Giggling While
Rome Burns

Paranoid fantasy? Or is American fascism at hand?

What’s it going to take to wake America up?

Given the complexity of the world, it’s always been easy to spin all kinds of paranoid fantasies, about anything that gets your juices flowing: George Steinbrenner, Microsoft, the secret formula for Coca-Cola, the Jews, women, homosexuals, who really wrote Shakespeare.

But what are you supposed to think when a bunch of people find themselves in control of the U.S. government, possibly as a result of what was an illegal coup, but in any case with 500,000 votes less than a majority, and those people consistently say all kinds of pretty words and just as consistently act, both domestically and internationally, in a ruthless, arrogant, expedient manner that the longer they go on, the more it looks like some kind of sugar-coated, red, white, and blue, American version of fascism?

Their actions clearly speak much louder than their words, which have become extended examples of Orwell’s doublespeak in which peace is war, affluence is only for the few, and justice goes to the highest bidder.

How many "tax cuts" does it take to wake us up? Clearly two didn’t alert us to the fact that these "tax cuts" are huge exercises in deceit, designed to dismantle the services of the federal government.

How many "pre-emptive" wars does it take to wake us up? Clearly two didn’t do it. How many more, then?

How many concentration camps? As far as we know, there’s only one now—at Guantanamo Bay (and if you think that’s not a concentration camp, you’re making a distinction without a difference), but what does the future hold?

How many enormous rollbacks of environmental, occupational, and social protections?

How many appointments of federal judges who deny a woman’s control over her own body and who believe that separation of church and state should be eliminated because the Christian Bible clearly as all the answers?

How many international treaties have to be abrogated or just plain ignored?

All this from a government that came into power under highly questionable conditions, yet it is a government acting as if it has a mandate to undertake a genuinely radical restructuring of the United States, both domestically and internationally.

Against this background of consistently ruthless, arrogant, belligerent, unilateral behavior, where is the least bit of evidence that might indicate these people will not do everything—underline "everything"—in order to retain power during the 2004 election?

Is such thinking merely a paranoid fantasy? Where’s the evidence to indicate that it’s NOT paranoid REALITY?

Given the very consistent ruthless behavior of these American rulers, is it paranoid fantasy to assume that somewhere in Washington a group of the Bush people are at this moment compiling a list of Americans of, shall we say, dubious patriotism? For such rulers, of course, dubious patriotism means very simply resistance to their edicts and actions.

Please look at the record and try to convince me that there’s not already a computer database in Washington that includes Magellan’s Log—not to mention many other similar sources of old-fashioned American crotchitiness—as a site of "dubious patriotism."

Remember: this is a government whose leader says, "If you’re not with us, you’re against us," and who divides the world into black and white, good vs. evil. A government whose majority leader in the House of Representatives, when recently asked by a citizen how the federal government could do such things, replied, "I AM the federal government."

Assume for a moment that the economy plummets again or that another terrorist attack occurs inside the United States, where is any evidence to indicate that these people would not attempt the final coup, namely the suspension of the constitution to battle the forces of "chaos" and/or "evil"?

Paranoid fantasy or paranoid reality?

Though still short of that last fascist step now, our present leaders continue to progress down this dastardly path toward unlimited authoritarian rule, wholly encouraged 1) by the poll numbers, 2) by the general indifference on the part of the Democrats, and 3) by the trance-like immersion of the greater populace in the full array of the bread and circuses of American pop culture.

A wassup-dude citizenry grins idiotically while a sugar-coated red, white, and blue American version of fascism takes shape in Washington.

Why should our current rulers stop what they’re doing? Why should they even hesitate?

Militarily, internationally, they have nothing to fear. Nobody’s even close to being their armed equal.

Socially, domestically, they see no cause for restraint or compromise because apparently nobody except for a few people who are still trying to think for themselves cares what they do.

For 200 years, even with all our problems—some profoundly severe, America functioned as a shaky but workable system based on the concept of shared power, checks and balances, and the rule of law not men. Imperfect though the system was it brought slow social progress through the long and difficult process of elections, legislative compromise, and thoughtful judicial interpretation of the law.

The system, at this writing, is still, at least in name, in place. But with one party in control of all three branches of the government, and it being a party absolutely disinclined to compromise, where is the call for restraint, the demand for some semblance of fairness? Where is the balance of power, where the rule of law?

What we have now is a complete imbalance of power, and more and more judicial decisions that are a mockery of the law.