Homeland Security Ate My Speech--by Ariel Dorfman

[kpete]

Homeland Security Ate My Speech
by Ariel Dorfman

On December 27th, at 11:31 in the morning to be precise, agents of the Homeland Security Department detained me at Miami International Airport and proceeded to impound a speech I was supposed to deliver in Washington, D.C. to a plenary session of the Modern Language Association of America.

Well, not quite.

It is true that this is what I told some two thousand university professors of language and literature who had gathered at a forum on the "role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century" in the Washington Hilton. I explained to them that the actions of the Department of Homeland Security had made it impossible for me to convey the words I had originally written and that instead I would narrate the strange, drawn-out conversation I had held with those two intimidating men in a windowless room at the airport as they discussed my speech on how exactly to think ourselves out of the catastrophe of our era?

The loss of that speech was, of course, a gigantic literary fabrication. All through my talk, I provided innumerable clues that this was indeed a tongue-in-cheek attempt to embody the contradictions of being an intellectual in our present time of turmoil. I wanted to use this "method" to obliquely lay out my ideas without launching into the sort of preachy manifesto I dislike. I made references to Borges and Nabokov, those literary masters of deception and apocryphal manuscripts. I speculated that the agents were part of a special (and hitherto secret) division of Homeland Security dedicated to weeding out alien scholars with dangerous academic leanings.

I gave one of these agents a tall and gangly physique as well as Trotsky-like glasses and wondered whether he was not exquisitely versed in post-modern theory and subaltern studies. I detailed his derisory comments regarding my central thesis that American intellectuals could learn from the Chilean struggle against dictatorship in their attempt to confront the erosion of freedom in the United States -- that it was necessary to examine the lessons of that other September 11th, the day in 1973 when Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown. I pushed my description to absurd levels, making those men grill me about possible Chilean sleeper cells bent on revenge against the CIA for its role in that military coup against Chile's democracy.


read the whole story at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=49432