Worse, just like lackluster turncoats in other minority communities, guys like Sullivan, if they played their cards right, could parley their demented but nonetheless outspoken opposition to their own claims to full citizenship into lucrative and influential spots in the burgeoning Wingnut Welfare industry, at think tanks, the Supreme Court, or somewhat less glamorously, as editors of formerly respectable magazines.  Out of nowhere, a fresh-faced upstart like Sullivan could be the toast of the town, or rather, Village, because even though he was as power-fellating and contemptuously dismissive of the concerns of ordinary people as the Washington Post editorial page, he was, well, gay. My sister and I used to joke about how cynically, say, Clarence Thomas was initially marketed to to the neoconfederate Republicans who so love him today; “a darky with a difference,” we called it, and it seems to have reached its comic apogee with Herman Cain today.

In Sullivan’s case, though, he was never very different at all.  Like most queens minted in the late 70′s or early 80′s, he was smitten by Reagan and Thatcher, dripping in elitism, and reflexively opposed to the hippies who, through their (by him) unappreciated earlier efforts, had done a whole lot to make his charmed, improbable life even possible, despite what he continues to decry as their unfortunate fashion choices.  In that sense, he’s just another bitchy queen making fun of somebody’s outfit.  Yawn.

But, unlike Clarence Thomas, he does occasionally have to look out the window, and grudgingly admit error a times when it  becomes too unseemly and discrediting not to.  There are no lifetime appointments, after all, in our increasingly pathetic and ultra-consolidated media, so Andrew (full name; so unusual for a gay man…) has had to recant his support, always much too late, for everything from George W. Bush to the Iraq war.   But now, for what I think is the first time, he had to recant his contempt for something quite central to who he is, by his own admission.  In a Daily Beast posting over the weekend, he left me gobsmacked when he wrote:

The outright lies are always a little riskier, but not by all that much.  Take, for example, the idea that our Wall Street fellating, oil-driller coddling, war escalating President Obama is, somehow in his heart of hearts, a Kenyan anti-colonialist.  Lots of people, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were unembarrassed to pretend they believed such garbage, but Forbes Magazine, quite understandably, took quite a bit of heat for publishing Dinesh D’Souza’s execrable and delusional cover “story” about how Obama’s  (unfortunately nonexistent) “anger” stems from the sinister influence of his father, whom he barely knew and quite clearly doesn’t come within a mile of emulating.  Though even some conservatives quietly distanced themselves from such baffling nonsense, the Fox-addled, who pride themselves on never reading such elitist (and wordy, too…) publications as Forbes, undoubtedly nodded their jowly heads in hearty approval.  Ditto the horseshit about FEMA Camps, gun confiscations, reparations, and on and on.  So a few cops got killed here and there; the rich got their tax cuts, which was the important thing, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

The conjectural lies are by far the bigger problem.  From Mushroom Clouds to World Government, these cannot ever be exposed for what they are because, well, you never know, and no one in the media has the common sense and professional standards to come right out and say that whatever drastic and stupid action Republicans are about to take is based upon pure fantasy of things that will never, ever, happen.  After all, it’s conjecturally (if not exactly theoretically) possible that global warming is a myth, low taxes on the rich create prosperity, and “small” government means spending a trillion a year on “National Security,” so why not let a bunch of Republican charlatans so obviously beholden to those who profit from such ridiculous notions repeatedly say so, unchallenged, on television each day?  Fox went to court in the 90′s and won a landmark case that established that knowingly lying to one’s audience was protected under the First Amendment, and after that, Republicans were off to the races, as we’ve seen.

The best kind of conjectural lies (from the Republicans’ standpoint), and the ones that inevitably turn out to be the most damaging to Americans, are the “Opposite Day” conjectural lies, because they’re front-loaded to put Democrats into their seemingly favorite political dilemma: heads we lose, tails Republicans win.  These tend to turn out predictably, as they did when Sarah Palin, defending the current Death Panelists of the health insurance industry, said Democrats, sometime in a future of her own imaging, would cut off care to the gravely ill the way for-profit insurance companies do every day, facts be damned, and it worked.  To this day, a substantial number of people still think we have the best  health care in the world, when we’re 37th, and spend more than anybody else.

