Our Long National Nightmare

Night descends on the beach as I recall how I got here from long ago and far away when I was preparing to board one of three buses headed toward Washington D.C. to protest the inauguration of a pretender to the throne of the presidency.

2000 was the type of election America holds other countries accountable for i.e. free and open elections. The 2000 election was a coup conducted by neo-conservatives aka neo-fascists for those who can really handle the truth to impose their dogma contained in The Project for a New American Century on the rest of the world but first they needed a president which five right wing jurists gave them, then they needed a catastrophe much “like Pearl Harbor” and coincidentally 19 guys with box cutters created the catastrophe necessary to shock to the public into accepting more limits to their freedoms with the Orwellian named Patriot Act, to unleash shock and awe on the cradle of civilization to protect our national resource of oil and establish a permanent military presence to protect the profits of the corporate.

George W. Bush was their man. The record shows he entered every institution based on privilege rather than merit. At best he was mediocre to average in school and it was privilege that accorded him a place in the Texas Air National Guard and privilege that protected him when he was AWOL. Every business arraignment he entered was based on who he knew and not what he knew and every business he conducted failed but he still managed to avoid any personal financial loss.

The 2000 election was the betrayal of the American Revolution exposed. We were not a democracy nor a republic and Jefferson’s truths while still self evident have yet to be born into actions because the reality is that by the commonly accepted definition we are in fact an oligarchy and the people abrogated their right to bear arms when the revolution occurred because Gil Scott-Heron was wrong the revolution was on television and not a shot was fired. The jig was up. If the right to bear arms isn’t exercised when the country is in danger from enemies foreign and domestic then what is the right for?

I had a moral responsibility to object to this fraudulent election. I bought 200 small American flags which I distributed among the fellow travelers that night eight years ago. We tore the flags from their small wooden sticks, turned them upside down to express that this nation was under a state of siege and crudely fastened them to the stick with tape.

THE FIRST FOUR YEARS

After sixty years the Fourth Reich of the corporate state came crashing down these last eight years. The $600 stimulus that couples got during the first recession of the Bush years in March of 01, 9/11 that he was briefed about on 8/6, reading My Pet Goat, reassuring a consumerist population to just go out and shop till ya drop , objecting to the establishment of a 9/11 Commission then testifying before it with his co-conspirator Dick Cheney and neither one speaking under oath, the history repeating itself invasion of Afghanistan, getting Bin-Laden “dead or alive”, the crimes against peace by invading a sovereign nation – “bring ‘em on” and the crimes against humanity by waging war, destroying the world’s good will after 9/11 and creating a climate where the world community of civilized nations were no longer impressed by the rhetoric of “liberty” and the actions of a rogue nation – our nation that demanded you either with us or against us, the deceit, the deception and the outright lies to sell this war that will pay for itself - this violation of international law to the American public that pays 13 billion dollars a month to wage, the blitzkrieg aka shock and awe with god’s personal blessings that began 3/20/03 just like the Project for a New American Century prescribed, the Mission Accomplished less than two months later while five years later there are more dead and dying, more suffering and millions displaced from the land and the people they love and then the ordered from top down torture at Abu Ghraib where the ones carrying out orders from above were held responsible but the real criminals remained at large – in fact they run for reelection. That was the first Bush Administration – the one where American’s found out what it meant to be a “compassionate conservative” - corrupt and contemptuous of man made law it dispelled another myth because some men are above the law.

THE SECOND FOUR YEARS

Then came the second Bush Administration the one where over sixty million people still voted for a corrupt administration that conducted acts which violated international law and our own Constitution during the first administration. The Bin-Laden tapes released two weeks before the 04 election even though the fix was in Ohio, the violations of civil liberties with mass arrests at the RNC convention in New York City where a war criminal gave a speech in Madison Square Garden protected by the police who are supposed to protect the people not arrest them to keep them off the streets, keep them silent from speaking out against treason and the tyranny of oligarchy and the abuse of power conducted in our name while the guy they’re looking for is at The Garden, he’s the one who violated national and international laws, he’s the one with more blood on his hands than mine for financing this crime with my tax dollars, Kenny Boy and Enron, the absolute failure of government to respond to crisis when Katrina came across the beaches of the Gulf to destroy everything in its path, maybe that 13 billion dollars we’re spending for a war that was supposed to pay for itself, commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, the corruption of the justice department, the rich getting much much richer, the poor getting much, much poorer and the middle class blending into an unfamiliar state of poverty, the collapse of the national economy and the world economy as well after all it is a global economy based on a dream of putting more people in their own homes as a symbol of the American dream whether they can afford it or not and deregulate or look the other way to make unfettered capitalism a success for the few at the expense of the many – the few that don’t have to worry because this administration permitted them to believe they were too big to fail, too big not to be bailed out – everybody else is on your own. Then in the last year record unemployment, record home foreclosures, record bank failures and an absolute denial of reality from the commander-in-chief in his last speech as President to friends and family that marked eight years of corruption, incompetence and criminality.

EPILOGUE

In retrospect George W. Bush didn’t do all this on his own. The press never scrutinized the first four years of his administration indeed enough people voted for him in 2004 even after the lies were exposed and the so-called opposition party looked the other way when the crimes against national and international law were being committed to the extent that even when they took power in Congress in 2006 they claimed that “impeachment was off the table”.

Eight years later since that bus trip in 2000 I woke up on a beach in a country that believes our long national nightmare will be over by noon when Barak Obama was sworn in as our next president much like we believed after the transfer of power from the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Administrations to those of Carter and Clinton but this time belief won’t be enough because unless we hold the Bush Administration accountable for its failures and ours there will only be another transfer of political power and not the “change” required to move away from a status quo where no one is held accountable for the consequences of the long continuing national nightmare that follows.

This is our time to say “never forget and never again” for who we become in the future depends on what we do in the present and if we continue to ignore the lessons of the past we are indeed doomed to repeat them. President Obama may prefer to look to the future but if he ignores the past it will only be repeated and while “hope” for a better future may still exist it won’t be for us.