Happy 4th?

 I recently saw that half of Americans don't have any idea what they are celebrating on the 4th of July, “including 61 percent of Gen Z respondents.”  That is certainly consistent with my experience, with rural Americans and, especially, rural young people. On average, the "Proud to be an American" crowd doesn't have even the slightest idea what parts of American History they should be proud of and what parts should be causing deep shame and embarrassment. Worse, at least half of them don't have the capability of feeling shame or an obligation to make things better for anyone but themselves. 

 This is the crowd that, exemplified by Elon Musk, think that philanthropy, empathy, and community are obsolete concepts. If you want to put a circle around the people who have caused the United States to become a lawless trash can of fools and degenerates, this is the group you put your focus on.

 A few days ago, I was talking with a friend and we were trying to determine when our police departments quit cracking down on illegal exhaust systems. Where he and I live, the noise level is often bad enough to make us decide to pack up and move to someplace quieter.  When I was a kid, 60 years ago, every young man who owned a motorized vehicle, from scooters to cars, worried about the smallest pin-holes in their exhaust systems.  Any sort of unmuffled sound would get them stopped, ticketed, and it might even result in the vehicle being confiscated; if it was the second or third time they've been stopped for that offense. From the early 1970s until the late 1990s and early 2000s, most states performed emissions testing, which included visual inspection of vehicles’ intake and exhaust systems for illegal modifications.  When that ended, so did anything resembling law enforcement of vehicle noise laws. Today, it's impossible to tell the difference between a modified, aftermarket exhaust system and a straight pipe on a huge number of vehicles of all sorts, including vehicles that are absolutely illegal on public streets, regardless of exhaust system condition. Since I still read about cops making house calls when neighbors make a disturbing the peace complaint, I know the country hasn't gone stone deaf. We have just gone stone lawless. When, and why, did that happen?

 The answer to almost every question in these United States can be found by following the money. And there is certainly lots of money to be found in the illegal exhaust business. But that doesn't explain why people want that kind of lawlessness, and they seem to want it in large quantities.  First the Nixon Administration (with a major impeachment threat setback) and, then, the Reagan Administration demonstrated that the nation’s laws do not apply to the rich and powerful.  I will always believe that everything in human culture is driven top-down and that doubly applies for criminal behavior.  When the average Joe Douchebag saw that the people who run the federal government were unimpeded by any sort of ethics limitations and were filling their pockets with anything they could steal, he decided those same rules applied to him. 

 For more than 60 years, I thought the American Constitution was the closest thing to a sacred document, at least related to governments, that humans had ever created.  Then, I read it cover-to-cover several times in 2013 and 14, when I was trapped in a New Mexico Campground with a broken Volkswagen camper. Even not considering all the lines drawn through slavery protections, it's not a very organized or impressive document. The Declaration of Independence, the thing we are supposedly celebrating today, is even more flawed. Ignoring the fact that the document only acknowledges that "all (white) men" are "endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," a good bit of this celebrated document embedded vicious racism in the origins of the country.  The declaration’s final complaint being that the king refused to protect the European invaders from ". . . the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." The North American European invasion history that followed that document is best described as the largest, most ruthless, and blatantly racist genocidal campaign in human history. Add that to the lined-out provisions in the Constitution protecting and furthering slavery and we should probably be having a moment of silence rather than a raucous, drunken, fireworks-detonating celebration of 250 years of mortification and greed.

 That isn’t, of course, who we are today.  Instead, we are a nation divided and on the edge of another civil war.  Our federal government has been dumbed-down to accurately reflect the lowest-common-denominator in our culture.  After 250 years of trying to find the least-fit person to hold the office of Presidency, it’s hard to imagine moving that bar any lower.  Donny Trump’s rampant corruption, narcissism, mental deficiencies, and vile amoral behavior is a sad and scary reflection on who so many of our countrymen and women are today.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not celebrating this moment today.  I’m going to spend this day and evening at home with Ms. Day and my thoughts and hope that next year is better.  Or, at least, not worse. 

The “Too Many Men” Problem

War has always been an old man’s game, using young men as pawns, cannon fodder, and the tools of the “trade.” The January 6th seditionists were great demonstrations of what happens to a culture that breeds gross excesses of unskilled, uncreative, uneducated young men and provides them with nothing to do to either burn off their unproductive but dangerous energies or the necessary self-destructive opportunities nature intended for them. If we’re not going to give them swords and spears and pointless causes for them to flail away at each other in the service of their lords and masters, they need drugs and mindless activities with which to distract themselves. Thousands of years of human evolution and near-constant war between cities, states, and regional nations either caused or was were caused by these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible. The true cause of war might be a surplus of  these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible.