Health Care Reform lies, of course, are relatively minor in their harmful effects compared to much more insidious opposite day lies like, “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”  Ever since those words were so repeatedly uttered, the wars they credulously cheered on have, not for nothing, radicalized a generation of Muslims around the globe, just as surely as the first Gulf War radicalized Osama bin Laden, and the resulting deadly spiral of violence inexorably worsens year after bloody year.  Never mind that it was the peaceniks, the Unserious hippies and civil-liberties absolutists who dismissed such war-mongering xenophobia as the contemptible proto-fascism it was who were right in the end; no one remembers any such helpful facts because all of them, from Ashleigh Banfield to Phil Donahue, were summarily hounded off the airwaves by the end of 2003, only to return when it was far too late.

The mother of all opposite day conjectural lies, of course, is being rolled out as we speak, in part I think to cover up for the rest of them, which is that Julian Assange of Wikileaks has “blood on his hands.”    Like most opposite day lies, this one attempts to paper over its absurdity by choosing a person who can be conveniently demonized, rather than the less-refutable principle they stand for, because that’s a lot easier.  You know the drill:  if Michael Moore/Al Gore/Insert Truth Teller Here are for it, I’m agin’.   And just like any other under-60 male (older if you’re Republican) Assange does have a sex life, which must be ripe for exploitation in some way or other, at least  if nothing better comes up.  As usual, creating comic book villains beats coming up with arguments to refute them, and thus the bloodiest hands around are now feverishly clutching their pearls at the horror of it all.

Why things that haven’t and probably will never happen are to be feared and prevented at any cost, while things that are happening, every day, are dismissed as the errant rantings of people who just don’t know any better is a question our media ought to answer, but for obvious reasons, won’t.   No one could have predicted, we’ve heard ad nauseam, what actually happened, but yet they predicted, with disastrous consequences, a lot of things that didn’t, but well, you never know.  Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, but that’s still a considerably better record than most Republicans boast.

Someone ought to alert the media.

As the Nixon Administration collapsed under its own criminality, and with it both the draft and the Vietnam war, I felt that the clouds that had haunted my childhood had been lifted, and even if the prospect of getting rid of my older brother that way necessarily dimmed, that was still a very good thing.  The Church Commission hearings, which exposed the police state tactics of the FBI and the government in general led to important checks on government power, and here in Oregon marijuana had even been decriminalized for possession of less than an ounce.  Our Republican (!) Governor had passed the first Bottle Bill as well as landmark land use laws that protected forest and farmland from the sprawling development of the era, and one Republican Senator, Mark Hatfield, had been a staunch peace advocate, while the other, Bob Packwood, was outspokenly pro-choice, before that was cool.  (Later we found out Packwood might have had personal reasons for this stance…)

Then, along came Reagan, the first horseman of the apocalypse that is today.  Almost as soon as he took office, he made registration with Selective Service a condition of federal higher education aid, a clear signal that more wars were in the offing, and after his wife was lambasted for her extravagance and shallowness, she showed her serious side by revamping (and vastly escalating) Nixon’s failed “War on Drugs.”   Taxes were cut drastically on the rich as the military budget ballooned, and red ink flowed from sea to shining sea, necessitating savage cuts in social programs, and tales of “Welfare Queens” nipped whatever vestigial social responsibility that still existed in the middle class in the bud.

Worst of all, though, what Reagan ushered in was what I call, with a nod to one of my favorite authors of the era, David Wise, “The Politics of Lying.”   With his sunny talk of Morning in America, Reagan was able to unmoor political discourse from any connection with reality; facts did become, as he put it “stupid things,” and any politician who dared tell the truth to the American people would henceforth be rendered some sort of subversive party-pooper, and would lose.  Like his successors, he was able to cobble together the conniving rich and the religious bigots into and uneasy but enduring majority, trashing the country in the process, but what the hell?  It worked.

