Creeping Fascism

I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.

~ Mark Twain

Does anyone recall the scary days right after September 11, 2001? No I don't mean anthrax scary...I mean worse...when criticism of the United States, God and the Republican Party was strictly verboten. There was heavy censorship of anything that questioned the natural order of things, namely that Jesus Christ would get vengeance on Mohammed in the big sand box. I remember all the shiny gas-guzzling SUVs toting big flags, then brightly colored decals (made in Chinese prisons) and asking how stoopid could some folk be? They didn't see it coming. 3 buck a gallon gas. The attack on civil liberties, which has been non-stop. The diversion into Iraq. The decals have faded, bleached by the sun and the letdown of a quick high followed by a quicker withdrawal into reality. You been had, people, you been took. Bamboozled. I sensed it immediately, not because I am clairvoyant, but because I saw it all before. I knew where the media was being lead, willingly, complicitly. Most of all, I knew that the righteous warlords would get PAID in big stacks of pure blood money. Yes sir, a quick infusion right into their icy cold veins. And the worst part was that I couldn't call them on it. No one could or your words would disappear right off the page as if they, and you...never existed. I've studied enough history to know that these things go in cycles. I was there in 1991 when the same thing happened with Poppy taking down his doublecrossing drug runner buddy in Panama and then Oil War Numero Uno. I was there when Raygun atoned for all the dead marines in Lebanon by gangbanging a tiny island that neither he or his voting bloc could find on a map. Going back further in the same tragic history there was Nixon bombing the entrails outta SE Asia all through Christmas and Chanukah 1972 and beyond. There were so many lies ringing and echoing further back to the Red Menace, the Rosenbergs, McCarthy's lists of names, but most of all, the cowardice of the people to stand up to creeping fascism. What a tremendous let down, when you see what you thought was a free society crumble so quickly through fear and nationalistic hysteria. You would never think it was that fragile until you watch it fall. And it continues to fall little by little, brick by brick, even though the censorship loosened up slowly during 2002 as it become obvious that the struggle was taking an obvious detour to (quite literally) take care of business in Iraq. The criticism is there now, mostly uncensored. But so are the stealth prisons and the disappeared and the watch lists and the NSA data mining and the quid pro quo of the telecommunications companies. Freedom isn't free, it is a constant struggle against against opportunists, nationalists and believers in the supernatural. The fight against global capitalistic extremists will continue.