There were so many of these pain-feeling pundits and politicians (mostly Democrats) that it finally occurred to me that if I could get a dollar from each of them, I’d be on my way to wealth. So that’s what I did. I asked each and every one of them. And sure enough, being the sincere and generous souls that the spokespersons for the 1% truly are, they bestowed upon me an attaché case full of money.

So, there I was on by way to wealth, and looking around for something to invest in, when Occupy shut down the ports–not only the Port of Oakland, but also several other ports on the West Coast. Immediately afterwards, the air was filled with an incredible stench. You could hardly breath, the smell was so tremendously overpowering. On investigating the cause, I discovered that the 1% were crapping in their pants.

Being both a civic minded person, as well as an astute investor, I imported shiploads of adult-sized diapers and sold them to the 1%. I really cornered the diaper market, and became fabulously wealthy. I also received much gratitude and appreciation for having restored the quality of air here in Oakland.

(Of course the restoration of air quality was only temporary, as the air was soon filled with billowing clouds of tear gas. But there wasn’t much I could do about that, nor did I wish to, since as a newly anointed member of the 1%, I realized that the police defending my interests.)

Then Oakland Mayor Jean Quan had the grassy area of the plaza flooded, rendering it an uninhabitable swamp, and turning it into a city-center mosquito hatchery. Once again, being the far sighted entrepreneur that I now am, I outsourced the production of quinine tablets which I imported by the shipload and sold at great profit, thus preventing a malaria epidemic.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in just such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– William O. Douglas

“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time we have been asked to supply a dissident or ‘truth telling’ website with our Automatic Traversal Algorithm. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your — ah — establishment had much use for such software. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the dissident, adjusting his woolen beret and carefully putting away the mobile-phone with which he had been messaging his co-conspirators. “Your ATA can carry out any standard tree traversal involving up to one hundred million nodes, using the most efficient path. However, for our work we are interested in traversing actual routers and web-servers on the Net, not nodes of a data-structure. As we wish you to modify the code, the software will not only traverse nodes but also execute an instruction on each node.”

“I don’t understand …”

“Here’s my other b-card,” the dissident said, handing Wagner a business-card, a different one from that with which he had introduced himself.

“Hal L. Burton, Ph.D., President, Burton Microprocessor Research?” Wagner finished on a surprised note, reading the business-card. “I see — so that’s how you earn your money then, and I suppose freedissident dot-com is where you spend it.” Wagner warmed to his visitor. “You know, I, I …” he trailed off. After fifteen years of authoritarian rule under FEMA and the so-called ‘USA Patriot Act’, personal freedoms were severely restricted and it was not wise to express admiration for any dissident activity. Still, he said, “Actually, I visit freedissident dot-com quite often. You do great work, you’re gutsy folks.”

Wagner meant it. That website was only about three years old but had quickly developed a reputation for occasionally managing to expose government secrets and lies, and breaking suppressed news-stories. The government had tried to shut it down but had failed.

Burton smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Wagner. Been in and out of prison for it.”

Wagner smiled too, feeling a new respect for his customer. “Hoder. Call me Hoder.”

“Hoder? Nordic?”

“You’re right. Norwegian and German extraction. So tell me, how I can help you — in any way.”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three years — since freedissident dot-com was founded, in fact. It is perfectly in keeping with your line of work, so I think you will be able to provide the solution after I explain it,” Burton began.

“Ooo-kay.”

“It is really quite simple. It’s because of the CPU-virus and worm menace that started a few years ago. Remember Stuxnet? — that was the grandpa. My team has made a self-learning firmware patch, a one-time universal patch that takes care of several entire classes of these damn things. Nobody will have to care about any CPU virus or worm for several years, especially with new server-boxes, and therefore new chips, not being available anymore. We want to traverse the Web and apply the patch to every web-server and router.”

“Excellent idea!” Wagner was enlivened. “So you wish to start at triple-a dot-com and work up to, say, uh, … zygote dot-org …”

“Exactly–”

“… not that the actual process would be executed alphabetically,” mused Wagner thoughtfully.