The “successes” of George Bush, which were many if you look at it from his party’s perspective, made Reagan look like an ineffectual semi-hippie by comparison.  Where Reagan denounced torture, Bush gloried in it.  Where Reagan attempted to salvage his legacy by negotiating arms treaties with the Soviets, Bush ostentatiously backed out of them.  And where Reagan had peppered his staff with quite a few venal cronies who personally profited by their government “service,” Bush’s administration had nothing but, right on up to his Vice President.

Being a natural optimist, I thought that these serial disasters would, once and for all, discredit the right and its dissolute and authoritarian ways, but I’ve been proven wrong once again.  Not only has Obama embraced the worst of Bush’s policies on civil liberties, war, and government overreach, but his economic policies are just as bad if not worse than those of his predecessor.  A serious primary challenge from the left, which will probably do nothing more than put a fanatical teabagger in the White House in 2012, seems the only, admittedly unappealing, prospect at this point.  All these years after the 70′s, Republicans have managed, with considerable Democratic support, to make voting all but irrelevant; we now have a choice of more of the same vs. more of the same, no matter how bad.  Makes me want to put on bellbottoms.

Today General David Petraeus had another statement, among the many he has made in his current 9/12 Media Blitz, that was about as enlightening as, say, coming out and declaring water to be wet, but the media nonetheless slavishly typed it up as though it were Holy Writ, or at least news.  It seems that General 0 for 2 thinks that a right-wing church in Florida burning the Koran, loudly and publicly, on Sept. 11, might be the sort of thing that could, well, possibly, anyway, “endanger our troops.”  Ya think?  That would, for the low-information reader, be the same troops that have been pointlessly annihilating Muslims willy-nilly for long about ten years, and thus are parked, targets on backs, all over the world where we don’t belong and will NEVER be accepted.  One wonders what led to this sorely belated epiphany.

You see, Petraeus never said such commie, Blame-America-First types of things when we decided to go into Iraq.  He certainly never uttered a discouraging word as we tortured, killed, and destroyed the homes and lives of millions of Muslims, nor did he feign umbrage as the country was consumed with anti-mosque hysteria for the last several months.  Bombings, torture, indefinite detentions, demonization, and outright calls for genocide fell like rain on his balding head for years, but during all that ol’ Dave had faith that Muslims, like ill-behaved dogs, just needed another whupping and they’d shape up.  White Man’s Burden, and all that.  But burning books?  That’s a bridge too far.  Maybe he was a librarian in a past life; the sort who doesn’t read anything but is nonetheless fanatical about keeping everybody quiet.

I guess, since according to the right, this adenoidal failure is now the Greatest General in the History of Mankind, people are supposed to listen to his unexpected deathbed conversion into a sort of global Miss Manners, and heed his meek entreaty to ixnay on the ook-burningbay… but who?  Certainly not the psychopath Terry Jones, leader of Dove (!) World Outreach, who’s firing up the pyre as we speak.  Definitely not anyone who watches Glenn Beck or anyone else on Fox, all of whom daily call for the killing of more Muslims, the more violently the better.  Not Republican politicians, who’ve joined with some of the more pathetic Democrats in solemnly declaring that American, non-terrorist Muslims must henceforth be more “sensitive” by meekly abandoning any visible displays of their “monkey god” faith.  Political animal that he is, he senses that both of his two fake “achievements” of his entire career sucking one of the 310 million government tits, that is, Iraq and Afghanistan, are rapidly going up in flames, and he’s thus finally gotten a little afraid of fire.  Couldn’t they just shred that kind of stuff?  It worked great for Ollie North.

