Michel Foucault recounts an 1840 work in which French psychiatrist, Dr. Leurer discusses how he treated one of his mad patients. Leurer took his patient to a shower room to detail and confess his madness. Following the patient’s recounting, the doctor tells the patient “all that […] is madness. Promise me not to believe in it anymore” (147). Although after hesitation, the patient promises, Leurer turns on a cold shower after which the patient assents, “Yes, yes! I am mad!” (147) The interrogation continues and the patient concedes, “Yes, I recognize that I am mad […] because you are forcing…
To address the tragic decline of our planet’s biodiversity and restore the planet’s stability, David Attenborough calls for rewilding the world in his book A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future. Attenborough illustrates how our unsustainable mindset and lifestyle of being “apart from nature” has precipitated a slow-motion disaster of our collective death (loc. 1,077). The Anthropocene geological stratum signals this lack of biodiversity with markers of our time: “plastic, plutonium from nuclear activity, and a worldwide distribution of the bones of domesticated chickens” (Attenborough, loc. 1,947).
April 2020
On April 7, 2020 at a small business relief update meeting, Trump touted that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the US economy was “the greatest economy that anybody has ever had.” Despite his hyperbolic characterization, the pandemic jeopardized the economic system within just a few months. To protect the economy, Trump adopted militant rhetoric and proclaimed himself a “wartime president” “fighting an invisible enemy.” Trump even boasted the enemy would “soon be in full retreat” and claimed “we must sacrifice together.” …
Talitha May
a creative who writes about wicked problems, philosophy, rhetoric, and…