Forty years ago, a friend and I made a regular pilgrimage to San Clemente, CA (Doug always called it “San Clemency,” since Nixon was still boarded-up there at the time.) to scuba dive the San Clemente reef. Weather or ocean conditions were never a limiting factor for us. If we’d made the date for Sunday on the Monday before, regardless of 10’ surf, 2” visibility (seriously), cold, wind, or rain, we’d both be there on Sunday, suited-up, spearguns and game bags in hand, ready to swim the half-mile from the beach to the reef, and dive into the crashing water for fun and adventure. Over the years we repeated this exercise, we developed our own (probably not) definition of “macho”; which, essentially, translated to “stupid.”  When we chanted “this is really macho—as we flailed against the first 100’ of surf, sand, and wind until we got beyond the surf zone where we could comfortably paddle on our backs with our BCs partially inflated like undersized Zodiacs the rest of the swim to the reef—we were really telling ourselves that “this one might be the one that kills one or both of us.” Macho.

Doug was a PADI Dive Instructor and, eventually, I became a Dive Master (an instructor’s assistant) and as certified instructors we preached the PADI religion of “dive buddies” to our dive class students: as one PADI instructor quotes, “. . . the buddy system makes every dive safer and more fun.” And more complicated. Doug and I only paid slight notice to the whole buddy concept, especially at San Clemente. With visibility that rarely exceeded 3-4’ and was usually barely an arm’s reach, there was no point in pretending that once we went under water there was any chance that we’d be buddied-up. One of the last dive trips we did together, Doug asked, “What do you think is in store for two guys like us, who Nature intended to finish off in a war before we made it to 20 or 25 years old, who have ever appearance of living way past 40, at least?”

I totally understood what he meant. When I “celebrated” my 30th birthday, I was mostly stunned that I’d lived that long. Both in my career and in my recreation and even my everyday activities, there was no reasonable expectation from anyone who knew me that I’d live to 30, let alone 40+ years-old which I was at the time when this question was popped. Nature had clearly intended for both of us to, probably, lead a small group of young men against another group of young men in bloody, hand-to-hand combat, and to die “gloriously” on a battlefield strewn with other equally destined-and-designed-to-die young men. At 40, like lots of men, we both felt that thing often called a “mid-life crisis” but we were both aware enough to know that the crisis wasn’t about anything more than having outlived our use-by-dates. No expensive car,

Our national fixation and the weird and not particularly honest “respect” we give to people who spent time in the military is a pretty accurate example of the dichotomy between who our culture pretends these people are vs who we know they are. A recent pass through Minneapolis/St. Paul reminded me of the near-constant parade of homeless (mostly) men sporting “homeless, support your troops” signs.

The Obama Administration, several states, and a few cities combined to dramatically reduce the number of homeless vets between 2010 and 2019, but in 2019 21 out of every 10,000 veterans were homeless which is about 25% higher than non-vets. A 2012-2017 study found that military vets contributed to 13.5% of all US deaths by suicide but were only 7.9% of the US adult population. Male vets were almost twice as likely to commit suicide than female vets (with Army and Marine vets leading that “charge”). In March, 2020, the VA found that veteran unemployment was greater than 13%, opposed to a 3.5% unemployment rate for the general population at the time (Trump managed to degrade the rest of the US workforce to the vets’ unemployment level by August 2020.). Three of the top ten professions in the US that exhibit high divorce rates involve military jobs. All of that negative outcome is in spite of the desperate attempts by government and society to provide a “hand up” post-military service through generous veterans benefits, special employment consideration (especially in government employment), and the leniency society gives to those “who have served.” Being in the US military is either hazardous to the rest of your life or attracts people who are deficient in the first place. The fact that “nearly 1 in 5 of the [January 6] rioters charged so far have a history of serving in the military (only about 7% of Americans in general are military veterans)” is a pretty solid indication that being a military vet is no indication of either patriotism, loyalty to the oath service people take to the US Constitution, or intelligence or even sanity. The January 6th Hee Haw Riot was one of the most underachieving herds of human beings since . .  . every Trump rally ever.