But decency and respect aren’t what Petraeus is after, of course.  The vile little weasel is trying to do what all neocons do when their pipe dreams turn into nightmares; blame someone else, a neccesary endeavor that can never be embarked upon too early.  Like the hippies that supposedly caused us to “lose” in Vietnam, a preposterous falsehood that has blossomed gorgeously over the years in the right-wing hothouse, the Koran-burners can be trotted out twenty years from now (when we’re a despised and impoverished protectorate of Red China), and Petraeus can tell his grandchildren that his incompetence and insubordination had nothing to do with his (and our) many defeats.  Heck, he might even be lucky enough to follow his other failed neofascists into a lucrative radio career, as long as nobody watches anything but Fox.  Can’t knock him for trying.

His thin excuse that such genocidal impulses are only damaging inasmuch as they might “endanger our troops” abroad was as dangerous as it was revealing; to the neocon mind, the world has to be made safe for occupiers all over the world, a somewhat taller order than merely making the world safe for beleaguered Americans here at home, of which this whole demented “war on Terror” enterprise was supposed to have been predicated.  Even Petraeus, dumb and immoral as he is, realizes that the utterly undeserved lionization that military “leaders” such as he have enjoyed for so long might be placed in jeopardy if we had to start killing all Muslims, everywhere, as Dove World plainly advocates.  He’d be like Lucy and Ethel at the candy factory, even more than he already is.  Too bad he didn’t speak up sooner; he might have slowed down the terrorist assembly line, just enough to save his false legacy.  Good Luck with that, Captain Obvious; you just kissed your “base” goodbye, and accomplished exactly nothing.  Too bad, for you, that Dove World isn’t Moveon, and they will never shut up.  You’ve made the bed.  Lie in it.

As was visibly and perhaps too inspiringly revealed in the “Beverly Hillbillies,” oil is about the closest thing to instant undeserved wealth our overtaxed earth has yet to produce, and, like waving a twenty dollar bill in a trailer park, it attracts thieves and charlatans like shit attracts flies.  Better yet, the instant riches created a class of welfare queens more demanding than the world has ever known, who’ve spent more than a hundred years manipulating the modern world into absurd, abject dependence on its tainted product.  Cities across the world, but especially in the US, remade themselves to accommodate excessive oil consumption, a thoughtless crime for which history will condemn us, that is if there even is such a thing.

As an energy source, oil is indeed a necessity of modern life; no less damaging or more sustainable replacement of oil for, say, jet fuel, may ever be harnessed.  But using such a precious and finite resource for such a mundane thing as personal transportation, which in itself destroys and impoverishes communities with publicly-funded pavement everywhere, is plain nuts.  As we’re seeing, the relentless and entirely preventable clamor for more oil that has made the most harebrained schemes for its extraction seem not just reasonable but a dire necessity, has put America in a fix any crack whore would be sure to recognize, ruefully.  We’re hitting bottom, in more ways than one.

Since there simply are no more places to get oil that make any sense, we have resorted to waging wars, destroying the biosphere, and generally making asses of ourselves to delay the inevitable for a few more years, while we mindlessly waste oil for such shoddy ephemera as a drive to the outlet mall or a crappy bag that will barely carry our purchases to the parking lot, but nonetheless will eventually form continent-sized messes in the ocean. Governments all over the world, but particularly here, have made such profligate waste a way of life; damn the consequences.

Shortly after 9/11, I decided to move downtown and get rid of my car, once and for all; I couldn’t stand knowing I was helping finance the Bush/Cheney regime with every tank.  It wasn’t all that difficult for me, since I’m a single adult who loathes driving and Portland has great public transit, but for most Americans such a choice is all but impossible, so successful have the oil/automobile industries been in eliminating all alternative forms of travel.  Even here, there are few family-sized apartments and no schools in the easily walkable downtown core, and the costs would be prohibitive if there were; like everywhere else, the older, outlying residential neighborhoods built around transit have long ago had the tracks ripped up, with no realistic attempt to replace them.  In other, more enlightened countries like Switzerland and Spain, heck, even China, massive investments are being made to take freight and personal travel off the highways in favor of high-speed, electrified rail.  Here, we fall asleep to the lullaby of “Drill, Baby Drill” in our cul-de-sacs, all the while spending thousands of dollars a year on our automobile habit, money that could go toward almost anything better, but instead enriches the very interests that made the mess.

