there would always be death.

So, Heaven must be the promise of life.
And the crisis of the living must be
the eternal condition, sparking faith.

Memory fades into the abyss of good times,
as darkness makes us turn towards the promised light.
Nothing is sacred in our day-to-day.

Nothing is holy in the morning.
Nothing is worthy at night.
Nothing is the gray light of guilt and grief.

Which one, is your choice.
Which Nothing you choose, is your freedom.
Tomorrow, will always offer another one.

For those of us left behind after the Rapture this past weekend, there have been many articles detailing the history of prophecy, how believers rationalize post-apocalyptic life, and even a website dedicated to post-rapture pet-care to browse over.

Sometimes, as a society, we experience, what seems to be collective moments of THE END! You know, that inescapable weightless feeling of emotional heartiness. It’s that white on black Windsor-EF Elongated type that appears at the end of a good Woody Allen film; or that soul-crushing feeling we get when our favorite sitcom comes to an end, or when a song is laid over a scene in just the right way. Music might be the most evocative source of this collective sentiment, or the most easily accessed; but from time to time the end of time takes a larger stage.

There is an intimate relationship between the sensation of end times and the fact of our finitude. One might argue that the end of time occurs with our cessation to breathe. When consciousness leaves the body, time comes to a rapid halt. An earthly condition of life, time, like most things in this world, was created. The functionality of time serves to measure our day-to-day experience of living. There have been several books and articles published recently on the relationship between speed and time, and how the rate at which we experience the world has fundamentally changed, and for some, poses a threat to democratic politics. The faster we move, the more we do, the more we experience, the more we live, perhaps. If time is linear, some might argue that the faster we move the faster we die, or the faster we proceed towards the future, whatever that might be. On the other hand, others like William E. Connolly directly challenge the notion of linear time entirely, while some like Sheldon Wolin choose to challenge how the acceleration of time decreases our thoughtful leisure time. On a different hand, one might take a step back to argue that the association between time and speed itself is reflection of our finitude, of our own earthly desire to understand how it is we move through life. In this vein, and reflecting on the recent rapture, we might ask what does our desire for a Messianic Moment reflect? Is it redemption we seek, or something else? Or, why has end times become an object of cultural consumption? What happens when we are overwhelmed with a sense of “It’s over”?

Some of the examples I listed in the beginning represent individual moments of “the end” on smaller scales. The end of a movie hardly compares to the end of the world, and the end of a television show barely measures up to the end of life, but still there is a sensation of the end of something. As a society we often experience collective moments of end times locally or nationally. Earthquakes, floods, tornados, terrorist attacks, economic meltdowns, and endless wars are all enduring and impending moments of doom. During these moments of crisis a kind of collective sentiment emerges, a sense of togetherness that temporarily binds people through a shared loss or sense of “nothing will ever be the same again.” This sentiment isn’t always the same as the one we cultivate individually, but it reflects a desire to experience the edge of some-thing. When time is dis-jointed by moments of crisis that push us out of our daily experience, the limits of our reality are disbanded. All of sudden we are shown the vast horizon of possibility, of hope, of opportunity to break with the way things were. Perhaps this possibility assuages our submerged desire to live outside the realm of 9-5, kids, household chores and bills. Perhaps it is the unknown that we fear, but love. This points us to the difference, though, between manmade rupture and moments of destruction that are out of our hands. Rapture is a bit of hybrid because it is manmade, but not. For those non-believers among us, we see it as a kind of spectacle invented from time to time, which somehow, inevitably, only ends up reinforces religious zealotry. For the true-believers, it is a divine intervention, the moment of reckoning, and personal vindication for all of their proselytizing and praying.

At the other end, perhaps these moments of “the end is near” represent something entirely different. If you ask most people how they think time is affected by end times, they are going to tell you that time changes when finitude becomes a reality. Most people are aware that they are going to die, but most don’t live like they are going to die tomorrow. When the end of life can be measured or seen on a calendar, it seems like we experience time more quickly. Everything begins to move faster as we barrel towards the edge of non-existence, which means that we no longer need to carefully think about or contemplate every decision. If we think about this mentality within the framework of modernity, as it is conceptualized by thinkers like Connolly and Wolin, we might end up with a different sort of conclusion. One where end times don’t reflect finitude so much as a they reflect a desire to escape the man-made digitally fueled world of today.

