Something There is That Does Not Love a Wall

San Quentin, monotype by TIm Holmes

Last month The Daily Show interviewed author Suki Kim talking about her teaching in North Korea, where citizens are flooded with propaganda that touts their concentration-camp-like nation as the most awesome in the world. Although the top NK students–unlike the rest of the country– get three meals a day, they know nothing of the internet and have never traveled outside of their own area, Kim says. What would it be like for these poor citizens to rise above the level of their incarceration and begin to see–if not grasp–the greater world outside of which they remain tragically ignorant? 

Following the release of the US Torture report last month there was a flurry of defensiveness and disgust by the right centering on what a great nation we are, that we were simply doing what was necessary. Even the discussion, some said, is dangerous in its incitement of hatred against us and, besides, it's old news! Furthermore it counters that lovely fuzzy feeling that we are AWESOME! I couldn't help but become haunted by the parallels in these two stories.

I'm getting ready to deliver a speech (similar to my Erotic Crisis TED talk) in Berkeley on Jan. 29 about there being certain things in what we consider the free and open society here in the US that cannot be talked about in the public sphere. To bring up some topics (like the value of the flesh) would violate certain unwritten rules we've all learned to live by unconsciously. But the one thing we always can be sure of is that we don't know our own limits. What might we discover were we to rise above the walls of our own culture to fully inhabit this glorious universe?