U.S. Enacting Kafka’s “Trial”

Expect another gap in The Picket Line as I’m heading off-the-grid and into the desert for the Burning Man festival in Nevada .


“Under the abominable Patriot Act, Franz Kafka’s The Trial is coming true in America, in comic and tragic versions, just under the mass media radar, just off the front page. Wounded, we’re fast becoming the Saddam Husseins, the Robert Mugabes we pretend to deplore. The Department of Justice reported 1,182 arrests under the Patriot Act; from those prisoners, its inspector general received 1,072 accusations that FBI agents and other department employees had violated their civil liberties, and in many cases physically abused them. That’s not a left-wing rumor. That’s a gulag, a secret police state that’s encroaching, case by case, on the smug affluent America where most of us live.”

―from Counter Intelligence by Hal Crowther Durham Independent