I spoke to my friend Victor at the gym yesterday morning. Now, Victor likes to take the high road and loves to crow about certain political subjects, he is brash and loud. Also, one of the reasons I and many others tolerate these characteristics is that he is Nigerian and his voice is deep, resonant with the music of his beautiful accent, it is an experience to simply listen. He is a Mock Conservative when it suits him. So, yesterday as I said hello he started to sing the praises of President Obama and the bin Laden assassination: What do you think about your President and the death of Osama? or something to that effect. I immediately got angry about being cornered and told him that if he defended that position, that the President has the right to order the murder of anyone, even an American citizen, that I never wanted to hear him mention the Law, as Conservatives are constantly doing, as a defense of their self-righteous  punitive political dispositions, on all kinds of political matters. I mentioned Carl Schmitt the Nazi jurist, as demonstrative of the deeply held notion of the exception and the relation of that to the destructive operative political idea of American Exceptionalism. Well, that brought I’m disappointed in you Steve in a very condescending patronizing way. I mumbled something about not really caring what he thought and went toward my first workout station and ignored him. He came up to me as I was moving from one station to another and announced to me that he was going to speak to me for thirty seconds about his disappointment with my ingesting the political propaganda of Michael Moore and unnamed others. I pointedly told him that I have my own mind and that I can think for myself.  It occurred to me that sometimes people want you to simply mirror their opinion as proof of your membership in the clan, in our case to celebrate our mutual membership in Clan America by celebrating the death of bin Laden. I made it a point to call out to Victor as I left the gym and waved to him and he waved back and said goodbye. We humans are very complicated beings.