We live in a society that is dominated by a 24 hour-a-day seven-day-a-week news-cycle, which peddles politics and sexual exploits before the ink is finished drying on the computer screen; a world where technology enables us to communicate instantaneously and have relationships at warp speed. In a world, where we are constantly being bombarded with stories of demise, destruction, and doom, it’s not implausible that some people simply wish to live outside of all this, and not in a Thoreauian sort of way, but in a “I want to live in my small town, go to church, and cook dinner most nights” sort of way. For them, maybe the end times mentality is really a reflection not of finitude, but of a desire to escape the social and political world.

This conclusion might be viable, but it seems problematic in the sense that it forgoes assuming that there is something much more sensationalist at the heart of all this “the end is near.” In a world where God has been declared dead, those left among us non-believers, seem to be the ones left behind to suffer in a world of hedonistic horror. It’s seems logical that they should try to scare us into repenting by excepting our own mortality, or convincing us that God is punishing queer people with AIDS. Fear is still a powerful political instrument, it’s just not clear that it is a powerful religious one anymore; and this is where the divide between “Rapture” and ordinary moments of crisis is. Moments of collective crisis like 9/11, create a kind of negative solidarity, which elected political officials take advantage of. Just look to George W. Bush’s address to the nation after 9/11 or, President Obama’s remarks on the death of Osama bin Laden. What Rapture and crisis share in common though is rupture. Crisis taken in the Greek sense of the word offers us a turning point from which we can move forward in the present. It’s the sense of the end of some-thing that forces us to reckon with ourselves and our lives. For a moment, however brief or long, we are tossed into the realm of uncertainty where we can choose to turn back or choose to change the way things are. Either way, it seems we end up right where we were, in the present, living our our day-to-day.

The 50th Anniversary of the Eichmann Trial has brought about much contemplation, retrospection and criticism; and much of it, not surprisingly, has been directed at Hannah Arendt. It seems impossible for anyone writing about the Trial not to write about Arendt, so it seems only fitting that Arendt’s argument be given its due if for no other reason than to correct inaccurate critiques.

Arendt wouldn’t have been surprised at the number of criticisms being launched her way. Always controversial, her work never ceases to inspire thought or feelings of great ire. As early as the first publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, critics assailed Arendt for possibly suggesting that many Holocaust victims may have been complicit in their own deaths. The Library of Congress has over a hundred reviews stored with the label “Unfavorable.” When Eichmann was first published, Gershom Scholem, her fiercest critique and friend, called her “heartless” and said she lacked “Ahabath Israel,” “love of the Jewish People.” Scholem also accused Arendt of asking “why the Jews let themselves be killed,” even though, as she clarifies, she never did.

In last weeks New York Times, Michael Kimmelman reflects on a new exhibit at the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin, which devotes a section to reassessing Arendt’s banality argument. In making his observations Kimmelmann not only mischaracterizes Arendt’s argument about the banality of evil, but he incorrectly associates her “philosophy of totalitarianism” with what he calls the Willy Loman (Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”) ethos.

First of all, by her own definition, Arendt wasn’t a philosopher, she was a political theorist. But beyond that, her theory of Totalitarianism has little to do with her argument about the banality of evil. The bureaucratic, functionary, mundane inner-working of the Totalitarian machine she describes in Eichmann has little to do with explaining why Totalitarianism arose in Europe, a question she goes to great pains to answer in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published twelve years prior to Eichmann in 1951. While Arendt’s work cannot be forgiven for some historical inaccuracies, she does offer an insightful and critical explanation of how space opened up in German society for the Third Reich to come to power.

For Arendt the practice of ideology and terror were the defining characteristics of Totalitarianism. The ideological campaigns that disseminated propaganda throughout Germany leading up to Hitler’s election in 1933, and after, alienated individuals from the world that they once belonged to. Arendt writes in Origins, “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self. . . Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.” According to Arendt, this created a condition of severe loneliness that opened up space for tyranny to emerge by destroying people’s capacity of motion, eliminating the space between men that is required for action in the world. The loss of individuality that came with the “iron-band” of tyranny, lead to the reduction of individual men to masses.

