Peter McLaren, The Smell of a Dying Republic, LA Progressive, Oct 13, 2026
Courts, universities, newspapers, and elections may survive even as their democratic purpose is stripped away. The danger is not simply political collapse, but learning to accept it as ordinary life.
[…]
I was chosen to serve as a tour guide for Michel Foucault when he visited Toronto. There is something almost comical about the memory now: the young man who had travelled by Greyhound bus and hitchhiked through a continent, carrying his questions in the same battered luggage as his clothes, suddenly entrusted with guiding one of the great philosophical interrogators of the twentieth century through a city whose secrets were written in back alleys, bars, and the hidden cartography of desire. Hitchhiking teaches you that the world is not quite the orderly place it pretends to be.
[…]
Foucault understood that beneath the respectable surface of a city another city is always breathing. He had spent years investigating the invisible architecture of power: the rules that enter our bodies, the categories that sort our desires, the institutions that teach us which lives are normal and which must be hidden in the shadows. Toronto had its own underground passages through this architecture. The Barracks, at 56 Widmer Street, belonged to that secret geography, a place associated with the city’s gay underground and with forms of desire that respectable society preferred not to acknowledge. I remember the encounter not as a lecture delivered by a philosopher to a grateful audience, but as a collision between the life I had stumbled through and the questions that had animated his work. The road had taught me that human beings are never quite the creatures their official descriptions claim them to be. Foucault gave that intuition a sharper edge: perhaps the borders around our lives are not natural boundaries at all, but fences built by history, guarded by habit, and mistaken for the horizon.
[…]
