This is the greater fear of states or of their governments is not that some fringe group will become enraged and violently act out; such behavior only strengthens the power of the state and of its police. (And J. Edgar Hoover is hardly the only law-enforcement official who has sought to promote violence in order to increase his own power.) But things fall apart when the normal flora—the Third Estate in revolutionary France; US college students during the 1960s—are at war with the organism of which they are an integral part.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: bacteria, FBI, Freud, history of science, medicine, Nietzsche, poetry, politics, science