Kimmelman also joins Holocaust historian Ulrich Herbert in challenging Arendt’s thesis of banality by lifting fragments from her postscript in Eichmann and setting them next to an interview with Eichmann in which he says, “I could have done more and should have done more.” The actual sentence from Arendt reads: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” What Arendt goes onto explain is that this normality poses a problem to our legal institutions because it undermines traditional notions of morality, which assumes people know right from wrong. Eichmann thought he was right, so of course he thought he should have been able to do more. This was precisely Arendt’s point.

Both Herbert and Kimmelman dismiss the banality of evil as a catchphrase that at best described the collective sentiment of the day, saying that people were looking for some sense of magnitude in the trial that wasn’t met. No sense of reprieve was granted, no catharsis was found in the trial or hanging of Adolf Eichmann. For Arendt, this was an extension of the banality of evil. When people suffer horrible unspeakable crimes at the hands of other human beings, we can’t expand our imaginations to believe that they are simply people like us. We convince ourselves that they must be something different, that they must be monsters alien to the human race. So, we dissect them like specimens, looking for the non-human element. What Arendt discovered was that it doesn’t exist, no matter how hard we look. Evil is subjective and so is good, and no higher morality governs our existence.

Fortunately, we have Arendt’s own response to these criticisms in her 1963 response to Scholem. She writes “Incidentally, I don’t see why you call my term ‘banality of evil’ a catchword or slogan. As far as I know no one has used the term before me; but that is unimportant. It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, ‘because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’ Only the good has depth and can be radical.’” The banality Arendt saw in Eichmann is a reflection of our desire to take him apart and find a monster that wasn’t and never will be there. Yes, people commit monstrous acts, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t human. Instead of trying to find some greater element of evil in Eichmann while we reflect on the 50-year benchmark, today Arendt might have pointed us towards thinking about the conditions that let Totalitarianism arise, the totalitarian governments and democratic movements in the Middle East, or the Holocausts that have and are happening this very moment in Chechnya, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burundi, Rwanda, the Congo, and Sudan. How will history try them? Will we be monsters, too?

Last summer Glenn Beck penned his own Common Sense, taking the name of Tom Paine, but not a page from the original work. In fact, it is not clear that Beck has actually ever read Paine, citing him only eight times in the introduction to his tea party manifesto; which is perhaps part of a scarier problem: Beck is counting on people not reading Paine either.

The Tea Party has steeped itself in the iconography and language of the American Revolution, yet possesses little of its flavor. Paradoxically, the Tea Partiers actually seem to be arguing in favor of the principles underlying British Loyalism, instead of popular sovereignty.

When Thomas Paine penned “Common Sense,” urging secession from Great Britain, he argued that the smallest form of government necessary to maintain the security and happiness of the people was the best form of government. “Society in every state is a blessing,” he wrote, “but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” For Paine, the crimes of England against the colonies were unforgivable, and he argued for an immediate rebellion. The only way for the colonies to liberate themselves from Great Britain was through revolution and the institution of representative government, general welfare and free markets. Social welfare was not a contradiction to small government and free markets, because the happiness and welfare of the people was essential to maintaining a strong and peaceful government.

Paine would have been greatly troubled by the Tea Party for several reasons. First, he would have been frustrated by the misappropriation of “Tea Party,” which he upheld as an example of rebellion. The original Tea Party fought against the taxes imposed by a king who lived on a different continent: the colonies had no voice in the imposition of the taxes and saw them as a levy on the poor and middle class. While today’s Tea Party claims to represent the interests of the people, in reality, it is led by a small number of wealthy men. The Koch brothers have little in common with the average American, economically speaking, and no interest in rebellion.

Second, Paine would not have favored the no-taxes mantra of today’s Tea Party. For Paine, a characteristic of monarchical or aristocratic rule was the way taxes were levied. He argued that in a monarchy the people who own the corporations write the laws that levy the taxes. By doing so, they end up paying the least, while the middle class is saddled with the bulk of the nation’s tax bill. Paine suggested a progressive taxation system in order to alleviate the burden of taxes on the middle class. The Tea Party proposes cutting taxes in the same way the British House of Commons, run by the corporations, did, reducing the burden on the wealthy.