Nixon ended the draft in July of 1973 in an attempt to end the Vietnam War protests. He was too late, of course, since Congress cut off funding for the war in late-1972, forcing the US to negotiate a “peace settlement” that allowed US troops to leave in January of 1973. The end of the draft instigated 50 years of a “poverty draft” where young people with no other economic hope feel forced to join the military in the desperate hope that they might receive some vocational training and an economic leg-up. Lake of education opportunities, college debt, and the general trends in the economy that will continue to offer fewer employment to the military’s current prime candidates: the military spends “$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.”

Places like Puerto Rico and the deep South are  the Army’s and Marine’s prime recruiting territory. Puerto Rico ‘s unemployment rate is greater than 40%, and Army recruiting offices ensnare more than 4 times the number of Puerto Rican recruits than the average US-based recruiting offices. Thanks to a particularly sleezy section of the Bush “No Child Left Behind” education bill, public schools have to grant military recruiters the same access to children as do post-secondary schools and employers. Of course, the military recruiters don’t spend anywhere near as much time at private schools or high income suburban K-12 schools as they do in impoverished rural and urban schools. Kids who know they have options are less likely to give up 4 years of their life wasting away in the military. For example, “In 2015, a pair of Education Week reporters making use of the Freedom of Information Act reviewed the Army’s presence in Connecticut high schools and found major discrepancies in how the branch targeted middle-class and poor kids. Throughout the entire 2011–2012 school year, Army recruiters visited a higher-income high school—in which only 5 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch—just four times. By contrast, at another high school, where nearly half of the students qualified, Army recruiters stopped by more than 40 times before the spring semester’s final bell.” According to a RAND report, 40-65% of JROTC programs are clustered in the generally impoverished Southeast. JROTC programs are significantly more likely to exist in schools where the majority of students are eligible for free lunch programs. Schools with JROTC programs are twice as likely to have a large black student population than those with a more typically represented black population.

Nothing about military recruiting tactics would indicate that our military is staffed with the nation’s “best and brightest.” What we do have, however, is a military that is incredibly non-representative of the general population—racially, educationally, intellectually, and politically—and a well-armed and dangerously trained sector of and from the federal and state governments that are clearly easily duped into believing fantastic and unsubstantiated conspiracy gibberish and are very likely going to be the fall of the United States of America’s government and empire.

Gun Fallacies

About 15 years ago, a friend (David) made the dumbest possible decision to use a gun to defend himself from a pair of stupid young men late one evening after a gig in a small Idaho town. He didn’t manage to kill anyone or even seriously injure them, but he did shoot two unarmed men and, in a panic, ran away and tried to hide the evidence. In every simulated and real scenario I have ever seen, ordinary people demonstrate no good reason to possess a gun during an emergency. People kill their kids, kids kill other kids, cops shoot unarmed victims or innocent bystanders, and people shoot themselves accidentally or on purpose. But the whole "good guy with a gun comes to save the world" bullshit is just that; bullshit. I just finished reading A Massacre in Memphis, The Race Riot thatShook the Nation One Year After the Civil War.  A couple of the scenes in that story reminded me of David’s experience with a gun.

The first incident in A Massacre in Memphis that is a classic example of dumb shits with guns demonstrating how criminally easy it is for a pack of idiots with guns to do everything except what they planned with their little toy pistols. The scene is--after a day of white and black idiots waving sticks, throwing rocks, and shooting guns in the general direction of their oppressors or the people they've decided are the reason nobody wants to hire drunken, lazy Irishmen--a group of black men decided to chase a group of white cops out of their neighborhood. Most of the black citizens in this encounter were recently discharged “Buffalo Soldiers” who were well-trained and experienced soldiers, supposedly competent with weapons and with being under fire. Like most modern cops, the white (mostly Irish) cops were more skilled at close-up brutality than being in a gun fight and they not only couldn’t hit a barn door at ten feet, although the only one who did hit something shot himself. Not an unusual story today. 

“To this point no weapon more dangerous than a stick or rock has been displayed. But now a pistol shot rings out. One of the more distant black men, intending no doubt to scare the police men and speed them along on their retreat, has pulled out a revolver and fired into the air. A few others follow his example. The policemen, thinking they are being shot at, halt on the bride and turn. Three of them reach for their revolvers. Two of them draw, level their weapons at the crowd and open fire. The black me who are shooting into the air immediate lower their guns and fire at the policemen. Within moments, twenty or more black men are firing.

