9/11 and the Sway of Fear

Popular sentiment in England: Could America benefit from a bit of it? (Wiki Commons)

There is little doubt that the events of 9/11 were fearsome. Until the past ten years, the longest period in US history marked by fear was the lead-up to and duration of  World War II.  Amazingly enough, civilians were less frightened and more willing to pitch in during WWII than they are now. There are abundant very logical reasons for this difference. Most would cite the fact that, back then, the fighting and dying was all done on foreign shores, even if US GIs were dying, too, fighting for Europe's freedom.

Back then, the US government, in demanding sacrifices of consumer goods to support the war effort, rewarded the population with as much support as it could muster: “Feel good” movies were produced, rewards for heroic acts at home were bestowed, the opportunity to assist as plane spotters was created to involve everyone in the endeavor, and so on. 

In the current “fright theater,” the deaths that caused the problem were on US soil, but the government reacted in ways that made the horror even worse. This time, rather than demanding sensible sacrifices by civilians, the government simply ramped up the tax bite on the many and lowered it on the few―always grand for morale. With the money--and more--it invaded sovereign states in the name of protecting America. This was the precise opposite of WWII, in which US GIs attempted to save sovereign states already invaded by a dastardly rogue government. In short, this time, instead of fighting to save others from fascism, the US acted like a fascist state and invaded for one simple reason; because its leader wanted to. Like Hitler. (The collusion between the Bush family and Hitler's Germany has been well chronicled by others; a simple googling of Bush-Hitler will give you more information than you can digest.)

Rather than giving the population work to do, such as WWII's plane spotting (a useful task in those days with those planes), it made the US into a nation of snitches and quaking whiners who feared a murderous Muslim lurked around every corner. “Report suspicious activity” flashed from overhead signs on every highway, making some of us who are at least casual students of history cringe at how reminiscent that was of the old USSR; students of literature knew that the ersatz world of Orwellian fiction had come to pass.

Bush: A decade of insufferably inferior leadership

The difference between the 1940s and the first decade of the 21^st century resides first and foremost in who was sailing the ship of state. In 1941, it was a man who had faced a debilitating disease, polio, and coped with it before he won the presidency. He was wealthy, which no doubt made all things easier. But he was no stranger to pain, and no shirker of the hard choices and the difficult tasks. He was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 2001, the putative leader was a man who had faced nothing in his entire life, George W. Bush. Bush was coddled through school, and passed on for his MBA despite lacking the intellectual rigor and basic honesty to earn the degree, according to his major professor. Yoshi Tsurumi, one of Bush’s professors at Harvard when Bush was shoehorned into Dad’s school’s MBA program, said Bush “showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.” 

(Aside: One has to wonder why no one in Congress challenged him. One need not wonder why Cheney did not challenge him; in Bush, Cheney’s pathology had found a perfect mouthpiece for Cheney’s own dark compulsions and biases. Bush famously said, in his Harvard class, that poor people need not be bothered with because they were lazy. Such intellectual laziness itself, and such incautious speech and cavalier attitudes alone, should have been enough to warn all and sundry that this was no fit person to led the free world. Unless one were equally unfit…and several―Cheney, Rove, Yoo, Rumsfeld―were.)

Bush sat out his National Guard service god knows where―anywhere but on a military post―while so many young men and women were suffering and dying in southeast Asia. The closest he had ever come to death was pushing the button on a record number of executions when he was governor of Texas, a state that illogically elected him despite his rather dubious dealings with sports club ownership in that state.

Fear explains it all

There is little doubt that when Bush wasn’t presenting the world with a vacant stare. When (we are told) Bush was informed by an aide of the Twin Towers disaster while he visited a second-grade class in a “safe place” for him--his governor brother’s state, Florida―he was whipping the nation into a frenzy of illogic based on a surfeit of fear. It is hard to think straight when you’re terrified out of your shoes. Bush’s every action post-incident was calculated to lead to an increase of the nation’s fears. A man with the agenda carried by the Bush family and supported by intelligent, rapacious, unscrupulous hangers on like Cheney and Rove would need a population frightened into witlessness to get away with it all, despite his well-documented ability to claim he hadn’t said what he said not 30 seconds earlier.