Sadly, perhaps only a disaster like the one unfolding in the Gulf has any chance of redirecting us from the cliff we’re about to leap, but here it is.  What will we do with it?

Many attempts have been made by movie writers/directors/producers to tell the truth about the tragic, unnecessary Iraq War while making it a financial box office success. Making significant dollars means large numbers will see the movies and hear the important truth messages. The two latest, Oscar winning The Hurt Locker and the just released Green Zone while making the most recent successful attempts so far, will probably fail at their profit goals and have little political impact. This weekend Green Zone starring Matt Damon took in $14.5 million while its box office competitor, Alice in Wonderland starring Johnny Depp made $62 million. (See Green Zone movie reviews here)

Damon with his Paul Greengrass’ Bourne movie triumphs can compete with Depp’s star power. What he can’t overcome is Americans’ reluctance to face the truth about American made wars and our military “heroes.” It just so happens that tonight Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg launch their latest HBO passion project, The Pacific (in ten parts) trying to show the reality of war and “bringing history’s lessons to modern audiences, especially those lessons that resonate with today’s war-weary Americans,” says Hanks. It probably will resonate, but is unlikely to change many minds.

Since the inception of moving pictures, Hollywood has struggled with how to portray the men and women who go to war on behalf of their nation and then discover war’s horror realities that will alter the participants lives forever. It’s a herculean task for movie makers to condemn war and the war mongers who create it while making heroes of mostly innocent pawns who carry out the missions. Some succumb to ignoring the mongers or making “heroes” of those who don’t deserve it. Others blame the “troops” ignoring those who sent them to risk their lives under the false pretense of national “defense.”

Having served in the Air Force from 1963-1991 as a public affairs officer, I watched how our military “heroes” went from scum after Vietnam to true heroes in the First Gulf War. I worked hard to make that perceptual change. I can see now that success which came about because our military became superb professionals at the art of war, using the latest weapons from the very profitable war machine makers, significantly contributes to confusing American voters on the question of why we are creating enemies and wars and the terrible consequences that result.

It isn’t easy for average Americans to praise the “troops” while condemning their wars. That means they would have to accept that all that deadly sacrifice is sadly only contributing to the power and money brokers who never suffer and gloat with glee and greed over their success. When Hollywood or those “terrible lefties” attempt to tell them the truth, it is too painful to hear so they seek solace in the propaganda of those responsible for putting them into this emotional dilemma and ruining millions of lives including ones that touch them.

The only way to ease this dilemma is to face up to the power of the M$M-Congressional-Military-Industrial complex and the cruel irony of the name of the organization responsible for conducting our wars, the Department of DEFENSE.

Politics is framing. As long as we call our military pawns “heroes” just because they are called on to “DEFEND” us, keeps far too many Americans confused suckers. And that is just what our war monger profiteers want and need. They do it with framing that creates false fears. Their success will lead to the ultimate collapse of the American Empire.

I’m not the first to suggest that the DoD be renamed the Department of PEACE. It would be a very important first step in using political framing to the disadvantage of the complex. The second is to stop using HEROES. Our most important heroes should be those who want to overpower the complex. Until that happens, our downward economic and political spiral will continue unabated.

That’s what’s so remarkable about the situation we’re in right now; pretty much all of our problems that we face as a country stem from the simple fact that we spend HALF of our money each year trying to (often successfully) kill people we don’t know, in case they might try to kill us, and getting a lot of our own people killed in the process.  Is that smart?  Is this a country, or a mink farm?  As usual, in both wars, arms we sold to our last best friend got turned against us, so we showed them what’s what by buying a whole lot more.  Children conduct snowball fights with a more sophisticated strategy, and snow is, unlike the weapons we employ, free, and nobody dies.

