"Homeland Security Ate My Speech"

Ariel Dorfman uruknet.info "Homeland Security Ate My Speech":

"On December 27th, at 11:31 in the morning to be precise, agents of the Homeland Security Department detained me at Miami International Airport and proceeded to impound a speech I was supposed to deliver in Washington, D.C. to a plenary session of the Modern Language Association of America.

Well, not quite.

It is true that this is what I told some two thousand university professors of language and literature who had gathered at a forum on the "role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century" in the Washington Hilton. I explained to them that the actions of the Department of Homeland Security had made it impossible for me to convey the words I had originally written and that instead I would narrate the strange, drawn-out conversation I had held with those two intimidating men in a windowless room at the airport as they discussed my speech on how exactly to think ourselves out of the catastrophe of our era?" (more)