What he did spoke louder than what he said; it always does

At the moment, there is a catchphrase in England that should have been the motto for the reaction of the US post-9/11. That catchphrase is “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Did Bush suggest anything of the sort? Not at all. Rather, he instituted a nerve-wracking system of colorful alerts, with red naturally being “Jeez, god, the Muslims are at the freakin’ door.” All the while, of course, Bush’s lips were moving like the proverbial lying lawyer’s, telling the world how tough America was even as he made it weaker. Bush was busy telling the rest of the world how tough America was as we failed over and over at bringing American justice to other cultures that had little, if anything, to do with what happened on 9/11. Unless, of course, American justice has descended to globally shooting and asking questions later. That's the hallmark of Texas justice, of course. So perhaps it is no surprise after all.

Bush apparently heeded well the words of a world-class crooner, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra quoted, in The Way You Wear Your Hat, as saying, “Fear is the enemy of logic.” Bush could not afford to have a thinking electorate, one to whom logic was as natural as turning on the stove to cook a meal. He needed an electorate so busy looking for the gas knobs and some sort of instruction manual, their heads down and getting hungrier by the minute, that they wouldn't notice that nothing Bush did made the slightest sense for the nation as a whole, but only for the small cadre of oligarchs whose aberrant psychology was in charge.

The second mistake

Thus misled and purposely confused, Americans followed the lead of a man in control of only one thing, his own escape from responsibility. If Bush simply instituted a system of alerts, his minions could post them without his interference and he could get on the plane to his ranch with a light heart and a goofy grin. And so it was. And so it became apparent rather quickly, despite the compromise of so much of the nation's intelligence by fear.

An excellent question: Why?

But why did we allow fear to continue to hold sway?  Because the Master Chef of Unreasoning Terror was not finished with the feast yet. He was cooking up more treats to deflect our knowledge of what was happening.

First, of course, there was the anthrax attack. That was fear-inducing….and it went on and on and on with swamps drained and a man under suspicion, but no resolution. Finally, supposedly, the man who did it committed suicide in 2008. The original suspect? He was exonerated, but the bugle wasn’t loudly sounded. If he was the culprit, then why was another man found to have killed himself over it?

Everything….EVERYTHING…about the anthrax scare suggests, in fact, that that is precisely what it was, a scare, and no perpetrator need ever have been identified as long as the population became more afraid. The first suspect, Dr. Steven Hatfill, was awarded huge monetary damages by the Justice Department, when charges against him were dropped. The award was so huge that neither he nor his heirs will ever have to work again, possibly an adequate payoff for the suffering and ruined reputation. 

Dr. Bruce Ivins, identified finally as the perpetrator, killed himself. Did he do it? Or did he react that way to being informed of an investigation by the Justice Department? Who can know?  But it doesn't matter. However the anthrax incident was contrived, it had the desired effect. The population was terrorized. To quote George W. Bush, mission accomplished.

“To him who is in fear everything rustles.”

SOPHOCLES

While it was OK, after the suicide of the putative perpetrator, to give up the unreasoning fear of anthrax, how to keep the population afraid so that another fear-mongering Republican could be elected? The population's terror of anthrax was kept alive for seven years via the occasional announcement in the press about this or that additional finding, despite no additional biological attacks. But that fear had abated, and the popularity of the president could be measured most accurately in its absence.

A new flash point for fear had to be found. It wouldn't be terrorists, or at least not so much, because that would give the lie to all the extreme measures taken that the administration claimed kept the US safe from terror.

What to do?

AHA!  People with no stable employment are easily made fearful, aren’t they?

CONTINUES with What to do about the fear.

Do you really believe in coincidence? It will be difficult to, if you read this and think even half of it might be true.

Post 9-11: What to do about the fear

FDR: Fireside chat (Wiki Commons)

 (Read the companion piece to this article here.)

What to do about the fear

AHA!  People with no stable employment are easily made fearful, aren’t they?

And whose homes are being snatched out from under them? How much worse could that fear be if they were effectively prevented even from declaring bankruptcy in Bush’s land of the corporate serf, or at least, not without signing the rest of their natural life away to do so. (Please read Republican Tortures for the Middle Class for more information.) Unlike corporations, of course, which can go bankrupt totally, at will, leaving the employees empty-handed.