Murtha, unlike his many Republican critics that suddenly emerged when he “prematurely” called out the Iraq War as a fraud and a disaster with no conceivable goal in sight in 2005, was an actual combat veteran in Vietnam, and although defense contractor dough had long since gummed up his spending priorities, he still could spot a deadly, pointless meat-grinder when he saw one, and then by defending himself against their cowardly attacks repeatedly revealed the neocons as the chickenhawk pussies they were and are.  And he did.  Sadly, the Democrats, who owe their 2006 and 2008 victories in part to outspoken antiwar Democrats like Murtha, clearly didn’t listen to him, or to the rest of the people who are quite aware that war costs a whole lot of money that might be better spent elsewhere, no matter what nonsense you read in the Washington Post or hear from David Gregory.

As a country, we’ve simply been sold a pig in a poke so obvious that we have to either admit our error now or literally go down the tubes trying to apply lipstick.  Sarah Palin has some experience in that area, and look… here she is.  She says Iran ought to be next, and didn’t even have to write that one on her hand, which I find rather disturbing.  Evidently, the current wars haven’t bankrupted us quite enough for the evergreen Republican Utopia to look good by comparison, so Sarah has spit out the teabaggers and reached for the Kristol Pistol and the Cheney Dick.  For Sarah, this is pretty much a lateral move, but for the teabaggers, not to mention normal Americans, it sucks.  (I hereby promise not to carry that metaphor any further…  CHNN has had a run on barf bags lately…)

Wars are now bipartisan again, just as they were when Murtha opened his jowly mouth, and worse, the right has decided that even two couldn’t possibly be enough, and no Democrat has yet called them insane.  If you ask me,  Murtha picked a good time to die.

But in retrospect, both of them “got things done,” despicable things though they were, something of which the new Hitler, (at least according to Fox News) President Obama, can’t match.  Bush, who had been a conspicuous and disastrous failure his whole life, was able to accomplish the right’s most fevered wet dreams: massive tax cuts for the wealthy, elimination of significant chunks of the Bill of Rights, massive giveaways to Big Pharma, permanent war, the abject fealty of the media, and have two tainted, squeaker elections treated as historic mandates for all of it.  Obama’s only “victories” so far have been in strong-arming his giant majority into, well, acting like a minority, and cementing Bush’s radical and destructive policies as inescapable reality.  Change we can believe in, indeed.

Back in the days of Bush, for which I continue to feel unaccountably nostalgic, I could blame a corrupt, bought-and-paid-for Right, and still feel hope that their defeat was coming, and our ship of state could right itself.  Not so much these days.  Not one meaningful Bush policy has been reversed, and many have even been extended, and the Democratic victories of 2006 and 2008 have laid bare the brokenness of the American political system that first reared its head under Clinton.  It is no longer possible to have an even nominally “Liberal” government in the US; the Media and the corporations decided against that long ago.  What we get is either the faux-earnestness and morality of the Democrats, or the open belligerence and proud STFU of the Republicans; we weren’t at the meeting where the actual policies were decided.

The infuriating part of all this is that in the new game, nothing is too far right for the conventional wisdom to embrace, and Democrats face a withering and unanimous barrage of horror for any idea to the left of, well, Hitler himself, and the vestigial remains of the American “left” get slammed even when they show up on, say, Daily Kos.  What liberals, including myself,  but unfortunately NOT including our President and a good chunk of or “representatives” in congress, failed to realize that the game was already over, probably even before Sept. 11, but that little something certainly sealed the deal, and the goal posts that had been moved so startlingly far under Bush have become embedded into the new rules of the game.

Failure, in today’s Washington, is the new success, and Obama is the embodiment of that.  Good thing we lost the Olympics, and nobody’s suggested that Obama try to influence train schedules.  Those now ubiquitous and suddenly unsurprising Hitler comparisons would again be unflattering.