He had seen the immense benefits of Burton’s plan at once; it was the need of the day, literally. Only personal desktop computers were available to Joe Blow; these machines were made such that they could not be used as web-servers. Server-class computers and routers were strictly regulated and were not available to the general public. Apart from the government and the armed forces, servers could be sold only to businesses and they too had to fill out a variety of forms to establish ‘need’, and even so, permits were granted to a minority of applicants. All the personal and independent media websites in the country ran on repaired and re-repaired machines that were over ten years old. Ten years ago, after coordinated hostage-takings and bomb-blasts in Peoria, which were blamed on foreign ‘terrorists’, the Department of Homeland Security had demanded the law regulating servers and routers, and had been given what it had asked for. Wagner knew that it was critically important to take good care of the old machines that the general public and individuals were using, and to minimize their vulnerability to viruses and worms. Personally, he suspected that the N.S.A. was behind many of the viruses that regularly crippled free-thought and dissident websites.

“You know how the Baldur chip works, right?”

“In general, yes,” Wagner nodded. He thought back to the second Bush-Cheney administration when the Baldur chip had been invented and mandated as an etched integrated-circuit on every CPU. First, it had been the V-chip. Then, the RFID chip. It had been only a matter of time before something like the Baldur chip would be proposed, be legislated for electronic devices, and become ubiquitous — every web-server and router carried it now. It provided the means to disable or lock, and re-enable or unlock, any device it was on-board on by means of one kilobit lock or unlock instructions and an accompanying and suitable five kilobit key.

“Because it’s not possible to install a firmware patch when the CPU is operating, what we plan to do is to make two passes: on the first pass, we disable the CPU and install our patch. And on the second pass, we attempt to upgrade to a different version of the firmware patch by applying a delta on the old patch for any CPU that needs it, and re-enable the CPU. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why we need this dual-pass system, even if I knew all the technical details behind it.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on. I’m curious about, I mean, how are we supposed to crack those one-K instructions?” Not even any single government branch possessed those two one kilobit instructions’ bit-sequences. Each instruction was split up into three components. The Federal government was the custodian of the lower-order 512-bit-sequence, and the State governments and the Judiciary were the custodians of the higher-order bit-sequence with the 512 bits of each instruction equally split between them. This would be a first, if they pulled it off. And an underground effort, at that.

“We’ve hacked it,” Burton said with a trace of smugness. “That’s what we’ve been working on for the past three years. That, and the universal patch. But for the traversal, you’re the experts. That’s why I’m here.”

“Of course, to successfully unlock a chip, the re-enable code must be accompanied by — doesn’t the key … I mean that doesn’t it have to somehow mesh … in that there has to be a — an equivalence between the bit-wise ORs and the bit-wise ANDs between the one-K disable instruction and the key’s one-K chunks … ?” trailed off Wagner in a querying tone. He was not at all sure as to just how all this worked; he was a through-and-through Language Theory & Automata man. One or two of his specialists would certainly know this Baldur-chip business backwards, however.

Burton laughed. “I’m even more in the dark than you, but we’ve got that part nailed down. My boys are all set with the keys, the instructions, the whole shebang on that end. All we need from you is a guaranteed traversal of every node, every leaf, every router, every web-server on the Net in North America. And then they’ll be safe from these virus-making crazies.”

“Thanks to you.”

Burton smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Thanks to us, if you must.” Shifting his weight to one side, he pulled out a chequebook from his hip-pocket. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Wagner replied, “Don’t even think about it, Hal — we’re in this together.” He smiled at Burton and rose to shake his hand.

The root reason behind these machinations was the fact that the World Wide Web was that greatest of ‘unknown unknowns’ — a random techno-sociological mutation in an otherwise (mostly) ordered and controlled world; an ‘unknown unknown’ whose unforeseen birth and stupendous power to capture and exhibit the evasive and coquettish Truth had thrown off-course, and was hampering, the march towards that unholy concentration of wealth and power — the ‘New World Order’ — which the European-originated money-lending power-elite clans had so carefully been planning for centuries.

