Buckets of Pain

I have read so many variations on the theme of the dissolution of the American dream of late.

And I must report that from the reasoned left to the reasoned right the prognosis is essentially the same – it is a mass lamentation.

All seem to agree that the America that we thought we knew is gone: beyond reclamation, beyond repair.

On the left, of the more intelligent, pragmatic, and insightful writers I”ve followed and read, Naomi Wolf stands out with her little masterpiece, The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. (It”s short, and well-worth a read).

On the right, there is the pragmatic Patrick Buchanan. Some of you who know me well will certainly recall a time when I would never have spoken his name with a civil tone in my voice, but I now understand what he is feeling – he is suffering greatly and while his recent ruminations are in many ways counter (in the details) to my own observations, I can now appreciate that he is experiencing in his own way the same sense of utter despair, anguish, and the mute helplessness wrought by the now undeniable dessication of any true hope for the survival of the United States of America as I – and so many others of us (of all ideological persuasions) who have been paying attention – are feeling.

As I mentioned to a friend within a week after 9-11, as it became all too clear that Bush was closing his dictatorial talons around what was obviously – by design or pure luck – to be our own Reichstag event, “We are living in epochal times.”

I now stand by that statement and feel that it pretty much speaks for itself.

Reason help us.

If what I believe is going to be the continuing argument of this regime in spite of the recent (and most adamant) conclusions of the NEI on the status of pursuit (or rather lack thereof) of fissionable nuclear materials by Iran, then drastic measures are needed to de-legitimize the Clinton and Giuliani myths. These are dangerous people, and if we wish to see any semblance of an effort toward a reclamation of the credibility we have squandered the past seven enervating years, I suggest “we” find a way to label them for what they are: greed, power and lobby-driven spin-offs of the Bushian variety.

I find that I”m less concerned now about Dick dicking with the 22nd and considerably more concerned about how our no-longer questionably Goebbels-esque “fourth-estate” will continue – and in increasingly subtle and powerful ways – to toy with the mind of the (sigh) “average” American “sloth” which I”m sadly beginning to believe certain key players among the so-called founding fathers had pegged from the beginning, and had every right to fear.

What can be done? Hillary and Rudy unquestionably represent the logical perpetuation (and perhaps worsening) by hook or crook of the now deeply troubled but by no means dead neo-Wilsonian nightmare encapsulated in – the obviously failed – Straussian experiment, which has proved to be perhaps the worst and most truly dangerous American foreign policy adventure since such a term really mattered, AND implicit sympathy with the passage of bills such as the recent Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (essentially a new “sedition act”).

Kids, we”re in a heap “o trouble here. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and expect some mighty hard times ahead.