“One of the officers, thirty-two-year-old John Stevens, falls. A shout goes up from the crowd, 'He is shot.' He has in fact been shot, but not by any of the blacks. In his panicky attempts to draw his weapon and return fire, he has pulled the trigger prematurely, putting a bullet into his own leg. It is a bad wound: the bullet goes deep and shatters his right thighbone. All who see him go down assume he has been hit by gunfire from the blacks.

“The fusillade is quickly over. The firing has all been hasty and inaccurate. Dozens of rounds have been discharged, but no black person and no policeman but Stevens has been hit.”

In this episode of "Gun Dummies," the two cops who opened fire and started the shootout at the bridge ran away, leaving their wounded officer and the one sane cop who hadn’t panicked to face the black soldiers on their own. That cop and several of the black protesters helped get Stevens to a doctor and, then, to a hospital. The two panicky cops ran back to the police station, exaggerated what had happened and prettied up the fable of their own participation, and helped start a Memphis riot and race war. More of that kind of gun-owner behavior continues throughout the story, but another favorite moment of mine was when black non-participants in the fight were trying to flee the city and escape the white mob.

“Many of the blacks being shot at are fleeing down Rayburn or across the eastern branch of the bayou. Pendergrast sees one who appears to be lagging behind the rest: the man is running down Rayburn just twenty feet ahead of the (white) mob. Pendergrast can see only his back. He takes aim at him with one pistol and fires. The man pitches forward and sprawls facedown on the street. Pendergrast goes up to him and turns him over on his back. To the grocer’s astonishment he sees that his victim is white. ‘God damn it,’ he exclaims. ‘I am sorry I shot this man. I thought he was a God damn yellow nigger.’

“The man is fireman Henry Dunn, who in his eagerness to wreak vengeance on blacks raced ahead of the rest of the mob. He is alive but unconscious, and obviously cannot live long. Pendergrast’s bullet has entered the back of his head, plowed through his brain, penetrated the skull on the other side, and lodged under the skin of his forehead.

Pendergrast now seeks atonement for his error by claiming a black victim. Leaving Dunn, he goes down to the bayou and spots a short young man in an army uniform who is trying to get away. The man is Lewis Robinson, a former corporal in the 3^rd. He is too far off to get a good shot at but is within shouting distance. Pendergrast calls to him, telling him to come back, that he will not be harmed. Robinson takes Pendergrast at his word. He halts, then begins making his way back toward the grocer. When he is close enough, Pendergrast raises a pistol and fires into his face. The bullet hits Robinson in the jaw. A policeman nearby also fires, hitting Robinson in the side.”

American history is littered with the wreckage of lives, families, and communities destroyed by the fable of the "gun that won the West." The west was "won' and became a semi-livable place when communities decided they'd had enough of the mindless fallacy of "good guys with guns." When law officers began to disarm the usual idiots who are inclined to carry weapons everywhere they go and when communities and states decided to disarm the usual suspects, the country finally began to achieve some sort of stability and security. Like most lessons in history, we seem to have forgotten that lesson and the NRA/Russian propaganda is doing everything it can to prevent a rational discussion about the problems a "well armed" society creates for itself. In fact, we have repeatedly disproved Bob Heinlein's drunken claim that "a well armed society is a polite society." It was dumb when he said it and it's even dumber to keep thinking it. 

Thinking Small and Growing Smaller

The United States once did really big things. For about fifty years, we were the inventors of practically everything significant in the world. In the late 1800’s, the United States created a land grant university system that educated children other than just those of the ruling class and created a middle class that drove the nation’s economy, it’s industry, it’s creativity, and its spirit. We created a public education system the rest of the world imitated and, then, improved on while we allowed ours to decay into a pre-prison system. We built cities that redefined urban living. We crossed the continent, first with railroads then with airlines. We electrified cities, then the countryside, and tied it all together with telephones and followed that with the Internet. We went to the moon dozens of times and sent astronauts there six times before 1972. There are branches of science that wouldn’t exist anywhere in the world without American curiosity. There are concepts of democracy, justice, and freedom spreading throughout the world, based on models the United States of America invented. We were the envy of the world.

Then we weren’t. To paraphrase Marlin Brando’s character in On the Waterfront, “We coulda been a contender.”

There has always been a primitive, superstitious character to citizens of the United States. After all, as another move character said about the American people, “We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans, we're Americans. With a capital ‘A. huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts.” All of which is true. And like mutts we’re naturally inclined to knock over trashcans and root through the rubble for a scrap of food or join a pack of other rejected mutts and go feral and become dangerous to everything around us. Along with getting “kicked out of every decent country in the world,” we brought with us a collection of religions that were clearly as insane and useless as the most dangerous ideas humans have ever invented. Today, those religions are driving the country to do smaller and smaller things in the name of money and power and under the pretense of doing a variety of gods’ will.