Those who have actually experienced war and whose bodies and minds survived the ordeal are much more skeptical, from Eisenhower on down, but are now either dying off or shut out of the conversation, while those who’ve done nothing but  cheerlead from the sidelines control our discourse, and the media, ever eager to cover drama, if not carnage and corpses, happily hand these cowardly and bloodthirsty charlatans the floor.  As powdered and cosseted  ”strategists” plot and plan the latest scheme for world domination, always just another war or two away, the lives, bodies, minds, and countries thus shattered become a distant and rather irrelevant abstraction.  Talking about “winning” becomes particularly important when everyone can see that we’re not, and might then want to start cutting their losses.  Nobody likes to lose, you know, and our military adventures have become the convenient replacement for the old Roman “bread and circuses.”  Except in our case, no bread is involved.  As far as government largesse goes, we’re Zimbabwe, but with freeways and relatively nicer dungeons.

Bush’s bellicose rhetoric probably represented the turning point; false, aggressive “patriotism” coupled with ridiculously overblown fears of the enemy gradually turned us from an already overly punitive and overbearing military empire to a rogue elephant that now not only embraced “preventive” war, an international anathema since Nuremburg, but also advocates for and loudly attempts to justify torture, illegal government spying, and the kind of ruthless stifling of dissent that used to be the hallmark of only our most frightening enemies.  With these changes, The United States inexorably lost what the New York Times called in a 2003 editorial opposing the rush to war with Iraq, ” an essential part of its glory.”  We went from welcoming strangers, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, to demonizing them and blaming them for our own problems.  We went from being the world’s beacon of freedom to its largest jailer, with or without due process or any semblance of humanity.  The home and founding advocate of the United Nations just unilaterally dropped out of the International Criminal Court, and then promptly committed astoundingly blatant war crimes, before all the world.  In the process we also, as it happens, went broke.  Coincidence?  I think not.

As Orwell wrote, “the goal of the war isn’t to be won, but to be permanent.”  Cowering citizens beset by a wily and implacable enemy won’t ask for anything of their government, since it’s inevitably occupied with more “important” things.  An economy in crisis and a government crippled by debt can hardly be asked to solve even the direst problems at home, so the gleeful war profiteering can go on, unencumbered by the noisy unwashed who might think a decent life for themselves might be a better buy than another war or two, since it is their money.  Sadly, we are now poor as a nation because of these choices; too poor to provide health care for all, too poor to maintain the infrastructure of which we were once so proud, and too poor to properly educate our children.  All we do, and that pretty poorly as well, is war.

Thus the dominoes of our many domino theories continue to fall.  Soon, in addition to finding that we can’t afford health care, we will also find that we can’t afford to stop global warming either, can’t afford to reform our flagrantly corrupt banking system, and can’t afford the sensible trade policies that might put Americans back to work; the cupboard, it turns out, is embarrassingly yet conveniently bare.  Just another case of “more will than wallet,” as Bush’s father patiently explained with suitably feigned ruefulness, evidently referring to wallets other than his own, after ten years of Reaganomics had laid us low for what by then was the third time.  Don’t think for a moment that Republicans start wars and trash the economy accidentally, given that every time they do so, they win by default, as they are now.  They aren’t nearly as stupid as they pretend to be, however convincingly at times.

They need a public that is both fearful and vengeful, and they’ve proven themselves quite adept at creating one, seamlessly shifting from threat to threat, enemy to enemy, like the seasonal colors at Pottery Barn.   And every time a Medicare-dependent teabagger calls universal healthcare  ”Nazi” or perhaps “communist,” another wealthy Republican consultant gets his wings, and the American people get sent up, again, before another Death Panel of their own making.

Reporting from CHNN's Park Avenue Headquarters, Little Beirut

As one gets older, chunks of time once thought epochal become mere blips; one may start out to say, “But I just…” and then suddenly realizing, add, “well, ten years ago.”  Oops.  Yesterday that definitely wasn’t, it only seemed like it.  Without clear markers, as we settle into middle age we see, and generally embrace, a sameness that is as comforting as it is deceptive, dulling our senses to the rapid advance of time unless its continuity is shattered by momentous events: deaths, births, marriages, divorces, children growing up so quickly.  Or, in this case, our world being turned upside down by an openly extremist political movement run amok.

