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Our spirits were uncharacteristically lifted by this.

Jaime Ocampo says he proudly tells people he meets in the street that “the police are different now - we read”... “I think of myself as [Don] Quixote and my buddy, my partner, as Sancho Panza, who has to watch my back,” says Pedro Martinez, referring to the Spanish classic his class read last year in a digested version. “They were a little crazy, but we are a little crazy, too.”

Now granted an appreciation of Cervantes may not dissuade the average Mexican police officer from throwing you into a cell until you can raise enough money to bribe your way out -- a practice for which they are currently notorious. But we here at DHAIP are adamantly in favor of this program, and demand that it be put into practice in the USA. Lacking any possibility of a philosopher-king, we can at least insist on a scholar-policeman. Who can be cold-hearted enough for the unjustified use of lethal force after ingesting, say, the exuberant humanism of Whitman? A policeman who can say, "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself," is the policeman whom we at DHAIP will trust to carry a firearm and billy club. What cop would beat a man to death in a jail-cell after digesting the moral anguish of Dostoevsky, or violate a prisoner's civil rights after identifying with Ellison's Invisible Man?

But why not that philosopher-king after all? Let us insist on literature courses for our president. Let us posit Bush reading Kafka. Hunched in the Oval Office as he has been for uninterrupted hours -- Cheney's running things today -- his eyes and mouth hang open as Joseph K.'s intolerable plight becomes his own. He sets The Trial down for a moment, to ponder what he has read. "Gosh," he says at last -- his thoughts have wandered to Guantanamo and the secret European prisons -- "I guess maybe the mental anguish of uncertainty can be a form of torture, and I too have been complicit in the unthinking horror of modernity." He presses the buzzer for more Cheetos; the bag on his desk is cheerlessly empty. Suddenly a sense of the vast building around him sends him into a reeling nausea of self-doubt. What happens in all these offices? What is all this work that's being done, and according to whose plan, and why? He wonders: why doesn't he know more? Late that night he will wander aimlessly through the deserted halls and rooms, picking through memos, blinking at foreign names and unfamiliar places, wondering of what significance he is, or anything at all....

That, we submit, is not a man to go around starting wars at the drop of a hat. Let him now proceed to Beckett.


"We've never been 'stay the course,' George."
--George Bush to George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week"

"Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something..."
--Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable