The Politics of Experience...
Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good, | They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would. | They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home. | Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone. | But I would not feel so all alone, | Everybody must get stoned.
Bob Dylan | Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35
Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled "Andrew Feldmar."
The psychotherapist's world was about to turn upside down.
The Tyee | LSD as Therapy?
The headline poses a good question. That said, and being a South African armed with Google — which permits unlimited access (within a reason dictated by those who would do no evil) to the diseased world of Bush, I have no problem with U.S. admissions' criteria.
In fact, from the point of view of someone 'on the outside', I find reaction to Feldmar's unfortunate incident somewhat perplexing. The disquieting fact is not that foreigners are being 'locked out' for reasons beyond even Kafka's imagination, but that increasingly socially-and-economically crippled Americans have been 'locked in' — to a quarantine or jail of legislated isolation.
The U.S. has become its own Guantanamo Bay and its own jailer. It is, as John Brown so eloquently puts it, our global Cho Seung-Hui. The intellectual anemia, cultural kwashiorkor, and delusional dementia suffered by the average American are now complicated by an administration suffering a severe, self-inflicted cholera of contempt...for anybody, everybody, and themselves.
And yet... yet there's nothing quite as unsightly or pathetic as someone slitting their wrists in public. The flip side of this brownshirted-strongman zealotry is the media-friendliness of its Courtney Love or Britney Spears bathos and banality.
Shave your heads, man. Re-member your inner Auschwitzes before you become your own 'suiciders'.
Don't get me wrong; I do sympathize. I realize it's tough. But it's tough on Americans rather than on those they supposedly 'exclude'. Fascism is a tough nut and, in the U.S., its ouster will be made the more difficult by USians — rendered silent in their cocoon of cosseted, impenetrable ignorance — being unable to see it permeating their lives and lifestyles.
I'd get depressed were I on the inside but, then again, look what Xanax, Zoloft and telephone surveillance did to the so-called anti-war movement. Yet the situation is bad enough to engender dispair and strong medicine is called for.
Where to now, my American friends? The patient appears 'etherized upon a table.' Or is it, as with the self-'efaced' Cho, the post-mortem slab?
Fear not the alien; look out for yourselves — the enemy is always within.
If one were to measure progress on the number of suiciders, if that's your definition of success, I think it gives — I think it will — I think it obscures the steady, incremental march toward democracy we're seeing. In other words, it's very difficult — you can have the most powerful army of the world — ask the Israelis what it's like to try to stop suiciders — it is a difficult task to stop suicide bombers. That's the — but that's one of the main — that's the main weapon of the enemy, the capacity to destroy innocent life with a suicider.
George W. Bush
The man certainly speaks for himself. He sounds stoned...
