Get Out of Jail Free
by the Editor
EAP thinks a lot about prisons. In fact, it’s named for a film by the director Luis Bunuel — Exterminating Angel — where a lot of rich people sit down to dinner and then find afterwards that they can’t leave the house. No explanation for why not — they just can’t. They can talk to people outside the house, but they can’t leave. Terror follows. And atrocities. Next morning, just as mysteriously as they are trapped, they’re free. The whole town goes into a church to give thanks, and then — nobody can leave the church.
The film ends as a flock of sheep run out of the church doors, baaing.
So. This month our writers look at all sorts of prisons…at all sorts of pens and traps. Alex Cox goes through airports and doesn’t like what he sees. Stephanie Sides looks at the Prison of Security. Sean Watkin at being a Prisoner of Love. Harvey Harrison at the Prison of reducing everything to abstract principles, forgetting the human being. Gaea Yudron at ways of dealing with the prison of depression. Mike Madrid offers a hilarious, if tragic, look at the prison of working for a hugely successful, hugely hip corporation. Bob Irwin’s photos of Safetyville pretty much tell their own story. And everybody with a teenage daughter will want to have a look at Rebecca Harrison’s report from that particular prison of confusion…or maybe not.
Most importantly, we need to be reminded about the prisons we keep ourselves in every day — the prisons of how we look at things, restricting ourselves to what is and keeping ourselves shut away from what might be. The economist Bernard Lietaer, interviewed by EAP’s John Merryman , makes a clear case for how we’re trapped by a present group illusion about our monetary system, and how a simple shift in point of view could bring enormous social change. Really great stuff, and I urge you to read it.
Floyd Webster Rudmin does us a similar service. A professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Tromsǿ, in Norway, he talks simply about how Conspiracy Theory, far from being the realm of the Nutter, may well be a more adult way of looking at the world…and an alternative to passively swallowing our news from a compromised media. Why shouldn’t we, as free citizens, question and compare facts and make judgments for ourselves? Floyd argues that to do anything less is to keep our understanding of the world, and our ability to act in that world, in chains.
Finally, Clarinda Harriss, in Poetry Makes the Cut , writes about her experiences teaching poetry in prison…and how she was involved in the case of Walter Lomax , a writer serving thirty-eight years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. She tells about the day a judge set Walter free, and the poem the judge read aloud. Walter makes his own comments, too. He’s not wasting any of his time now; among other projects, he’s setting up a mentoring system for at-risk kids. When I asked him about that, he said, “Well, I had the luxury when I was inside of having the time and the ability to look around and figure out just exactly what the perfect project would be.”
We went on talking, but I was really stopped at the phrase, “I had the luxury when I was inside of having the time…” That’s a man, I thought, who wasn’t in prison even when he was. That cheered me up. Gave me hope that we can all get out of jail. Once we know how to find the door.
Welcome back.