This, thought Greg, was the most satisfying thing that had ever happened to him. Chuck and he were both volunteers with an activist movement, ‘Winter Soldiers & Rainy-day Patriots’ — an apt twist of a two-century-old American concept — to restore (true) Republican government, and so the nature of this project and the linkage with freedissident.com gave him a good feeling. His thoughts drifted to the erosion of civil liberties. Besides a question of ideals, he had personal reason to be concerned: he had been detained in prison for a fortnight without any charges, simply for submitting a withering short-story about the government to a publisher — someone there had probably ratted on him. A number of laws contradicting and subverting the still-constitutionally ‘guaranteed’ free-speech were on the books now. These anti-constitutional laws had various sections — ‘dissent,’ ‘incitement,’ ‘sedition,’ and so forth. They had either been in existence since 2001 by way of un-American legislation or had been enacted during Bush-Cheney II or Clinton-Lieberman I. He was a boy when it had all started, but he knew that except for a few (true) patriots who invoked Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the majority of the populace, apathetic and afraid, had not bothered to challenge those repressive Totalitarian laws.

Greg heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck joined him on the balcony.

“Dude! Clean compile,” Chuck said. The software they had been working on that day had built successfully.

“Sounds good! Seems like we’ll beat the schedule. You told Shrub?” ‘Shrub’ was their private nick-name for Sam W. Jaffe who was nominally partnering them from Burton’s team. On their very first day, he had delivered a near-monologue about a documentary he had seen on the San ‘Bush-men’ of the Kalahari Desert. He had gone on a little too long for Greg’s liking, and had finished by telling Greg and Chuck that, in his opinion, ‘the Bush-man’s way of life is thoroughly depraved, degenerate, and inhuman.’ After that, Greg had started referring to him as ‘Shrub.’

“Yeah, he’s happy. I’m likin’ this so far. Wanna go get some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They walked back into the office and out to the corridor.

“You seem kinda … a little subdued …” ventured Chuck after a couple of minutes, as they were descending in an elevator.

“Thinking about this project made me think of the Unpatriotic Act, FEMA, and all the shit that came after that,” said Greg, and cut loose with a few obscenities. “It’s perverse to have called something so un-American and anti-patriotic the ‘Patriot Act’!” he said loudly, and punched the elevator door as it was opening.

“Well, one reason was to fool the public into buying it, so that they would not protest against it,” said Chuck matter-of-factly. “Doing anything on New Year’s?” he asked hurriedly as they turned left at the Christmas tree in the main lobby, wanting to get Greg’s mind off the USA Patriot Act.

“Maureen and I are just getting together with a few friends. And being grateful we’ve made it a quarter of the way into the century … without blowing everyone up, despite all the carnage and mayhem. Hey, you and Janie, if you don’t have plans, why don’t you join us?”

“Aw-ight, thanks dude. I’ll tell her. Guess she’ll give you guys a call,” answered Chuck as they entered the cafeteria.

He picked up a bar of chocolate from the packaged foods rack. “Wonder which of the F3 this benefits,” he groused.

“Huh? F3? — what are you talking about?” Greg said, not comprehending.

“Dude! You mean you don’t know?! The F3 — that’s Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto — they’ve a lock on all foodstuffs. Throughout the Americas. Happened during Clinton-Lieberman II. Not even a giant like McDonald’s gets its beef now without it passing through one of the F3.” Chuck kept up with the minutiae of economic developments much more than did Greg who was naturally inclined to ideologies and abstract concepts.

“Oh!” Greg sighed and shook his head in disgust. He thought back to the second Hillary Clinton-Joseph Lieberman administration and the merger of the two political parties. Soon after their increasingly lockstep economic policies had become undeniable and obvious, the show ‘Democracy’ had been dispensed with and the Democrats and the Republicans had made their marriage official. It had ostensibly been ‘to foster inclusiveness, put an end to partisanship, and bring all Americans together under one tent.’ Exalted sentiments, tawdry reasons … and Totalitarian phraseology. The new combined party — the aptly-named ‘Federalists’ — pointed to the disorganized, little-known Constitution Party as evidence of a thriving ‘Democracy’. Standing at the packaged-foods rack, Greg subconsciously smiled wryly and shook his head in the midst of his ruminations that were triggered by Chuck’s little nugget, causing one or two people nearby to stare at him. The strange part of it all was that even though large bodies of voters would agree amongst themselves that they had voted for a Constitution Party candidate, that candidate would somehow almost never win the election. The Max McKinney crisis of the previous election was evidence of that. But the strangest thing was that frequently the media’s ‘scientific polls’ too would be at odds with an honest person’s investigation of reality. Everyone and their dog would tell you that they had voted for populist, popular activist Green, yet the ‘polls’ would show capitalist, well-connected businessman Gray holding a ‘twenty percent lead.’ It was as if normal, sane people were saying one thing to their friends and families but saying something else to these ‘pollsters’… .

