Thrashing goose bumps infest the porous external organ, which wraps itself wholeheartedly around my entirety. The knots in my stomach lunge outward, finding themselves trapped, as I stare at the packed suitcases on my bedroom floor.

By the time you read this I’ll be studying government in Columbus while interning at the local National Public Radio station, WCBE.

Throughout the semester I will observe this illustrious entity known as government in its natural habitat and saunter through its dens and caverns, my dress shoes clinking against the cool, shining floors.

These close encounters with Ohio’s indigenous population of legislators will allow me to offer you a more in-depth analysis of the ambiguity that is politics. And they will help me to answer many questions.

Do collared shirts — as most cynics contend — really cut off some of the blood flow to politicians’ brains? Or is the dead weight that is bipartisanship to blame for the incessant opening and closing of so many mouths saying the same things sideways, backwards and upside-down?

This oral fuel is constantly fed to the media machine in momentary increments of importance and then forgotten when some uneducated believer (Pastor Terry Jones, everyone’s new favorite Floridian) simply closes his eyes and sucks into his ears some of the sideways or backwards, igniting the things he doesn’t understand as if demolishing something will afford him self-satisfaction.

People like Jones who are afraid of books are usually afraid of their own minds. Historically, these people have tried to suppress literature and any thought process that conflicts with their own thoughtlessness.

“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama,” wrote Henry Miller in his famously banned book, “Tropic of Cancer.”

Because it was amid scenes of sex and deprivation, which apparently offended the decent individual, the poetry of this book was lost on the “pure minded” who wander aimlessly down the perfectly paved streets of their own denial.

But it obviously isn’t just a book that Jones is afraid of. It’s a government based on religious ideology that causes his blood to circulate frantically.

Maybe Jones should acknowledge the religious sentiment that infiltrates his own country’s politics. Maybe Jones should learn to separate extremists such as himself from the rest of the population rather than spread hate and intolerance in the name of his higher power and for the sake of his country. He should sift through books that people have blamed the world’s problems on, including the Quran, and find the poetry.

Now that this digression has officially lapsed into a full-fledged abortion of topical consistency, I’ll leave you anticipating more coherent rants throughout my anthropological study of state government. I’ll try to answer some of the questions I have, but more than likely I’ll just come up with more of them.

Nicole Hennessy is a senior magazine journalism major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].