My Worst Ever 4th of July

Fourth of July, 2006, was the worst I have ever known.

When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed along with the execrable Ceausescu regime in Rumania and everyone was shouting “hurrah!” I felt unease – it was as if I heard the movement of a clock work in the metapsychic interstices. It was as if a giant hand on a hidden clock moved with a couple of ticks and tocks that much closer to midnight.

It struck me like a bolt between the eyes – what would America do now without the Enemy we had come to depend upon, the Enemy we had embraced for a generation in a strange tango of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Enemy we had come to know and in which we had a perverse trust as we held the gun of nuclear perdition to each other’s head?

It seemed obvious that we then either came to terms with the dichotomy in the American soul or found a new Enemy, one we would love to hate, an object on which to project all the things that we, as a nation, refuse to recognize about ourselves – our group Shadow.

Then came the shock of 9-11, on cue, giving the neo-conservative movement opportunity to realize their “Plan for a New American Century” – which, all bullshit aside, is a plan for world conquest. How puzzled I was to almost immediately hear phrases like “Homeland Security” and “be careful” about what you say so as not to “help the terrorists”. The shock was not the fall of the Twin Towers but the sudden “consensus” that 9-11 had “changed everything” and the need for a never ending “war on terror”.

Dammit, 9-11 changed nothing! Nothing, except that we had bonded with a new Enemy and what a perfect Enemy It was! Shadowy, terrible, demonic, able to appear and disappear, everywhere and nowhere – a “service pack two” version of Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldberg.

The beauty is that Our Enemy can be anything or anyone. Our Enemy hates our Freedom and hates Democracy. Those who oppose anything in the War, support the terrorists – in fact, are but an executive decision from being terrorists. The tautology is complete.

But why was this July 4th the worst I have ever known? It is because the eliminationist rhetoric of the rabid right which Orcinus has documented for years suddenly mainstreamed this 4th of July weekend. Not only the usual covey of pundits but even elected representatives of the American People have attacked the editors, journalists and photographers of a major American newspaper with a viciousness we have never seen before. They cried “treason” and asked for their death a “gas chamber” and even agitated deadly vigilante action against them and their families.

Elimination of opponents is the prime characteristic of a fascist regime. That eliminationist rhetoric has gone main stream is a major step in that direction.

Is there no one who can cry, “Have you no shame?” If there was and they did, would they listen?