50 years from now, when the early-21st-century history of Fortress America is being written, I'd like the writers to take special note of the role of the Smiler in changing America from the land of the free to the fortress of the scared.

Honestly, looking at the 50 billion dollar defense proposal, I don't think that America as such can survive this one, folks.

We've got a president who's afraid of losing his job, writing a budget that guarantees that - whether or not we need the proposed weaponry etc. - he will keep his job. Because a defense budget that large only does one thing, which is to spin up the defense industry again, and, as postulated in an earlier rant, rehire all the defense employees, who will then vote for him and he will be re-elected, ushering in a new wave of Republican presidents, all of them increasingly small-minded as they realize that to really shaft the common people and not have them notice, you just have to make sure that they have jobs.

Never mind the highly-logical question of why, if we are now fighting terrorism, a large chunk of the budget is going to the development of conventional weapons. What I'm interested in is finding out whether the people of Fortress America are going to tolerate the government's excursion into their wallets. After all, we've got to pay for our toys somehow, and since non of our proposed military forays are for the purpose of conquering the country in question, our tax base isn't going to grow. Also, since we are going to start these wars and they aren't exactly going to be resounding moral victories, we won't be able to force the citizens of the countries in question to pay reparations to help offset some of the tremendous costs we're about to incur.

Instead, by 2007, the government is going to want an extra $1500 a year from the average family. Not that this will come particularly close to covering $50 billion, but what the hell - between the tax increases and the money saved by cutting and ending various services, we'll manage. Never mind that we're going to go straight back to debtor-nation status, with - once again - interest payments that would bankrupt any other country. It's a good thing that America's got a reputation as the biggest economy in the world, because if it was any other country doing this, their debt structure would be under some serious scrutiny. In case you missed the point, no other country would be allowed to behave this way.

And that's totally disregarding any of the other stupid things the Smiler's doing, like declaring the targets we're going after next. Now we've got Iran and Iraq ready to go back to war after a decade or so of stability between them - we're going to reinstitute a state of war between not only implacable religious enemies, but also religious enemies who use any and every non-religious means at their disposal, such as the drafting of children, to engage in their wars. But we've got to have someone to shoot with the ammunition that we're rehiring everyone to make.

There's also always the question of who benefits. As a friend of mine has been known to ask, can you follow the gain? Who benefits from such an action?

As it turns out, not only does the Smiler get to keep his job, but the Carlyle group - among others - which has a hefty investment in the defense industry, benefits from any increased profit. And it just so happens that the Smiler's daddy is one of the stockholders of Carlyle.

We can totally ignore Enron and the questionable investment schemes of our so-morally-correct Republican 'leaders'. We can ignore the possibility that all this defense budget crap is being done, not so the Smiler has America to be president of, but rather the presidency of any country (and Fortress America will not be America). But this whole issue of the gain is one that came up during Vietnam.

I don't have my Vietnam books here, so I'm flying blind, and I couldn't tell you which source I saw this in, since I've read too many books on Vietnam to remember them all, but one of the authors alleged that one of the reasons that Nixon failed to end the Vietnam war - beyond the fact that promising to end it would get him reelected - was because someone, I think Lyndon Johnson, owned a large amount of stock in Bell Helicopters.

Obviously, every Bell helicopter that got shot down meant that the government would buy more to make up the loss, which meant that Bell would make a profit, which meant that the shareholders would make a profit also. I don't think that postulating that one of the factors behind Vietnam - which was basically fought live on the evening news - was the profit of big business is too far-fetched. Nor do I think that it's too far-fetched to say that the same combination of events are coming together again in the Smiler's presidency.

Let's face it, the man lied to be elected. He flat out lied. People swallowed the lie - and Gore fucked up his campaign, let's not forget - and elected him. But it came close to the lie being discovered. For one example, he promised to reduce taxes, so he gave us all a payment that the government couldn't afford - if I make extra money, it makes a lot more sense to me to pay down some of my debt than to go out and give it back to my employer - and, as of September 11th, had a really great reason, specifically the bodies of some 6500 human beings, to go to war and hide the shortfall coming up in the budget. He's exactly like some slimy cardsharp, distracting your attention with a line of snappy patter while he stacks the deck against you. If you keep trying to listen to him, you'll never win.

One key point to bear in mind - if this is, in fact, all about the economy, and I have no doubt whatsoever that it is - is that wars never solve recessions. Never. Instead, as someone else said before me, war masks the symptoms of recession with a high fever. Everything looks like it's going great, when the reality is that the economy is in an unsustainable high gear - the mass layoffs of women after World War II is one example of this. If the economy and business had to make a place for the women to keep working and for men to have jobs also, that would've been the death knell right there. There was no way to sustain the high pace of the economy, which is why women were hired because there were few men for the jobs, with the war, and the attendant huge consumption of supplies by the military, over. The economy would've been overproducing by far, far too much.

And let's bear in mind that for the largest chunk of the modern economy, which dates really to about the end of World War I, we in America have been in a state of war, actual or not for roughly fifty years. That's less than a century of the modern economy, more than half of it in a state of 'war', where we could justify our insane expansion of the economy by saying that we needed to be prepared for the Russians to attack us at any time.

It's like being on one of those moving walkways. We manage to avoid falling, as we run off the end, but we stumble. Before we can actually fall, however, we've found the next walkway. And bear in mind, I'm not saying that the Clinton presidency had nothing to do with the state of the economy - a lot of the factors that are now coming together started during his presidency - but the Smiler is making it ever so much worse.

I really believe what I said at the start of this whole thing. If the Smiler and the various conservatives are allowed to continue to have their way, America will cease to exist. We are no longer a country that recognizes the contributions of others. We are trying - rather than doing what our ancestors did - to keep people out of our country, which is supposed to be the refuge of all. My ancestors at some point were fleeing poverty and/or persecution - how about yours?

The point is, we're all ultimately immigrants from somewhere else, at least if not Native American. Yet we've decided to end the American mythology and to be intolerant towards those we should welcome. In some great book somewhere, doesn't it count for us every person who wants to flee an oppressive regime and start a new life in a democratic country? After all, that's the ostensible reason behind our involvement in most of the military conflicts of the last century - to allow democracy to flourish.

But now it's become a giant club that you have to be born into to be accepted in. I realize that this is minimally tied to the idea of the budget, but in fact it's merely the start. The Smiler has shown that he is perfectly willing to trample all over the people in his pursuit of his job. It's like we've elected someone to fuck the country up - it is what Warren Ellis said, he's a man who "will tell any lie, wear any mask, to become president, and not only that, he fucking hates you, and he's doing this just so he can make your lives hell."

We're watching the death of the American way of life in the fear-ridden reactions of our president and our elected leaders. Because they don't know what to do in the modern world, how to cope with new threats, rather than doing the logical thing and attempting to understand the new situation, they are resorting to the same weapon of fear that has been used since time immemorial - violence.

And they're building their apparatus of violence on our backs and in our names.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust,

Channon