It’s no wonder the population was still scared seven years after 9/11 when it quakingly elected a man they thought perhaps, just maybe, could bring some sanity and safety back to their lives. Because deep down, they KNEW they were not safe. They knew that everything they had ever planned, hoped and dreamed was more at risk in Bush’s America than at any time in US history. Even their superstitions had failed to provide solace for their misery.

Never mind religion; There’s a new opiate for the masses

No less than Bertrand Russell, one of the philosophical giants of the 20^th century, noted that, “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. (An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish)

Superstitiously, restaurant had owners changed French Fries to Freedom Fries in the months after 9/11. Why? Because the French government refused to join Bush’s juggernaut against the entire Arab world. The restaurateurs thought casting the French symbolically out of the ignominy of the rancid fat in the deep-fryer and into oblivion would keep them safe. Their customers ate it up.

Superstition was responsible for that minor cruelty, a mere stupidity in the run of human events, but it was emblematic of many much, much larger ones to follow. For example, suddenly Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown, despite his antipathy toward Al Qaeda, which the same agencies that failed to warn of an attack had miraculously identified as the perpetrator of 9/11. 

They had help ignoring the warning signs, of course. And there was the impenetrable fug of Bush’s mind to cope with, and the hubris of the leaders of the agencies involved in public safety and, not to put too fine a point on it, the likelihood that Cheney’s once and future connections with the likes of Halliburton stood to gain mightily from any protracted military action the US was involved in.

But Hussein was an Arab, providing reason enough for the superstitious mind to want to destroy him. Destroying him would bring peace. Wouldn’t it?

Daddy Bush and Baby Bush

For Bush, destroying Hussein held more magic still.  Bush’s father had failed to destroy Hussein; what the man failed to do, the boy attempted and so very unfortunately succeeded. Not that Saddam was a saint. He was a horror show. But he was his own nation’s horror show, not ours. And toppling him led Bush to superstitiously believe that Bush and Co. could do no wrong, and worse, could get away with just about anything. They had lied to get the US into the war. They would be out of office before anyone had to tell the truth and get the military out. They would be busy with their revisionist memoirs when…if…the nations they invaded and destroyed got busy resurrecting whatever could be salvaged of a culture, an infrastructure, and any belief system except despair.

One has to wonder if somewhere, sometime, the misfiring synapses in Bush’s pickled brain ever suggested to Bush that what he had done was wrong. He had taken apart a nation and killed its leader by constructing a not-totally-credible lie about WMDs, and further, caused some of those who followed him to lie as well. 

An officer and a gentleman
Colin Powell, a decent human being and honorable man, did not have the devious constitution to understand that the man leading the free world would lie to him, and get him to lie, to achieve ends that were wildly less than sterling. As much as anyone, Powell was the victim of the Bush government. Luckily, Powell’s strength of mind has outlasted most of the damage done to his reputation. But his public service is probably a closed book because of the way he was duped, on a world stage, by Bush & Co.

Cruelty is not gratuitous

Fear is the parent of cruelty, wrote James Anthony Froude in Short Studies on Great Subjects. Cruelty cannot be said, thus, to be without explanation, nor can cruelties be done for no reason at all. Cruelty is in thrall to fear, is part and parcel of fear―its very offspring―and must, therefore, follow fear absolutely.

From their fear of the demonized Iraqi population and the terrorists they were told were hiding behind every tree*, American military personnel tortured and degraded prisoners in wild contravention of the Geneva Conventions, rules that were written by wiser, calmer men to grapple with the natural fear that combatants feel in a war.

Some of the American military in Iraq chose to ignore their own humanity, in a superstitious belief that if they sufficiently degraded and dehumanized their prisoners, they themselves would be more than they thought they were, forced into a meaningless war by gormless politicians who exposed them not only to enemy fire but to vitriol from those at home who saw the truth. Not that many doves castigated the servicemen and women. Indeed, in Bush’s wars, the home front was at pains to honor the service of the soldiers but agitate against the decisions of the politicians. So at least the Bush-era GIs were spared some of the demoralization  faced by GIs in the Vietnam era. However, not being idiots, those very servicemen had to suspect something was not right and they were part of it. They had a hard time figuring out how officers and gentlemen (and women) had become tools of a craven mentality that cared no more for them than for the copperhead he killed last night at the ranch.