Third, Paine would not have understood why any American would want to put “God back in government.” While Paine called himself a deist, and firmly believed in the freedom to worship, in his Rights of Man he also argued that religion only became corrupt when it was united with the state. Glenn Beck’s rallies, which claim not to be political, often resemble a church service. He begins and closes with a call for a return to God, and a return to religion in government. The primary focus of Tea Party rallies seems to be the military and God and the role they should play in government. The argument for God in government was perhaps one of the strongest claims the British loyalists could make. God vested sovereign authority in the king. This is precisely what our Founding Fathers were trying to escape. They were trying to establish freedom of worship, separate God from government, take power from the King and give it back to the people.

Fourth, Paine would have been horrified by the overtones of hereditary monarchy in the Tea Party’s platform. In The Rights of Man, Paine compared monarchical France to newly founded America. He wrote of the two forms of government: the first retains power, accumulating wealth through a constant state of war; the latter retains power through peace. Paine argued that war has always served as the excuse of monarchical rulers to raise taxes on the people to increase the rulers’ own wealth and power. The Tea Party’s emphasis on maintaing a strong executive and military is characteristic of monarchical rule. The Tea Party’s goal is not to overturn the political order, but rather to infiltrate the political party system to implement principles reminiscent of hereditary monarchy. Political thinkers like Hobbes, who argued for a monarchical system of government, placed sovereign authority in the head of state. Republican thinkers like Rousseau, upon whom Paine drew, argued for popular sovereignty, believing a more united populace ultimately gave the government more authority both at home and abroad.

For Paine, the most effective representative government was ultimately a dynamic one. He argued that “one of the greatest improvements” made by the American Constitution was the “provision for occasionally revising, altering and amending it.” The Tea Party manifesto argues its members “stand with our founders, heirs to the republic, to claim our rights and duties which preserve their legacy and our own.” This static view of American government is at odds with the Founders’ belief that one generation should not rule over the next.

Hereditary government, to Paine, was the worst form of government, the root of corruption, poverty and crime. It meant giving power indiscriminately to those who claimed it through no natural right. Preservation of “their legacy and our own” belongs to the tradition of hereditary monarchy, not a representative republic like ours. Glenn Beck is free to argue for “Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets,” but to claim the mantle of the Founding Fathers is at worst duplicitous, and at best betrays a profound ignorance of American history.

A few days ago a friend from Germany sent me an alarming email with a clip about Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder. He asked: “What’s going on in Michigan? Reminds me of the Enabling Act of 1933, but instead of Nazis you’ll get corporate consultants.” A couple days later my father, a union man who worked forty-two years in the same grocery store now living off a fixed-income, called to tell me that they were going to start taxing his pension.

What is happening in Michigan?

Gov. Snyder has imposed a plan: “182 days to chart a new course for Michigan by July 1st.” A course to where though? Most Michiganders would probably agree that the state needs a new course, and an innovative recovery plan. Still struggling from the economic collapse of 2008, Michigan boasts some of the highest unemployment rates in the country at 10.7%, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For Gov. Snyder though, it’s not about the unemployed and working poor. His new course involves among other things: Taxing private pensions, which he argues will help fund his $1.7 billion dollar tax cut for businesses. In other words, taxes on individuals are going to increase by 32% , while taxes on businesses are going to be cut by 86%. (Eric Schneidewind, MI Pres. AARP) Why shouldn’t the working poor subsidize big business?

The most disturbing point in “Rick’s 10 Point Plan” though is number 3: “It’s time we reinvent state government so that it runs efficiently and serves its citizens as customers.” The audacity of the statement is so disorienting that one has to seriously ask if this governor with a business background actually ever studied political science, government, or has read the Constitution. When did citizens of a democratic republic become consumers and customers of big-business government?

To implement this point, on March 17th Snyder signed into law a series of bills that expand the powers of emergency financial managers (EMFs) running local governments and school districts have. Aside from giving these EMFs the power to dissolve all collective bargaining rights, they are granted the power to dissolve elected officials of their authority, and place a community under state control. The clincher is that EMFs appointed by the governor have the right to declare that any community at any given time is in such a state of emergency and that they can come in and toss out any and all of the elected officials.