Take our prison system, for example. In the 1950’s, we decided to move our prison model from punitive to “corrections.” We still cynically call prisons “corrections facilities,” but they no long serve any part of that mission. Today, our prisons are slave-owning, for-profit corporations that drive some state’s legal system to create more and more “crime” to provide those corporations with slave labor. As a result, one of the most embarrassing big things the United States has done since the genocide of the American Indian is creating the world’s highest prison population rate: 724 of every 100,000 Americans currently resides in an American prison. Russia, a dictatorship and repressive totalitarian government, is a distant second to the United States.

Our one and only other big thing is our war machine, jokingly called the “Defense Department.” We have dedicated our national budget and our industry to creating more dangerous and powerful weapons of mass destruction, individual destruction, and everything in-between.

Neuroscience, without much help from government funding or the public, has plodded along learning more about how the human brain and it’s collection of chemicals, electrical systems (neurons and neural circuits), and molecular biology create the individuals we become or could be. Crime and war are two big things that neuroscience could have changed with just a reasonable amount of encouragement, but neuroscience, like evolution, terrifies the superstitious and, more importantly, the people who make bucket loads of money on crime, war, and religion. In fact, those three “special interests” are overwhelmingly the forces that prevented the United States from reaching its potential and will eventually undo the nation and the species.

The fact is we do not control our brains, our brains control us. The combination of chemicals, electrical systems, and molecular biology between our ears and in our gut are the things that control who we are. Knowing that and controlling it would allow us to be anyone we want to be; as individuals and as a species. The trillions of dollars the US flushes down the military-industrial toilet could have been used to get to the core of human conflict and resolve it. The trillions of dollars wasted on our punishment system could be spent on creating happier and more productive citizens, through education, science, and a shared desire to improve the quality-of-life for every person in the country and the world. We could have built a corrections system that enhances lives and freedom. That would have been a big thing, but we’ve devolved into a nation intent on punishing the poor for being poor and declaring war on everyone who won’t hand over their national sovereignty along with their natural and human resources.

The cost of abandoning big things (No, Donny. Your wall is not a big thing.) is that we become smaller as a result. Our world image has shrivelled to a tiny fraction of what it was in November 2016 and it becomes smaller by the day. Our self-image isn’t doing well, either. Fascists and neo-Nazis are symptoms of failure and self-hate, not power or superiority. You don’t set a goal of repressing others, stealing their resources and lives, and propping up yourself at the expense of everything from decency to intellect because you are free, healthy, and happy. Those are the goals of total failure. Those goals are so small, they reduce everyone they touch upon.

Is the Gap too Far?

Not long after the “election,” I brought a Xmas pie to our young neighbors. I’ve talked about “Dan” before, when I discussed his argument (“I don’t believe that.”) against the evidence that market forces, congressional lawmakers’ opening the world market to our ammunition manufacturers, and gun hoarders like him who have driven the price of ammo up. Dan doesn’t vote, so nothing that happens “is my fault.” His wife, someone who works for the Veterans’ Administration and holds a BS in microbiology, like her family voted for Trump. She earned that degree at the University of Michigan, where she claimed “the professors were terrible.” I don’t know who’s who in microbiology, but I do have to wonder what someone with a science education is doing voting for Trump. Maybe her education really was terrible.

When we talked about her reasons for voting Trump, she said “there are books” written about Hillary Clinton’s corruption; which is true. A few of them are written by reasonably credible writers, but most are financed by the Koch idiots and the right wing propaganda machine. However, her family is all Republicans and Fox News fans and her propaganda saturation was complete. She said she even cried as she left the voting booth, but she was convinced that “Hillary lied” and she followed that statement with “but I believe in Jesus Christ.” I do not get the connection. I don’t get how people who imagine themselves to be any kind of Christian could find a way to voting for Trump. While there appears to be no evidence that Christians feel any obligation to behave decently it always seemed to me that the point in being Christian should be to do at least a few of the things that make the Jesus character appealing.

