In an effort to fight the threats invisible and deadly invaders pose to our civilization, many of us are willing to relinquish control of our own bodies. Giving up all claims on our last bastion of personal space, we invite the experts under our skin to seek and destroy any microscopic invaders. For better or worse, we have traded the invasion of the drug and the disease for the invasion of the doctor and the court.

In the war against invasion from within, the body has become the ultimate test site of civilian loyalties. Under panoptic eye of medicine, a person's otherwise invisible body parts are proven to harbor otherwise invisible enemies. Intentional deceit is equally hard to hide; the scale will show if we cheat on our diets; routine tests at the doctor's office betray any other slips like spending much time in the sun, or too little on the stairmaster. Urine tests can show our employers if we have taken the wrong kind of drugs. School boards and job boards somehow get a hold of supposedly "confidential" AIDS test results; a person who tests positive is considered to be as much a threat to public safety as any Soviet spy ever was.

For the truly interpolated, there are now a barrage of home test kits designed to help conscientious citizens monitor their own bodies as often as they like. The average healthy person is now encouraged to test her body fat, her cholesterol count and blood pressure at her own convenience and from the "privacy" of her own home. In just a few minutes, she can know whether or not her body shows any early signs of treason.

If any minute part of the body offends, its owner can turn herself in to a doctor or some other expert, asking to be fixed or at least forgiven. As a combination confessional and interrogation room, the doctor's office is a place of fear, but it is also one of redemption. In the charts and the bottles, there is always the promise we can save ourselves by submitting completely to the higher power of modern medicine. This is the catch: the remedies work only under complete submission. We must tell all, show all, admit everything, or the doctor won't be able to help us. Sometimes I wonder, how much control can I give up and still be mine?

In Montana, federal agents and militiamen are still at a standoff. The conflict, in combination with incidents in Waco and Oklahoma City, as well as the capture of the supposed Unabomber, has aroused fears that our fellow citizens may be more dangerous to us than any outside enemy. When the militia issue was discussed on "Town Hall", some viewers pondered what would happen if that weird old man at the end of the block took up arms against the rest of the neighborhood. Looking back on Waco (I know someone out there still remembers), others considered what the FBI would do to them and their families if they began to look like an internal enemy. Most of us, at one point or another, end up wondering exactly who the enemy is.

Those who can't figure out which side they should be more afraid of may end up blaming bilingual children or Blacks or gays or anyone else who wasn't specifically mentioned in the original constitution. They may decide that the safest intercourse is none at all, and lock themselves in their own compounds and amass their own arsenals. Or they may step cautiously out of their isolation to reinvent communities held together by more than fear of what's outside, communities that are safe because they are free--free to color outside party lines without being labeled as (and feeling like) traitors.

American life and politics has become (or maybe it always has been) a twisted, two-sided seesaw-over-an-alligator-pit of a system. Anyone who wants to get involved in the future of the country chooses a side, and arms herself to fight with that side. The FBI and the Freemen, the managers and the workers, the right-to-lifers and the free-choicers all stare at each other across the political chasm, screaming, "this far and no farther, you damned liberal/conservative!" Confident in the inevitability of a final showdown (in which one side or the other will gain definitive control over policy-making machine), each side amasses alliances, never realizing that even when amassed for protection, unilateral alliances can only lead to war.

Political debate is important; in fact I think America would be better of if we had more of it. But debate means arguing with each other face-à-face over individual issues, not declaring war on one another in an effort to advance larger-than-life-life-sized package deals offered by senile politicians. If we spent less time and energy policing ourselves and arming ourselves against ourselves, we might have more time and money to spend educating ourselves, vaccinating ourselves, feeding ourselves, and avoiding unnecessary civil war.

House

Body

Defensible Space

Residential Arms Race

Invasion

Conceptualizing Space