The Eye of the Storm

"Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is growing late"

~ Bob Dylan from "All Along The Watchtower"

America lost the recent Presidential election long before the televised charade of polling took place in November of this year and even, long before either Tweedle-dee or Tweedle-dum was first considered by off-camera "higher ups" as eligible for promotion as a public figure at any level. And the 2004 election was not merely a victory over reason and human dignity--much less a temporary set back.

It was the celebration of a mission accomplished, by architects of horror, at home and abroad, who have labored relentlessly, over the decades of my life and before, to extinguish once and for all the existence of a population that is capable of critical thought. They have created an electorate that can be maneuvered into validating atrocity with their rubber stamp votes, and giving to that atrocity the appearance of the consent of a free and informed electorate. I have not a shadow of a doubt that our countrymen will vote for their own mass incarceration.

America 's assassins have good reason to believe that this troublesome hope of all mankind, this America that Lincoln called, "the last, best hope of man on earth," this nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," this ephemeral light in the hopeless darkness of history, has, finally, perished from the earth.

They are sated for the moment. But election 2004 has given them a blank check and they will use it. Things will get worse. The establishment by which we are now governed is populated with people who have no knowledge of any transcendent human value. They have no souls. And when they see original thought or creative work or loyalty or anything human, it is like light to a vampire to them. Confronted with the merest breath of freedom, they cannot do otherwise than degrade and exterminate the cause of their pain. Today they merely imprison it or drug it with Ritalan. But the "final solution" is not a mere possibility when this sort gains power. It is an inevitability. Theirs is a quickly degenerative, spiritual disease. They thirst for the blood of innocents.

If you think that the picture that I draw is too severe, think again. Consider that in the last 30 years, the population of the US has grown by 56 percent, while the growth in the number of prison cells has grown by 900 percent. Why? Did you vote for construction of an American Gulag? Now use your Excel graph facility to draw a picture of this growth. Do I exaggerate the severity of the growth in corporal law? Has there been commensurate growth in criminal conduct, and if so, why, and why was this major trend not addressed in the presidential debates?

Ask not for whom the cells are built. They are built for honest men who dare to look with their own eyes and believe the report of their own intellect. In former times, you would have been called a witch or a heretic. Now 'days you are called a terrorist. Either way, your ass winds up in stir. And none of your country men dare notice or object, because the state and its media organs have declared you to be a non-person. It is a crime to note that you exist.

Consider the Orwellian case of Chulmo Sohn. Mr. Sohn is guilty of the heinous crime of loving and striving to protect his children (two daughters whom "authorities" have now dispersed in state detention centers for children). His only defender is teenaged daughter Wen, who maintains a web site (www.yihmylove.com) from her isolated detention.

Notwithstanding the absence of a grand jury indictment, Mr. Sohn now rots in Sacramento County Main Jail. In December he will commence a hunger strike. Sohn is only one of a multitude of men who are destroyed by the state for daring to take paternal responsibility seriously. It is not just the Founding Fathers, but all fathers whom the state despises. Good fathers get in the way of polluting innocent minds with force-fed state doctrine and, for difficult cases, Ritalan.

I endeavor to be impersonal in my writing. But I cannot abstain here, from keening in imponderable grief, that my country, by the consent of the governed, has vacated American law in favor or fascism. I am old and have nothing to lose. I'd as soon spend the "golden years" in a concentration camp as in a nursing home or in destitution. But I pray that they shall be brief years if they shall not be illuminated by those candles that were kindled on the 4^th of July so many scores and decades ago. Nor can I deny rage that my countrymen allow this catastrophe to be accomplished with an electronic whimper and not even the dignity of a bang.

It is tempting to roll with the punches and accept the inevitable. But I, for one, dare not present my soul before the Almighty, blemished by so grave a sin. When his country was overtaken by fascism in the early part of the 20^th Century, Spanish philosopher Miguel DeUnamuno attempted to awaken his countrymen from their passivity with the assertion that, "in order to accomplish the impossible, we must attempt the absurd." And so I shall do in my country's defense, so long as I draw breath.

If your commendable editor will allow it, I will follow this essay with others that will attempt to move you, my countrymen, to action that effectually resists the tidal wave of ignorance that has overtaken us. And they shall begin, shortly, with an argument entitled, "What's God got to do--got to do with this?"

On the other hand, as Yogi Bera says, "It ain't over till till it's over." The Dylan song ends with the ominous note that "two horsemen are approaching." Which will we mount?