A left-wing President presides over a corrupt party, and though she has never been indicted for wrongdoing, she is put on trial by a Congressional impeachment commission strewn with crooks. The government, in a move that will stand as a historic electoral betrayal, tries to impose orthodox austerity measures after running a presidential campaign based on leftist ideals. Senators prepare to impeach a President based on budgetary maneuvers that, not so long ago, many of them approved. One feels we didn’t need to be here, living out this farce.
AfD’s worldview, too, is vague enough to appeal to an array of voter groups once considered mutually exclusive: not just confirmed neo-Nazis, but disenfranchised former Communists, eurosceptics, libertarians, and social conservatives who decry abortion as well as gender studies departments at state universities. Forty-five percent of AfD supporters think of themselves as centrists. (Nearly 75 percent are men.) Their broad appeal is based on the floating signifiers familiar to any populist campaign. “Germany for Germans” is just one rallying cry. The most egregious is probably supporters’ adoption of the motto Wir sind das Volk, or “we are the people,” which every citizen knows as the chant of dissent and democratic inclusivity among the East German protestors who precipitated the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Bed Down Location projects images of several night skies—over Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen—onto the ceiling of a dimly lit square space. There is a platform in the middle of the room on which you lie down and then look up at the skies. The title refers to the sleeping place of a military or intelligence target, and so what you’re supposed to do while lying on the platform and looking up is imagine that you are the potential target, that a drone might be circling far overhead and preparing to end your life.
"What happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you?"
He began to wonder if there was something to Ayub’s notion that the pain was partly mental, seeing how it had jumped after the diagnosis from the doctor. At home, on his bed, enclosed by a life-size poster of Tendulkar on one side and of Michael Jackson on the other—old posters from the age of fourteen he had never taken down or replaced—he began to read the book Ayub had given him, The Religion of Pain.