George Bush wielded more power than anyone lacking empathy or a conscience should ever wield in the universe. He is an opportunist for all the worst reasons ―supremacy, not having to be accountable, acquisition of toys and of undeserved honors. Indeed, if he has not earned the honors, he is completely capable of wearing the badge anyway, as he did whenever he donned flight togs, gave a victory salute, and attempted to ingratiate himself with bona fide officers and gentlemen. He is corrupt to the bottom of his soul, and, as Prof. Tsurumi noted, he is a pathological liar.

Power corrupts, but it gets worse

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it,” wrote Aung San Suu Kyi in Freedom from Fear.

The fear-based psychology of America’s leader at its most vulnerable moment was the start of a superstitious period in which ordinary people clutched at absurdities, like renaming French Fries, as a way to protect themselves. It was also the start of a level of corruption rarely seen in human history. 

The corruption has so pervaded America that ordinary people believe that the two percent of the population that controls fifty percent of the wealth will help them up the ladder. They have become Teabaggers, a name they chose themselves unwittingly. It refers to a gross sexual act. They thought it cunningly described the ludicrous hats they constructed when they began protesting against universal health care, at the same time demanding that Medicare―no more than universal health care for the old and unwell, and therefore infinitely more costly than truly universal care which would save money on the young and healthy―not be touched. They demand, now, to be called Tea Partiers, but they are not hosting an event any sane person would wish to attend. The Tea Bag nation celebrates half-truths, lionizes stinginess, and exhibits the same pathology as any garden-variety sociopath.

It is easy to be corrupt and to foster corruption when it is so easy to control others by instilling fear; it is easy to become corrupted when one fears what those in control might do. One will likely believe any lies―that is, subscribe to any superstition (Horatio Alger gone mad, too broke for health care, no way to create a healthy economy for everyone, etc.) in order to be exempt from the very conditions the fear has induced.

It may well be that there is no antidote for the gut-wrenching terror most Americans find themselves living in. I’ve experienced a recent dose of it myself, although I gave up living in America a while back. America still has a long reach, and unfortunately can export its own brand of greed and hubris worldwide.

I was spending all my time conditioning myself to cope with the frightening and suddenly headlong dissolution of both the institutions of government and population of a nation based on a great idea, freedom and liberty for all. Then for some. Now, sadly, for almost none.

Something has to change.

It is time for a new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is time for America to come to grips with its fear; possibly, it will take putting the architects of that fear on trial. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Yoo, Ashcroft, et al. At least, they must be marginalized, forgotten as thoroughly as Rutherford B. Hayes (who?). It is time for someone, anyone, to begin convincing the quaking mass of disheartened Americans of the thought by which Roosevelt dragged/pushed/cajoled America through the Great Depression and through World War II:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”―

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1933

What a different world we would be living in today if FDR had been in the White House on September 11, 2001.

---

In Iraq, terrorists were and are hiding behind every tree. But the problem is, of course, that destroying a nation gratuitously is likely to make its people eager to remove the invader however they can. In short, US military presence has created most of the terror they are facing. 

How do you get people who volunteered to fight for their nation's honor and safety--US military--to fight when it is obvious they are engaged in an unjust war? Here are some clues: brutalization by their own command (see Abu Ghraib), the knowledge that there are no jobs at home, and treacherous re-deployment when a combatant's psychological reserves are diminished. All of these have been factors the military has faced for the entire recent past.

Lie Down with Dogs

Strung Ducks: Tea Baggers by any other name (Wiki Common)

There must be a simple way to break through the mental fog of the Baggers.

Possibly clichés would work. Clichés are simple. Most people know what they mean. Maybe we should offer the Baggers some clichés they could use in lieu of brains. Maybe that would help one of them blaze a new trail, prevent them making a president who inherited a huge can of worms from being the fall guy to the previous president, that “ordinary guy” they so admired, despite (or because) of his being a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

For example, here’s the very first I’d like to present for their consideration:

You reap what you sow.

Teabaggers need to reap what they sow

OK, Baggers. This means that if you give stinginess, you will receive stinginess in return.

Example: You want to deny benefits to those who are out of work because of the greed you so admire.

