Thoughts on Autumn in America by Andy Senior

The more I consider the what the Sacred Franchise of Suffrage actually grants us, the more it seems like a choice between flavors of Kool-Aid at Jonestown. Here ignorance is bliss (and denial is Valhalla) but the prospect of lying to myself provokes nearly as nauseous a feeling as the candidates we are given to vote for. Every race above that of Village Dogcatcher is rigged, fixed, and fixed again so that there is absolutely no danger that we may elect someone who has our best interests at heart or who might actually make a real difference.

At the top we have Hillary Clinton, who has proven to an avid warhawk and represents everything the "other" side stands for. The proof of that is, in the little Pro-Wrestling pre-game known as political punditry, she is slammed as a "liberal" while the GOP elite have not attempted to run anyone worth mentioning against her. Yet to say so is being "disloyal" to the Democratic [sic] Party, and even people who really should know better shout "Treason!" and rush to her defense. In one of the more disquieting aspects of the 9/11 Truth effort, Professor James H. Fetzer has all but vowed to take a bullet for her. (If things proceed along the current trajectory, he may very well end up doing so.) Hillary is so obviously being groomed for 2008 as part of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton continuum. Despite Rush Limbaugh's pharmaceutically-induced frothings, this has already been ordained by the upper eschelon.

Gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer seems better than Hillary, but as New York Attorney General he has been given the details in the case of September 11, 2001 and has not moved to investigate further. Much less evidence than exists regarding the self-inflicted nature of the World Trade Center bombings has sent many people to prison for other crimes. I suppose a legal pit bull like Spitzer would be all over this but for the ambition leading him to the greater glory of the Governor's Mansion.

Our local congressional district race fills me with more chagrin. For the first time in 24 years, the seat is open and the ostensible Democrats have a chance to take it. The "other" side boasts Ray Meier, a candidate who has been duly anointed by Dick Cheney and Bush's robot wife. His opponent, our District Attorney Michael Arcuri, is a dapper centrist (assuming the center to be on the right shoulder of the road) who refuses to give interviews to those who might actually ask him a probing question. He has stated publicly that he supports HR 6166 (the vile Military Commissions Act which gives the government the go-ahead to torture suspects, and revokes habeas corpus) because "it's important to protect American soldiers." What about protecting American citizens from their own government?

Yet his supporters are flummoxed into believing him a "liberal." In a particularly disgraceful episode my own sister-in-law wrote in today's Utica Observer-Dispatch:

"I now know why I want Michael Arcuri to represent me in Congress. It is important that we get someone in Washington who is going to protect our constitutional rights from President Bush.

"President Bush signed an anti-terrorism law that could take away our right to protest against him. I could protest the war and be charged as a military combatant, and sit in jail with no rights to an attorney or a trial. To me that is very scary.

"President Bush is slowly taking away our constitutional right of free speech."

(I had already written her of Arcuri's stance on HR 6166, so I can only hope that she submitted the letter beforehand. I don't mind thinking her a fool, but I am not ready to brand her a liar.)

The candidate we could have had, Les Roberts, is an epidemiologist involved in the first Lancet study determining that over 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of our unprovoked war. Obviously, aside from the fact that voters grazing in the hinterlands of the 24th Congressional District would have reviled him as a Libby Lib Lib who values live Iraqis over God's Precious Frozen Blastocysts, the upper eschelon couldn't risk the possibility of having a truth-teller win the seat. Beautiful but dumb (with a scintilla of Fascism) is their ideal.

It's obvious from all this that the genial fiction of Democracy is collapsing in a big way. Shall the people revolt, and "take back their country?" Good luck. A general strike might have some effect, but Americans are such television-hypnotized sheep that they would equate "strike" with "unions" and we know all about them unions. Since the media is a de facto arm of the government, expect no sympathy for those in revolt. Why, they're Terrorists!

The only solution I can see to this state of affairs is individual autonomy--an intellectual and ethical self-sufficiency which I would call Anarchy for One. It simply calls for building one's inner resources of health, strength, and mental resolve so that "they" have no power--so that, having removed oneself from contact with presumed authority wherever and whenever possible, on those occasions that contact with the state is forced it will have as little effect as possible. Some will find this through faith in God, and others through sheer force of will, but it is our last and best defense against all bullies.

This requires that we stop feeding ourselves garbage, intellectually and physically. No more broadcast television, and radio only from the most reliable (non-corporate) truth-tellers. Everything we see and hear and read is potentially propaganda, so we must constantly monitor what it is saying and our reactions to it. We shouldn't expose ourselves to ostensibly factual programming (including PBS or anything else with a corporate foundation grant) that provokes an emotional, knee-jerk response--unless we have mentally trained ourselves to observe it without being swamped by its manipulations. And we should avoid all food that is convenient, if possible. Processed or fast food will not sustain us in our resolve.

If things are going to get worse in what was once America, we have to be in a place where "they" can't touch us--and even if they kill us, they still can't touch us.