politics

What Politkovskaya writes in her last message to the Russians before she was killed by them is just as relevant here in the US:

Why is the word “terrorism” in quotation marks?

The triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity–call it the society of the spectacle, call it what you will. The change has certainly not gone unobserved. And yet, we are likely to blinker our awareness of the situation–and imagine that the mechanisms of our governance continue unaffected–that the institutions of democracy are somehow untouched by these changes. But how can this possibly be the case?

How is it that I don't sit in prison? How is it that I have so far avoided a finger pointing, which would sit me there regardless of evidence and circumstance? And why, if I am free, do I think only of how penned in I am? Of real prisons, the descriptions of which I can compare to my cell, I have with an ample sampling. And none compare; this is ease, while that is surely hard time, torture.