Think about this: If you end up out of work, you will be denied assistance if there is any truth underlying that cliché. And truth underlies most of them. Moreover, because your admiration of greed is tinged with abject fear that what you think you worked for will be taken from you,* I expect divine justice would require that you all become panhandlers, preferably in a state or city with no tolerance for the down-and-out. I’m thinking Texas, Arizona. Places like that. Except they are too warm. So maybe the Dakotas, where winter would actually be problematical.

Do you still want to deny relief to others to save what you think you worked for? You do? OK. Let’s move on and try again.

Flea-bitten Baggers

Next cliché:

If you lie down with dogs, you’ll get some fleas.

This means that by becoming door mats for the unprincipled wealthy, such as the Koch Brothers, John Bonehead, Bachmann et al, you are likely to end up scratching in misery as they move off to a new, clean bed and you are left behind with the “fleas”―the nasty little bad parts of blindly following greedy, unprincipled jackasses they forgot to tell you about. This would include being caught along with everyone else when the financial system implodes, and ending up in the gutter when the taxes you pay as an enormous percentage of your income are increased yet again to ensure that rich folks’ taxes fall from the pitiful rate they pay now to virtually nothing. But then, no one ever lost money betting Baggers were not as dense as a London fog.

Do you still want to be in bed with the likes of the worst of the Republican Party? With fleabags like Rick Perry? It’s only a matter of time, of course, until he disappears in some legal ignominy or other because he’s already got one hand on the chicken coop.

Bunking with Mongrels

But you Baggers still want to be in bed with those mongrels? OK. Here’s another one:

Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

This seems to be what a lot of Baggers are doing, trying to stick with the Republican Party, which it knows gave us two wars, a tanked economy and a bad rep all over the known universe (in addition to No Child Left Behind which is reason enough for any god one might posit to smite the US into oblivion). But what didn’t happen is that the US didn’t open its doors to the less-advantaged; it slammed them, thereby circling up the Koch Brothers' Mercedes and the Bagger’s Golfs. It didn’t join the rest of the civilized world in various treaties concerning the environment and international criminal tribunals, thereby making the US safe for those who would rather waste plastic bags because who cares if tortoises choke to death, and safe for George Bush because―heh, heh―now they can’t haul him in front of a world court for crimes against humanity and get him judged by a bunch of panty-waist Froggies or something.

So Baggers, what if you actually understood that plastic depends on oil, and oil is precisely what you’re afraid of losing to such an extent that you permitted George to finish his Daddy’s war games. Except of course he didn’t finish it because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, especially if the apple is rotten and can’t roll.

There really is no reason to continue, except for the hope that even one single Bagger will have a lightbulb go off in his/her head, and understand. It might only take one. After all, birds of a feather flock together. And, as similar in their idiocy as Baggers are, if even one of them changes his/her tune, it’s likely the rest will go along like strung ducks.

* This refers to Social Security. They all believe it is insurance, a sort of annuity, to which they contributed and should therefore reap the rewards of their insurance investment. Wrong as a screen door in a submarine. Americans pay F.I.C.A., but what they pay doesn’t go into a fund with their name on it. It goes into a general fund. Perhaps they failed to note all the pundits warning that the Social Security fund would run out. How could it run out if it was individuals’ earmarked funds? It couldn’t. Someone could abscond with it, a sort of governmental Bernie Madoff. But run out? No.  Americans pay F.I.C.A. because, with the force of both law and arms, the United States government says they must. It does not say they must get anything back. It is at the whim of Congress that people get Social Security, a whim-based program that also determines what they get and when they get it. Did the Baggers work hard for their Social Security? No. They worked reasonably for their parents’ Social Security, since each generation is contributing to the payouts of the generation already receiving the handout. Who’s paying for the Baggers? Their children and grandchildren, and the Baggers really don’t give a rat’s ass whether it requires half their salary just as long as the Baggers never miss a meal on their next trip to Florida.

Self-explanatory (Wikimedia Commons)

Fair Game: Valerie Plame's outing on the big screen. Where's Bush?

