From a MadInAmerica blogpost by Jim Gottstein“

1. The court must find that important governmental interests are at stake.
2. The court must conclude that involuntary medication will significantly further those concomitant state interests.
3. The court must conclude that involuntary medication is necessary to further those interests. The court must find that any alternative, less intrusive treatments are unlikely to achieve substantially the same results.
4. The court must conclude that administration of the drugs is medically appropriate, i.e., in the patient’s best medical interest in light of his medical condition.

That means that the government could identify particular individuals as being threatening in their thoughts or ideas and, using psychiatry, establish false pretense of “governmental interests” and chemically restrain a person into mute delirious defenselessness. 
They could take a person and drug them and detain them, because their ideas and expression, the people they know, present “a threat to the United States of America.” Using language and dangerous memes that levy on fear and utilize oppression, they could take a person down…create an alarmist claim, a set of conspiracy charges, hold people and drug them, do whatever they want to them…that’s horrifying.

In this day of well-publicized surveillance and NDAA, of Stratfor and DHS, of language that states that a certain “belligerence” is punishable as a threat, that the mention of certain words or subjects may well raise eyebrows, where are we left – the people who really do want the United States to dismantle itself? 


Why am I not allowed to criticize my country? Why am I not allowed to acknowledge my perception of this tragic failure of a brief endeavor in world history?

Does the fact that I am thinking about ALL OF THIS from a Big Time perspective make any difference at all?

Countries come and go, systems change.  Dysfunctional systems inevitably destroy themselves. This is Law.

However, what is also Law is the oppression of idea and expression for the purpose of regimenting culture in such a way that Systems and Profit and Power become the dominant determinants of what is right and what is wrong. What’s good for the gander, is…

Really bad for someone like me, who tends to get a little caught up in ideas. I toe some fine lines. Because I am good at taking perspective, I often write things that are intended to be triggering to anyone who holds a “surveilling for Systems” perspective. I do this because I think it’s funny and ridiculous, the thought that poetry is terrorism. 
The world was built on the breaking of ideas. 


You know, I probably sound somewhat paranoid at times. I’m not. If you call the FBI, email the Pope, and talk to Adbusters in the span of one month, documented in 2010, if your last name was once Faruq, if you post clumsy Arabic, if you know anybody anywhere, if you intentionally and with great verve assert your certainty that the Systems of Profit and Power must be reformed, dismantled, etc. etc.

…and if you set the whole thing up as such…because you thought this was a brilliant idea, a good story…

I prepare myself for every possible eventuality, even the strong possibility that nothing will happen. It’s all a big experiment.  I have measured the possible outcomes. In all my thinking about this, I always held a certainty that things would be okay. 
I didn’t really reckon with the fact that the Government has the power to claim whatever it wants and to enforce that claim however they see fit. I didn’t reckon with the fact that they might not find me so “special” as I’d hoped.

I am, however, fairly special though and they know this. I wrote it all in.
If they bother me, people will know and they will look at these ideas…which are not ideas, but the opposite of an idea…a deconstruction of idea, a formula for taking apart the elements and disproving their validity, thus nullifying the notion as a whole.

So, I really can say whatever I want here and either way, they lose. If they do nothing, they lose, because good ideas travel in flock formation and the fences are burning down. If they do something, they lose…because intelligent people plan wisely…and they lose doubly because it’d be pretty hilarious to try to bring someone in on conspiracy charges based on this absurdist albatross that holds a subtext designed to draw surveillance and facebook comments that are noted to be intentionally incendiary in order to prove a point…a trainwreck of simulacra.

Then there is the unfortunate reality that if someone were to push the wrong buttons, meaning toe the line a little too far, bother the wrong person…well, they could just swoop in and give you a lion’s dose of Haldol and wreck your brain in some cell.

Maybe I should go back to writing about drawing?
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The Conversation
The little girl sat in her great-great grandmother’s chair. The stove was on and hot air roared into the room. Her mother was framed by the front door and was speaking with her hands.

“So, the space for the presentation is here.” Making a half-circle, she explained, “You’ll be here and then your brother and I will sit in the chairs.”

The little girl nodded an affirmative “Okay.” and smiled. They were playing a game. The day was cold and they were giving presentations.

“Here’s how you speak about ideas,” the mother had changed her voice,“you sound bright and informative or,” dropping her tone, “very, very serious.”

“Mom, calm down.” The girl’s brother was on the stairs. He sounded bored.

“So, you first you say what the presentation is going to be about and then you talk about your idea, but you don’t talk too fast and you have to remember that the audience doesn’t know anything about your idea.”

“What’s an idea?” The girl was rocking lopsided in the old chair.

“An idea,” the mother paused, her hands behind her back, then brightened. “An idea,” she let go of her hands. “An idea is a set of information that creates meaning and sense of something. Ideas are like explanations or plans. Like if you got an idea to build something, you would think about what it might look like and you would think about what you might need to build it and you would think about…ideas can be complicated.”

The little girl shifted and looked right at her mother.  “What if you had an idea that someone else had?”

“Well, it’s not nice to take other people’s ideas.  Really, though, ideas can’t belong to anyone. Anyone can think of anything. Sometimes people do think of the same exact thing. They probably don’t think about it in exactly the same way though.”

“Yeah, but, what if you had an idea and someone took it.”

“Like an idea for a project or something?”

“Yeah. What if you had an idea and the other person had the same idea, or what if you told someone about your idea and then they made it their idea.”

“Good ideas don’t belong to anybody.”

“Yeah,” the boy on the stairs spoke up, “it’s only if they make money or something.”

“Well, and you should always give people credit for their ideas.”

“Yeah, but what if you didn’t know it was someone else’s idea!?” The little girl was beaming. She knew it was a good question.

“Well, sometimes ideas get big and lots of people get the same idea at the same time.” The girl’s mother was having fun. She was standing in the presentation area. She held up her hands and laced her fingers together. “Sometimes, ideas just sort of get into our heads and we don’t know where they came from.”

“Any idea comes from somewhere,” the boy was standing by the stove now.

“Sometimes ideas come from lots of little places and you don’t know where they came from, especially ideas about ideas.”