In essence, Gov. Snyder has granted himself complete sovereign authority to run Michigan like a business, where the citizens are customers, and democracy no longer matters. It seems unnecessary to say that this is a dangerous precedent. Gov. Snyder is grasping at a level of sovereign control over Michigan citizens that surpasses the limits of democracy and decries totalitarian control.

In 1922, Carl Schmitt penned Political Theology, outlining the principles of sovereignty. Schmitt now famously wrote: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” For Schmitt the exception was defined as that which is not codified in the existing legal order, and is at best “a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state.” The establishment of a state of emergency is not new to the American public. President George W. Bush made avail of this philosophy when he declared war on a Iraq and implemented a series of laws post-9/11 to protect Americans that essentially abridged the rights granted to us by the Constitution. A couple of weeks ago President Obama deployed a similar strategy concurring with the United Nations to decree a resolution for the use of allied force against Libya, without consulting the American people. Schmitt aptly points out that if such political figure-heads, presidents and princes, sought the input of the public that they risked being tossed out of office.

In the past ten years, establishing states of emergency have become a condition of everyday life. Everywhere we look we see elected politicians declaring “crisis” and “emergency.” In doing so they have created a culture of fear that undermines the principles of democracy, that undermine the constitutional relationship between government and citizen. Gov. Snyder’s 10 point plan also says: “we need a new approach to governing that is not politically motivated, but solution oriented.” An ironic claim considering Gov. Snyder is making the most politically motivated move of all: seizing as much authority as he can for his elected position, while cutting off ties from the people who put him in office.

It’s time the American people remember their power as democratic citizens of this fine republic, and kick Rick Snyder out of office.

For Libya

It’s nice to see Pres. Obama 
taking a page From Dubya
On Libya.
And, Why wouldn’t he?
Bombing for peace, 
Again. Maybe it’s working,
This time.
Why wouldn’t he?
Cuz’ who needs democracy
Anyway, when we have 
Resolutions that can decree.
What dictatorship is; this
That says we don’t need the people
To deploy the people
To kill other people.
What tyranny is this?
That thinks fighter-planes
Can write democracy in smoke
Can only kill the bad guys.

They say: The world will be more peaceful
When every country is a democracy
And yet, we keep killing.
They hide the blood from us, 
the missing limbs from us, 
the people. They tell us: 
That there will be more fare trade
That there will be less terrorism 
That flying will be more safe
That we will have less hunger
Less homelessness
Less people in the streets
Carrying guns into schools
While increasing access
To the middle classes, while
Handing healthcare to the “poor.”

The anxiety of terror isn’t an option anymore.
Fear is the economy of progress, and we must
Progress. 
He said we must have: Hope!
But how do we hope our way out of despair?
He said we must have: Faith!
In the American Dream and Progress;
But how does he explain the largest Gap ever
Between rich and poor?
Democracy! Si se puede, Yes we can.
Power to the people! That’s right!
That right!
That’s right.
It’s all a sham.

Sometimes I can’t help but reflect upon the despairing state of humanity that surrounds me. W.H. Auden once wrote for Hannah Arendt: “Private faces in public spaces are more friendly than public faces in privates spaces,” but I am not so sure about that. While it is a nice sounding idiom, and generally I agree with the sentiment, sometimes I need a little less private in my public.

People have a remarkable ability to destroy the most wonderful public spaces: The man talking too loudly on a cell phone about one’s medical condition, on a train, for instance, while I am trying to Moby Dick. Or, perhaps you have encountered the person who likes to eat potato chips in the quiet section of the library while you are up against a deadline. There is always the person who just never seems to look up while they walk, right into you.

My biggest public-peeve: Dispelling one’s bodily fluids in enclosed public spaces without any regard for other human life. People who cough in enclosed public spaces without covering their mouths appropriately should be charged with acts of terrorism.