It seems like only yesterday I was quaffing beers with a Hippie friend of mine, who told me that voting for Nader over Gore was the only way to “send a message” that our political system was broken.  Strikingly, the only real reason I felt that it was imperative for we liberals to make sure George Bush wasn’t elected, an argument that won the day with the Hippie, was that the makeup of the Supreme Court was at stake; I naively assumed that Gore and Bush would both be centrists in most respects, and that the social goals of Bush’s fundamentalist “base” was about the only thing we had to worry about.  That and deficits again.  What a difference ten years makes.

Had I thought, for even a moment, that ten years later, we would be mired in two unwinnable wars, witnessing the simultaneous collapse of our media, banking system, automobile industry, and any remaining appearance of the US as a nation of laws, while talking about torture’s usefulness despite its unpleasantness, well, that conversation would have gone a bit differently, to say the least.  The warning signs, however, came early, even after the disturbing coup-like ascension to power; dropping out of Kyoto, then the International Criminal Court, bizarre assertions of power and secrecy; all of this and more fell like rain in the early days, but why?  Something new was happening, but it wasn’t clear what it was at the time, until Sept. 11.  That day itself, and the bizarre behavior of the administration, especially Bush, has been scrubbed of its strangeness by history already but I remember at the time, glued to the television, that all I could think was that something else was afoot that everyone was pretending not to see.  Well, we soon found out.  Within days, Attorney General Ashcroft was talking about jailing journalists, Ari Fleischer was telling Americans to “watch what they say,” and a curiously instant Patriot act materialized, fully formed, out of nowhere.  Sheesh.  I’d been worrying about a black-robed bible-thumper or two.

I was in Seattle when Bush gave the infamous “Axis of Evil” speech, and my friends and I there were a roomful of dropped jaws as Bush announced that we were permanently at war, basically with a growing chunk of the world, and the media seemed to think that was perfectly normal, and maybe even good for ratings, for an American President to say something so frankly Hitlerian, which is the only thing to call it.  I kept waiting for the backlash that never came, joining enormous war protests that landed like trees in an empty forest as one doomed war gave way to a bigger, even more doomed one, while otherwise sensible people listened to Wolfowitz saying the war would pay for itself, Kristol saying there weren’t any religious tensions in Iraq, and Rumsfeld saying of the imminent war’s duration, “I doubt six months.”  Six years ago.  What a decade it was shaping up to be.

Worse, the crazier and stupider the policies enacted routinely and with no debate, the more likely we were told that they were none of our business anyway, and were inevitable, so shut up and go shopping.  The media led this chorus, putative watchdogs become lapdogs; more contemptuous of dissent than the rogue government itself, and sometime around the time that Bush managed to win reelection, I was utterly bewildered….  Had it only been five years?  A sinister, near-cinematic scenario had unfolded which, in my worst nightmares, I never could have imagined.  The night after the election, I threw in a familiar REM CD, and cranked it up, only to be interrupted by the telephone.  It was my Mom, asking what I was doing.  I told her I was drinking and listening to REM.  ”It’s the End of the World as We Know It?”   she asked.  ”Yes.  How’d you know?”  was my laughing answer.  And it really was.  At this point, why not laugh?

The financial collapse, torture scandal, exploding deficits, Katrina, Lewis Libby being freed, warrantless wiretapping, Nancy Pelosi taking impeachment “off the table,” it didn’t matter anymore. Outrages became commonplce with dizzying rapidity, and even keeping up seemed redundant, almost.  The worst decade the world had ever known was underway, and decades, perhaps centuries, later it would be remembered as such, I had no more doubt.  Sometimes decades just pass you by.  As has become abundantly clear, this last one never will.