The Fear...

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

— Benjamin Franklin

The Fear.

It’s what a young soldier feels deep in his or her gut when the sun sets in Afghanistan, when night patrol starts and the shadows become alive with menace.

It’s what a young soldier feels deep in his or her gut when the sun rises and shines on another village, failing to illuminate who are friends and who are enemies, where the explosive boobytraps are hidden, and who hid them. The soldier knows that he or she is an unwelcome guest in this country, and that one man's liberation is another man's invasion.

It’s what most soldiers feel deep inside when they hear that their tour has been extended yet again, when they hear that there is no timeline for withdrawal, when they hear presidential candidate John McCain promise that the war will go on indefinitely under his watch.

It’s what the parents of soldiers feel when they hear reports of casualties in the Middle East, wondering if they’ll see their children shipped home in flag-draped caskets. The irony won’t matter then. Their child was killed, and the government that sent them to die...based on nothing but lies...is filled with greedy swine concerned only with the next election and the next lobbyist handjob for political favor. Calling dead children “heroes” is only a cynical way to sugarcoat the awful truth...the little girl who danced by standing on Daddy’s feet is still dead, the little boy who kept asking big brother to push him higher on the swing set has long since crashed to earth.

So the war continues. The Fear spreads.

Yet the war has already been won.

The winners? Everyone who profits from the fear. The Republicans who conjure the images of that day in September to further their agendas. The Democrats who are just as complicit by playing along, or by doing nothing, or by getting themselves elected under the promise of “change,” a promise that they never intended to keep.

The contractors who send bored mall cops to the Middle East repackaged as rental soldiers, and the soulless fucks that own and run these companies.

The angry little bastards too mean and stupid to become cops who now work for the TSA, lording their government-sanctioned power and authority over anyone who dares to board a plane in the United States…like wheelchair-bound amputees who are practically begging to be strip-searched.

All the way down to rat bastard greedheads like the management at Yankee Stadium, confiscating bottles of sunscreen at the gate, then offering 1-ounce bottles of SPF 15 sunscreen for $5 a pop once inside. “Security, ma’am...you’ll need to surrender that SPF 30. And sorry about the melanoma. Enjoy the game.” Yeah, they gave up this ploy after some bad press. You won’t need to look hard to find another rat bastard greedhead to take their place.

The terrorists won.

Not on September 11, 2001. No, the terrorists won on October 26, 2001, when George Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law.

We are the terrorists. We terrorize ourselves. We allow those in command to perpetuate the terror.

And The Fear continues unchecked.

“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Those with the power strive to keep the power. The ramp-up began with Ronald Reagan, a dullard Hollywood hack who found his calling in politics, and his true calling in planting the seeds of fear, fertilizing them with propaganda.

Bush the First had the connections, but he lacked the charisma to sell the fear. Bill Clinton was nothing but comic relief, a distraction, a useful fool, a Kennedy wannabe with a hard cock and a need to be popular.

Then comes Bush the Second.

The past eight years have been an exercise in constant fear-mongering, the old “Red Menace” reborn for these higher-tech times. Were he alive today, Joe McCarthy would be consumed by envy, his evil allies Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn chuckling in approval for the efforts of the GOP in general and the Bush Administration in particular.

If you believe in a hell, you have to believe that McCarthy, Nixon and Cohn are there, and they’ve prepared a special place for Dick “Halliburton” Cheney, making sure they have space to accommodate his enormous brass balls. You need those when you tell the United States Congress to ram a subpoena straight up their collected clueless asses.

There’s a space for John Ashcroft, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his empty-headed piety. Spirituality is a concept of faith; religion is a concept of man, a political construct designed to put a few of the favored in control over the rest of the masses. You get into trouble when you confuse the two, and you’re damned when you interchange the two.

Alberto “I don’t recall” Gonzales has a space, if only for the scores of under-reviewed convictions and court cases while serving as then-Governor Bush’s general counsel. Only one death sentence case was overturned during his tenure with Gov. Bush in a term when Texas executed more prisoners than any other state. Don’t ask him, however, since I’m sure he won’t remember. As General Counsel to President Bush, then as Attorney General, this fuckstain helped the administration shit all over the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Michael Mukasey? He’s there. Bush has an incredible talent for populating the United States Attorney General’s office with toadies, and Mukasey is no exception. Mukasey spent two decades practicing law in New York City, and he made his bones working for the batshit-crazy Rudy Giuliani, serving for four years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the federal prosecutor’s office. Perhaps that was the training he needed to become point-man for Bush and the “we don’t torture” crew on Capitol Hill.

Donald Rumsfeld, a man of whom Richard Nixon said “He’s a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that.” Yeah, he’s got two spaces...one for his black little soul and one for his enormous ego. But the true man is revealed in his actions and words. Such as this from The Daily Telegraph (UK) on March 11, 2007, which revealed this instruction he gave to his underlings: “Keep elevating the threat...Talk about Somalia, the Philippines etc. Make the American people realise (sic) they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists.” And the classless fuck was busted in 2004 for using a signing machine instead of personally signing more than 1,000 condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. The man is too goddamn corrupt to even pretend to be sincere.

And George W. Bush. The man who refers to the Constitution as “...that goddamn piece of paper,” albeit a goddamn piece of paper he has sworn to uphold and protect. No more needs to be said about him, or any of his diseased crew, because we allowed it. We gave up to them, and we deserve neither liberty nor safety.

And The Fear continues unchecked.

“There never was a good war or a bad peace.”

— Benjamin Franklin

We let it happen. We fucking encouraged it when we allowed The Fear to take hold and strip away bloody chunks of our humanity. We have proven time and time again that we learn nothing from history. We have lost every war of the past half century...Korea was hardly a victory, while Vietnam was a disaster. The Gulf War was a misguided military exercise, in the words of the Bard, “...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

And all those domestic “wars”...the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Illiteracy, and on and on...each one a failure, a collection of giant sinkholes to suck away our money, our dignity, our pride, and finally, our intelligence.

Whether it was from neglect, or stupidity, or inaction, hubris has ensured that we got what we deserved. Fuck us each and every one. If we are standing at the pinnacle of human achievement, we and our children should be sterilized now just to keep our inferior DNA from propagating.

Because as long as we allow injustice, as long as we are willing to give away our freedom, as long as we simply let things be, then we deserve every bad thing that happens as a consequence.

“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, — if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Speech to the Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787

Indeed, Mr. Franklin.

Indeed.

And The Fear continues unchecked…

More later,

uncle dave