Midsummer Night's Dream

Last days of summer, hot, humid. I toss and turn as nightmarish sprites dance through the wee hours. I hallucinate: Baseball suspended whilst Fenway Park taken over by still-Rolling Stones. Arnold Schwarzenegger stages political fundraiser in stadium full of moss-free but confused Red Sox fans. Score tied in cliffhanger twixt Frat Boy and The Caliphate. In what is surely my imagination, Pat Robertson issues a fatwa from the televised pulpit of The 700 Club calling for Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez to be assassinated. British Home Secretary Charles Clarke says he "will be publishing and then acting upon new ways of dealing with preachers of intolerance and hatred." New York's Mayor Bloomberg cancels permit for street party at which twenty artists planned to paint graffiti on metal surfaces resembling subway cars. The good mayor fears it will incite criminal behavior and says that "defacing subway cars is hardly a joke." A jauntily cavalier activist judge restores party despite obvious slippery slope of what might be incited by stagings of Oedipus Rex or Hamlet.

At homeland insecurity, new categories of suspect profiles bubble forth in government advisory after government advisory. Race, ethnicity, religion, a fortiori--but the list churns on with up-to-the-minute brands of scoundrel like an endless ticker tape: Unusually clean-shaven men, men with long beards, people wearing heavy clothing or shoes with thick soles or big hats, women carrying large handbags, unknown delivery men bearing oversized packages, kids with backpacks or violin cases, cell-phone users, sweaty people, cool-as-a-sly-cucumber people, people with cameras, people praying aloud, people who blink too much or not enough, men with thick waists, women pretending to be pregnant, people who spend too much time in public libraries, men reeking of rosewater--on and on it goes. Most recently, we are to be on the lookout for the great masses of the unshaved, unwashed and unperfumed, to wit, "vagrants who seem out of place"--an almost calculatedly redundant designation--for fear they might be terrorists posing as "homeless people, shoeshiners, street vendors or street sweepers."

In once celestial cities, all of whose denizens are now deemed dangerous, one hears calls for house-to-house searches, shoot-to-kill policies and protection from "too many" civil rights. Debates rage about "political correctness" rather than whether this isn't beginning to look like martial law, or an effective immunization of police from discriminatory behavior, scattershot decision-making as well as deadly mistake. On the other side of the pond, London police send the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician regrettably executed by official mistake, a sympathy note with a $27,000 check tucked in, as "compensation." The part that really brings tears to the eyes is a touchingly generous little coda assuring her that "if a claim were brought in future, then the sum offered today would be taken as being on account of any other payments."

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