I have a hard time advocating for public spaces when I continually feel like they are the dumping grounds of human waste. Look at public bus stops. They have become shelters for homeless people to urinate in, sleep in, defecate in. People who use the bus can’t use the bus stops because they are uninhabitable. Of course the larger problem is homelessness itself, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the meantime they are unusable.

Smoking in public: It should be illegal for people to smoke at bus stops, anywhere near the entrance of office buildings or other spaces that people communally enter. What makes someone think it is okay to take one last drag before stepping onto a bus or into a movie, exhaling your disgusting fumes all over others who have no where else to go.

What’s worse is outdoor dining space at restaurants. What makes someone think it is okay to sit outside and smoke while other people are eating their meals? I assume restaurants created outdoors spaces for people to enjoy beautiful weather while they have a nice meal, not as a non-smoking section. Which, is basically what these spaces have become, especially for people who are sensitive to smoke and are forced to sit indoors rather than outside. Smoking anywhere near restaurants should be illegal. If someone wants to create an all-smoking restaurant for people to suffocate in while they eat then by all means go ahead; just make sure to put a big sign on the front door.

And we can throw brining one’s pets out to eat, wagging their thick fluffy tails and bouncing around while other people try to enjoy their scrambled eggs. When I can see your dog’s furry debris flying into my blood mary, we have a problem. Not to mention, once again, that some people are allergic to dog hair. Ick! It’s not legal to have dogs inside restaurants, what makes it legal for people to bring them into outdoor dining areas.

The older I get, the more of an Arendtian I become in some ways, wanting to draw stringent lines between private and public.

More misanthropy to come.

Dear Fellow Airplane Passengers,

Writing from Bradley International Airport, awaiting my flight from the endless row of black faux-leather chairs, I can only think about what horrors await me on the plane.

Really, it seems rather antiquated. Stuffing people into a not very large metal tube and lifting them in the air without any fresh oxygen to breathe. It is amazing we think this is a civilized practice. It is even more amazing we pay for it.

To the point though, I am consistently amazed at how oblivious other people are to their fellow humans around them. Is it too much to ask that you stuff the McDonald’s McMuffin in your pudgy mouth before we leave the terminal, so that I and a hundred and fifty other people don’t have to inhale deep-fried grease for the next hour and a half? Really, I can’t imagine being pregnant and on a plane.

Secondly, I don’t understand how or why it is legal for people to wear perfume, cologne or any sort of fragrance on a plane, in such a tight close place to begin with. What might be a pleasant passage is turned into a war of allergies, stuck between two women with fighting scents battling each other in my tortured nostrils. Oh, the agony of clawing my eyes for endless minutes counted staring out the window longingly for fresh air.

Third, cats. Okay, I like cats. I wouldn’t call myself an animal lover, per say, but I do enjoy ogling a fuzzy creature from a distance. Cats make my nose itch, my eyes blurry and I don’t think I am the only person with this condition. So, how in god’s name is it legal to let people bring their cats on board. Sitting right there in a seat, in a cage, next to me. Horrible! I say how rude, without consideration for the actual people who have paid way too much to be stuck sitting next to a thing that meows. I am always curious what would happen if I told the stewardess that I could not be trapped on a plane with a cat for two hours. Would she make the person with the cat get off? Would I have to change my travel plans? It is difficult for me to imagine that a hundred and fifty people or so should have to accommodate one person and not the other way around.

Perhaps worse, or at least on the same level, are babies. Why do people think it is okay to plop a poking, crying, snotty, sneezing hunk of flesh that can’t speak or cover its mouth when it coughs next to me. The last flight I was on, I was sitting alone next to the window. The flight was not full, oh the joy of having a spare seat between me and another. But then, this woman with a baby decided to sit in my row. Of all the rows! She could see the look of horror on my face. Not only should that thing not be on a plane, but you should have more etiquette than to sit it next to me, between us. So much for a nap. The baby poked me, tugged at my clothes for the entire flight.

Finally, perhaps the most controversial. Oversized people, I will call them. I really don’t think there is much to say. If you cannot fit into one seat without touching me, crossing the armrest median, then you need to buy two tickets. I paid for a whole seat I expect to sit in a whole seat without feeling like I am going to be swallowed by you.

All for now.

Sincerely,
A Fellow Tortured Passenger