In her recent book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History, postcolonial thinker Samera Esmeir examines the liberal, humanitarian, positive legal project of British colonial rule in Egypt, and its ability to construct the category of humanity, to provide the framework that constitutes what is good or bad for the colonized, and what bodies and behaviors are cast as (in)human.
Cakes don’t change. Plastic wrappers. “Real” cream filling. BEING. His television, milk and pastries. Adolescent twenty-seven. Soda, smoke, snacks. Like ten years gone had never been.
Passive, floating, shuffled by Time. Sixteen. New body shapes new clothing. Tunes. His room. Door locked. Illicit herb burned in a dirty-water bong. Loitering at the Mall, buying, driving, posing. Movies, pizza, boon companions.
“Won’t last forever,” Guidance Counselor warned.
Aptitude test discovered aptitude.
College: “Media studies.”
Twenty-nine is no longer young. Not old, two-thirds life ahead—possibly. But alas, beyond the market age bracket of the eighteen-to-twenty-fours. Let them pass. We are huge, despite unmarketable advanced degrees, dollars blown on our ‘afraid to work with our hands.’
Look at me. There. In the mirror. Cleansed and dapper. Green-and-yellow Topiary Techniques t-shirt; blue jeans; green-and-black sneakers. Ready to go. Ready to go. Ready to go.
BEING already in the kitchen, sipping coffee he’d picked up at the corner bakery. Sticky buns, muffins and The City News.
I call America’s pattern of behavior since 9/11 a “great transformation” because it involves revolutionary changes for the country and, unavoidably, the entire world. In its internal affairs, America has effectively weakened the protections of the Bill of Rights and instituted many of the practices of police states – all under the insidious rationale of “protection from terrorists,” a subject heading which incapacitates the courts and serves to draw a great dark cloak over matters vital to all.
A decade has passed since President Thabo Mbeki’s consent to the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act (53 of 2003). Also known as BBBEE, or simply BEE (if the prefix ‘Broad-based’ is dropped), the act has recently been amended and is set to be applied much more comprehensively from 2014 onward. As wonderful as ‘empowerment’ may sound, BEE comes with dire consequences for holders of property rights and for the overall South African economy. Moreover, the act is ironic because, despite its name, it is patently harmful to the vast majority of black South Africans.
When billionaires start complaining about taxation policies that are too lenient on the rich, you know something is out of whack.
According to billionaire Bill Gross, the U.S. can “challenge more productive economies such as Germany and Canada,” by improving equality of income, an area where the U.S. ranks “barely ahead of Spain and Greece.”1
The conundrum of what you do with that puma that comes wondering into town. Or that wolf jumping electronic fences for some of papa’s Angus beef. What do you do with that toothless meth head, crazed and full of steam pipe madness when he comes rushing at you with a machete. What to do with the careening car jumping curbs while you bicycle around town. What to do with the woman about to push the child in the stroller off the cliff. What to do with the disheveled dude with the lab coat with the syringe of gasoline about to dip the needle into grandmother’s wrist.
