“Any tyranny’s manipulation of the media is an index of its fears.” — John Berger, 2002

A recoil. Not a boom. No mood. Only fizzle. A quiet burn to ash in a street in Brooklyn. Chicago, Duluth, Miami, too. Watch effigies on the news. An other kind of smoldering under an American boot, prison-made. “Many companies can now take advantage of UNICOR’s modern manufacturing capabilities, talented labor pool and nationwide locations. . .” Berger observed that Palestinian boys only move their thumbs, not their bodies, when playing marbles. A result. From growing up confined.

When I was a boy, I overheard my mother on the corded kitchen phone say that my live-in cousin was still eating with his arm around his bowl as he had done in prison. He is back in prison now, and the lives from which he has taken so much leave me little sympathy for the lack in his. Thus goes another familiar, not-so-nuclear, American family.

The name predates the power. Historically referencing father, mother, and their orbiting children, nuclear-family has come to evoke a particular post-war Americana. Eggleston’s bright grocery stores. Shore’s expansive parking lots filled with fine gasoline automobiles for all. And all in great light. Hido comes through later, shoots photos from his black SUV. Nightly sprawl. Isolation homes. Still, that cul-de-sac archipelago is populated with warm windows aglow. Houses with television hearths. Fathers mashes the remote. This season’s oranges and lemons and lavenders for mama’s polyvinyl, polyethylene, polychloride mise-en-scène. Cooling towers in the background. Promises of clean energy, analog commodities in surplus, and a hell of a stylish design.

The kids are adults now. They light big fireworks and grill. Pop and sizzle. Federal agents stomp across a park in Los Angeles. They take a man during surgery. They grab a family inside the courthouse. One incident after another is explained away by mistake. Incompetence. Rouge actors. In another context, these individual aggressions would be called acts of war perpetuated on an innocent public by local terrorist cells. But that language is reserved for somewhere well past the towers, far beyond America. Whiskey Tango Fries and burgers, ignore the location of this military action. And serve another. Bored of fireworks, the kids go inside.

Bonds fall apart. Thumb through. A message and a new promise is brought to you by, promoted to you by, spoken to you by, relic powered, nostalgia sprung artificially predicted word slop. Get a hand around that bowl. Packets arrive from an imaginary place—got it in the internet—and they are filled with a real gray decor. Inoffensive. Unobtrusive. Sold by the hundred thousands and shelved in houses increasingly unnecessary to leave. Too risky besides. Thud on the window. Sky bursts as bomb emulations. Spectacular traces to all this freedom.

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