Apparently, Christians (especially the televangelist millionaires) are really on board with anything that ensures their “churches” never have to pay taxes or behave in any fashion resembling “Christian”: as in putting those millions to use doing anything other than packing their pockets, buying mansions and airplanes for their personal use, and fleecing the gullible. That is the religion I’ve always known and been disgusted by. One of the hallmarks of this brand of Christianity is a desperate desire to instigate “Armageddon.” Not because they really believe they are going to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but because it absolves them of any responsibility for future generations so they can carry on with their perversions and avarice without guilt. Again, what would be the motivation for an intelligent person to follow that sort of philosophy?

Of course, Dan’s only response was, “Hillary wants to take my guns.” He and I have had the conversation about how Reagan and Bush I were the only presidents to do squat to his gun rights with the Brady Bill. He’s still terrified that Democrats and 63% of his fellow Americans want some sort of gun control to slow up the decline of the country into gun nut chaos. Dan, of course, is afraid to travel anywhere, even in Goodhue County, MN without a weapon in case he gets his chance to be a “good guy with a gun.” Didn’t we used to be “the land of the free, home of the brave?” We also used to be a world leader in science and technology and we made stuff the rest of the world wanted to buy. That was then and this is the country that deserves Trump and has earned the ridicule of intelligent people worldwide.

I have to wonder if reasonably intelligent Americans, some with moderately decent educations, can be so easily fooled by low-rent propaganda and idiotic arguments, is there any hope for the country? The gap between the Tea Party know-nothings and people who actually make the country run, do science, make products and invent things, and demonstrate some level of creativity is growing so large it seems like humans are splitting into two incompatible species. That’s probably not a bad thing, since the left-behind species is superstitious, uneducable, and dangerous to the planet’s survival. The problem is that they are the overwhelming majority in the world and, especially, the majority in the USA.

#176 This Is Not America

It's late February and this is the first time I've felt like saying something in the Rat Rants. The first two months of the year have been depressingly like the last seven years and I see no signs of improvement on the horizon. I get a moment of "I told you so" because of the home and mortgage crash, but that was something I'd have loved to have been wrong about. Listening to math-deficient "economics experts" babble about "home ownership" as a sign of booming economics for the last seven years has been tough to take. When an expert doesn't know the difference between ownership and borrower-ship, the country is in big trouble.  

However, that isn't what inspired me to sit with my computer and write this Rant. For the last seven years, and often before that, a Pat Metheny/David Bowie song has haunted me; "This Is Not America." The refrain is getting louder every day.

The radical Right has brought us Big Brother in a form that even Orwell didn't imagine (or at least describe in writing). All my life, I've watched movies and read books about countries that "disappear" people and considered that the worst fate a person and families could experience. A country that can justify taking citizens in the night (or, worse, in broad daylight) without warrant, justification, or an expectation of a trial is without a reason to exist. A country whose court systems excuse this behavior has stepped out of the small group of civilized nations and into savagery. My country, the United States of America, is just that kind of nation. But I'm here to tell you, this is not America. This is G.W. Bush's primitive little nightmare nation, a country that once could have been great, a country that at least one time in its history rose up, unified, to fight corrupt and evil nations just like the sort that we are now beginning to resemble. This is not America.

The United States of America does not torture anyone, let alone innocent citizens. The United States of America does not condone capital punishment and John Adams explained why when he defended the British soldiers who were some of the murderers in the Boston Massacre. The United States of America is a curious, courageous, scientific nation, not a superstitious, backwards country of fools and cowards. The United States of America is a democracy, not a corporatocracy, not a theocracy, and not a kingdom. The nation was formed as a republic, with the dream of one day being an educated democracy. Business and government serve the public, not the reverse. The United States of America is a symbol to the world of all that can be good in human nature and society, not a terrorist power that tries to frighten the rest of the world into submission. This is not America.

The United States of America is not a country that directs all of its protection and concern toward the richest citizens, neglecting the poor and the working classes to labor in despair and fear. The United States of America is not a class society, regardless of the pitiful whining of the rich and their inbred idle offspring. The United States of America would never attack a smaller, undefended nation to steal that country's natural resources and to undermine their culture and government. The United States of America would never accept the inane jabbering of a Supreme Court that deemed the rights of the rich and powerful and their corrupt and psychopathic organizations, corporations, to be above and superior to individual citizens. The United States of America would run a judge who made such a foolish decision out of town on rail, tarred and feathered. This is not America.

George Bush will be an example of Oscar Wilde's great observation, "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." I only hope that when Little George leaves he takes his vicious nation with him. It was not America. When those selfish conservatives leave Washington, they will cause great happiness all over the world.

February 2008