The best crimes are always committed in the dark.

It's two thirty in the morning and I am about my seditious business in the dark.

So what to rant about? How about America's role in the upcoming war - and let's not pretend that we're not going to go - and how it makes me feel, to be an American? With any luck, this will hopefully jolt you out of your complacency, and out of your televised lives. I know you're there. You're waiting for the war to break out, live on national television. Because it's happened before.

But I say to you, beware the Ides of March.

Beware it because the man you have selected and allowed to be your President and the Cabinet that you have allowed him to chose and the Congress that you have voted in, irresponsive to the idea that maybe having same-party president and congress is a bad idea is getting ready to go to war in your name.

Your name. Not someone else's, not his own. Yours.

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

- H.L. Mencken

How do you feel about that? Does it occur to you, as you sit there, this dark night, and the dark nights to come, that you have allowed someone to kill other people because you see no other way to make yourself happy? That we are going to war for no reason at all?

"I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home."

- Archibald Cox

Well, that's not entirely true. There are lots of reasons we're going to war, and they're ones I've been telling you all along. The economy. Bush's desire to get re-elected and the certainty - on the part of his Cabinet, as well - that killing people is a good way to get re-elected. The fact that no one outside of America, and certainly not if their skin is brown, is real.

"When the flag is unfurled, all reason is is the trumpet."

- Ukrainian Proverb

You are supporting a plan that makes no bones about the fact that everyone in the world has a target strapped to them, and if things get bad at home, we can always "solve" the problem by taking aim at the targets.

"Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control."

- Allen Ginsberg

Never mind that, maybe, if there's a problem with the economy - which there certainly is - the solution isn't to gear up the defence industry. Maybe the solution is to re-evaluate our needs in terms of work hours. Jeremy Rifkin pointed out, in The End Of Work, that sometime early in the last century, the standard work week was six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day. When mechanization came in, the unions got together and decided that, to employ their members, the work week would become 40 hours, while wages would increase so that families could live on that amount of money. Let's look at reality here and realize that we're looking at mechanization and exporting of manufacturing on a scale that makes early industrialization look like a fucking tea party. Let's force our government to be accountable, to us, for the exporting of such jobs. Let's force the corporations that hire us to be accountable.

"I think we must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is a really big world danger."

- Gunnar Myrdal

But whatever we do, let's not kill people just to make our problems go away. You do understand, I hope, that this war is all about oil and jobs for Americans, either here or in the rebuilding of Iraq, because you know as well as I do that we're not going to let "for'ners" get those jobs. Or that oil.

"At the moment, the United States is the most powerful, the most prosperous, and the most dangerous country in the world."

- Robert Maynard Hutchins

And let's look at why Bush wants to be re-elected. Maybe it's because he's not qualified to do anything else. Maybe it's because we've bought the stupidest, least leader-like candidate on the slate last year. I wasn't a real fan of McCain, but he'd be better than this. For fuck's sake, can we not at least vote for the smart conservatives? Why did you elect Bush? Did you believe his campaign lies? Did you believe that "compassionate conservatism" existed anywhere other than a speechwriter's wet dream of a phrase guaranteed to swing the election? Why did you do it?

"America is a land where a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy - and won't cross the street to vote in a national election."

- Bill Vaughan

And congratulations. We've got a president who is a puppet for his Cabinet, the most racist, hateful, evil coalition in the world. I've got your Axis of Evil right here, baby. It's sitting right behind our "president", whispering in his ear about the latest way to fuck us over. And you know what? I'd even feel better about the whole thing if I thought we had a "president" who could at least perpetrate his racist, conservative hate for everyone himself. But instead, he is a puppet for the Cabinet.

"You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!' You never hear a real American talk like that."

- Frank Hague

When I compared Bush to Transmet's Smiler early on, I was wrong. At least the Smiler comes up with his evil himself. Think about that: we have elected a president so stupid, he can't even be evil without being told how to do it. The man is incompetent at what he does. He is a puppet, and that is all.

"The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition, and imcompetence."

- Elbert Hubbard

But in the meantime, he is, as the puppet, perpetrating Ashcroft, Cheney, Rumsfeld and co.'s absolute terror of others. Bush is the executioner. His hands are going to be dirty no matter what happens in this war. His hands are going to be covered in the blood of innocent civilians who did nothing except being Iraqi. But the Cabinet, by using Bush as the executioner for their dirty work, is going to come out of this smelling of roses. Because we've got a short attention span in this country. We're going to forgive and forget that they are the ones behind the throne and that there's nothing on the throne other than an empty vessel. We will allow them all to get away with this. Even though it is their fear of many, many things talking. Fear of Europe as a superpower. Fear of economic meltdown. Fear of what high oil prices will do to a re-election campaign. And not least of all, fear of little brown people, angry at us because we're mucking about in their business, telling them that they must have McDonalds, they must quit supporting anti-American terrorism, assuming that they do in the first place, an assumption I'm not comfortable with, and that, above all else, they must be brown-skinned Americans, buying American goods and making American goods and worshipping at the shrine of American-style "democracy and freedom", which is a double irony, when you consider that Bush does not understand democracy and his Cabinet is terrified of it.

"The flag is a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty."

- Woodrow Wilson

I know how I feel about the whole thing. It makes me sick. It makes me want to understand how in the fuck we can even try to make a human rights case out of bombing Iraq and not think that maybe, just maybe, the same case could be made against the good citizens of the United States. It makes me hate you.

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

- Thomas Jefferson

"My fellow Americans." That's not a phrase I ever thought I'd hate. But I do. I hate being lumped in with all the people who by an accident of birth I'm supposedly the same as, thinking the same thoughts that the government and the media want us to think, living lives of such banal conformity that we become interchangeable. We are all Americans in the eyes of the world. We all want to kill. We all have guns. We all have cars, and they're big cars. We're all loud, obnoxious, and downright rude.

That's who I'm put together with every time someone finds out I'm American. I'm a killer.

But if you're an American, I'm more likely to kill you. Because I hate you.

And because I know where the fault lies for America's problems.

With you.

Carving my cure with a blade,

Channon