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Keeping IT Out
Why we should do away with all public places
by Greg Benchwick

I’ve really begun to hate everything public: Public busses with their surly drivers and sticky customers, candied seats and bubble-gum rails; libraries made for lounging street lizards and hypocritical intellectual hoods; parks with their goddamned fucking trees – so tall, so arrogant – the fucking sidewalks and public spaces with their skateboarding punks and gruesomely green grass. And of course there’s always the itinerant and frightfully exuberant youth in revolt that seems to grow out there like a germ. You must have to be young (or degenerate) to spend so much time out there with IT lurking around every corner.

I admit that IT chafes me. And that YOU terrify me. That’s why I drive a Hummer so big and burly you’d need to be 6 foot 4 and have x-ray vision to see inside. You can’t see past the walls of my 8000-square-foot McMansion; you can’t see into the marbled halls of my boy Bill’s private school; you can’t see into my country club or my doctor’s office. And this is how I like it. This is how I designed it from the ground up.

To keep YOU out! To keep IT out!

To protect my life, every second of it – from Lunesta-soaked dreams (why hello there Mr. Butterfly) to the 19th hole and the champagne and caviar cart at Chez Pierre. Each day I find a new layer of insulation in hopes that the putrid wind of the plebeians not waft over my fence or through my tinted window. But IT always manages to get in.

I say we privatize everything. Private parks so well manicured you could perform surgery out there. Oh wait, I guess I have the club for that. Well then, let’s do away with busses and libraries and the goddamned sidewalks with their never-ending booby-traps – cracks designed to break mother’s back and crap left with one sole purpose: to shit on my parade. If you can’t afford your own ride and a few hundred a year at Barnes & Noble than what kind of American are you really?

I got all this mafia-like protection – from the SUV to the towering walls of my gated community – with money. I suggest you get some sometime. Then I might even consider letting YOU in. But IT is not invited.

more:

Love Politics | Spaces Between Places | Public Places | Mexico | Issue No. One |  Mexico 2008