Plame's book, Fair Game, has been made into a movie, out soon. Perhaps it will yield enough profit for her to protect herself and her family since the government she served has declined. (Wiki commons photo)

I'm tired of talking about George W. Bush. I used to think he was simply the puppet of Dick Cheney; then someone convinced me that he did have a brain and was not Dick's puppet. I don't know and don't, any longer, care who ran the mechanism of whom. The fact is, the two of them brought such ignominy to the White House and its environs that it would seem that Washington, DC., is no more than salted earth today, unable to support life or nourish those who depend on it.

I often -- for example, day in and day out -- try not to think of the disaster those two miscreants left behind. I am beginning to learn something about British politics, which is only sensible since I live in the UK now. But yesterday morning, BBC4 radio broadcast an interview with Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA clandestine agent outed in a fit of pique by Deadeye Dick's well-exercised right hand, "Scooter" (perfect name for Dick's right hand, no?) Libby.

Amazingly, Libby served time for his unconscionable engagement in payback. Payback? For what?

Bush administration kicks truth in the teeth

For truth. In the Bush administration, any breath of truth allowed to exit the compound would have to be dealt with severely, rendered a body blow until it was no longer recognizable as truth, so that their lies could supplant it.

Just so, Bush and Cheney and Libby and countless others mantracized the lie of the hour. One of those lies, according to Valerie Plame Wilson, was that Iraq had WMDs and that Niger had supplied the essential “yellow cake.” Not. Her husband, a retired ambassador with first-hand knowledge, said it did not. So the Bush-Cheney cabal paid him back for his disloyalty (or to the rest of us, his honesty) by ruining his wife's career. (This, of course, leads to certain assumptions about the regard of the Bush-Cheney administration for the female gender.)

Outed undercover agent in danger

A subsequent lie tossed into the murky air of Foggy Bottom was that the Wilson family was not in any mortal danger after Libby outed Valerie Plame Wilson, or at least, Bush-Cheney used that excuse when their CIA (recall, it had once been Daddy Bush’s CIA, literally) denied her request for protection.

Unbelievable. Is this, then, the same government that believed the entire nation was in mortal danger because some Muslims had wreaked havoc and taken 3000 lives in New  York City just a couple of years before? Is this the administration that was throwing money, ordnance and lives of young military personnel against countries that might be harbouring that sort of terrorist? The entire nation was supposed to be at risk from deadly forces from overseas, but there was no reason to think anyone might want to harm Valerie Plame Wilson or her family after it had been made clear that her job was collecting information about national enemies for years: Is that right? No, it's clearly wrong.

It would be natural to ask, how stupid were Bush and Cheney, and how stupid did they think Americans are?

Dumb like foxes

Bush and Cheney weren't stupid at all; they knew exactly what they were doing in engineering precisely what has come to pass―a nation deeply divided along ideological lines. More succinctly, they created a nation divided between those who drank the Bush Kool-Aid and chose to be frightened and therefore manageable by those who would force them into ignorant servitude, and those who were not afraid because they knew:

• The world was always thus, fraught with dangers

• It is not impossible that 9/11 was either and inside job or done with inside foreknowledge

• It is tantamount to becoming a serf to trade personal and civic freedom for putative protection, especially from shadowy forces.

Bush-Cheney were smart enough to know that they could force most Americans into the Kool-Aid parlor; they thought Americans were pretty stupid, and by and large, they were right. It's unfortunate that their single instance of correct assessment was that one.

Considering the hubris and self-referential activities of the Bush-Cheney cabal, it is easy to believe that there never was a real threat from Middle Eastern terrorists, even if one accepts the Twin Towers as a bona fide case of two towers, built to withstand almost anything, collapsing although the fire did not engulf them and was still localized on the upper floors when the buildings fell like a house of cards with the LOWER decks kicked out by an unseen hand.

Home-grown terrorists on Christian agenda

But let's leave that possibility. In the past ten years or so, most of the horrific acts in the US were carried out by US citizens and not even Muslim ones at that. I cite, most recently, the shooting of Rep. Gabriele Gifford, the killing of a judge and a little girl, and the wounding of many others. Where were the Muslims then? Living on the inhospitable alien landscape of Afghanistan, a nation that has been no more than rocks and camels and donkeys and men who would make other men and all women into chattel for centuries, and whose land--despite having been fought for by superpowers from Alexander the Great to the USSR to America--is virtually a pile of rocks and dust offering little more than vicious subsistence to the inhabitants. This factor, unfortunately, makes the place almost ungovernable and certainly unbconquerable; those with little to lose care little to live and will thus sacrifice yours and theirs with equal abandon.

It was a dingbat looney with Christian zeal who wreaked havoc most recently, an apparent home-grown psycho who had slipped through the cracks as he wound down into fundamentalist uber-angst and reckless behavior.

***

Valerie Plame Wilson got no protection. She left government, although she claims she still encourages students to enter government service. The woman must be an eternal optimist, thinking that there will never be another government as unethical in its conduct and inimical in its intent toward the American people as was the execrable government of George W. Bush. Or else, advising college students to go into government service is one way she can protect her hide from those inside who would do her harm. It is certain that the government that dumped her out of the boat is not going to wet its slimy hands helping her get to shore. And make no mistake; it’s still the same government, with just enough window dressing to keep the credulous confused.

It was an interesting interview. The interviewer asked Plame Wilson if she might have been over-reacting to threats against her and against her family. Her answer was clear, succinct and unemotional, precisely as one would expect from someone who had worked within the stress of clandestine ops for years. Valerie Plame Wilson, I have concluded, is good indeed at what she does, not least of which is surviving a several-pronged attack by the government she was proud to serve, and emerging with her mind intact.

Will brainy college graduates save America?

Bush and Cheney have so much to answer for, I and an army of bloggers could point out their misdeeds daily for the next decade and barely scratch the surface. Plame Wilson said she tells college students to study hard and graduate with the best education they can get because the nation will need brainy people who are well educated to solve the problems created in the past decade.

That’s true. But will they be treated as traitors for voicing concerns, even if they also offer solutions? Will truth ever regain a foothold in American life? Hearing truth requires a willingness to grapple with it, something in short supply in America since Bush could reach no higher than holding a book upside down when pretending to read it to children.* Grappling with truth often requires at least a modicum of education and courage, both of which Bush-Cheney badly damaged nationally.

Bush-Cheney virtually destroyed primary and secondary education in the United States via No Child Left Behind. They systematically dismantled the US economic system via a wealth shift of major proportions away from the middle class and to the top 400, and the concurrent rendering of a great deal of America's population homeless or jobless, or both. They rendered the population helpless to help themselves by a steady diet of panic alerts, color-coded so that an uneducated and biddable population might be driven to excesses of both fear and pseudo-patriotic zeal. Remember "freedom fries"? The puerile hallmark of a deluded and gullible population looking for a scapegoat for their own fear and their leaders' failures.

***

I wonder if that interview with the thoughtful and well-spoken Valerie Plame Wilson would ever have happened on a US radio station. I think not. I think a Limbaugh or Hannity would have been employed to assault her verbally in an attempt to prove to the baggers of the nation that this patriotic woman is in fact a traitor despite her years of service, and because she shouldered her betrayal by her superiors better than almost any soldier might.

I would like to think that the absence of an American demand for accountability by Bush-Cheney is also a mass shouldering of betrayal in the upright manner of Valerie Plame Wilson. But I think it is not. I think it is the craven simpering of a nation of peasants convinced by their masters that, if they speak out, they will be denied even the small scraps of dignity shown to them, as well as all means to live. Lord knows, there is little dignity in an America where educated people scrape by on jobs the less-educated would have once been glad to have as a means to start up the ladder. There is little means to live, when threats are made daily by Congress to scrap the meager program (compared to Europe’s) that is Social Security, to dam up unemployment benefits in a nation where the major industry is, at the moment, unemployment.

America no longer needs to fear becoming like the USSR. It already is. As in the USSR, America’s peasants refuse to revolt, or perhaps are already officially terrorized far beyond the capacity to take meaningful political action, concerted action, not actions cynically orchestrated by platoons of emperor wannabes like the Koch brothers and Rush Limbaugh. The population doesn't realize that, sooner or later, there’s going to be a gulag like Guantanamo, and not only for those identified as enemy combatants (rightly or wrongly doesn’t matter in a police state), but for those patriots labeled as traitors by the actual traitors in a democracy-killing real-life version of Mad magazine's prescient Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy.

* Bush was photographed holding the kindergarten book upside down. What did that signify? Did he think, like a mirror, the camera would reverse things? Or could he have been pre-occupied with other thoughts?