“Howdy guys,” replied Sam, walking into their office. “Hal just sent me a secure message. He’s not sure if you’ve been told but absolute secrecy is essential for this project; if any governmental agency — any snoop — gets wind of it, they’re going to try to halt it, sabotage it, whatever.”

“You bet,” answered Chuck. “Hode — that’s our president, Dr. Hoder Wagner — told us. Yeah, I can imagine that the Pentagon warlord, the A-G — all those Anti-American dictatorial creeps — would not like web-servers and routers getting virus and worm-proofed.”

Their concerns were well-founded. For the past two decades, the government had maintained a network of informants within the general public, reminiscent of the long-gone U.S.S.R.

“Mum’s the word,” Greg chimed in. “So, where does Dr. Burton keep himself?”

Sam made no answer. Greg and Chuck stared at him, then glanced at one another.

“He usually, er, he has another concern that … that he spends his, um, time at,” said Sam uncertainly.

“If you mean freedissident dot-com, we know about it,” said Greg.

Sam looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure you did. Yes, these days he’s usually over there. That setup is in a basement, a townhouse near Tysons Corner.” Tysons Corner was an expensive commercial and semi-residential area in Northern Virginia, about half-an-hour’s drive from Washington D.C.

After a pause, Chuck said, “It’s odd that they — the government — didn’t take down at least some part of the Web by fiat. What I mean is that I’m surprised they haven’t really tried.”

“I suppose they know that … that if they messed with the backbone or the routers, the Web would go underground,” offered Sam. “People possess routers and web-servers. Activists would create an alternate mini-Web … like a bits-and-pieces Web.”

“You’re right, we could patch up something, hmmm …” Greg mused. “Yeah, one-oh-nine-B, cable hookups, plain old copper … all underground,” he continued; he was thinking out loud more than talking to Sam. “Though I wouldn’t have thought that they’d, I mean the Feds, woulda been able to think around that curve,” he finished, addressing Sam now.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to your work,” Sam said, walking to the door. “The Web is a prized freedom and this project is important. In fact, it should have been done years ago — previous generation should’ve taken care of it.” Sam winked at them conspiratorially as he left their office.

“Shrub’s a funny guy,” said Chuck. “But he’s awright.”

“The previous effin’ generation was complacent. Complacent! Those dumb-asses kept blabbering about America being the most free country in the world even though that wasn’t true and even as our freedoms were gradually being … being chopped down, like a bloody forest being clear-cut,” said Greg, turning back to his computer. “Our freedoms are like the species: once plentiful, now declining.”

“Nice, that’s a good analogy, partner. Hey, how many species are there?” enquired Chuck. Responding to his own question, he continued, “After these climate-change-related extinctions, I think there’s, hmm … The Nine Billion Names of God … I mean, er, names of God’s creations,” he corrected himself, having taken a stab at flowery speech and felt embarrassed at the results.

“Uh, not billion, but million,” Greg said. “Nine million species.”

“Oh, yeah … ‘scuse me!” Chuck laughed at his mistake. “Though our freedoms have vanished at a rate far faster than the species,” he mused, on the same bent. “Ya know, I hacked into a Fed server one night and hit paydirt.”

“Welcome to the club,” grinned Greg. “But what do you mean, ‘paydirt’?”

“Yeah, was gonna tell you — it had a bunch of Top Secret white-papers and research reports. One was about freedoms, I’ll never forget that one. A complete list, and then some, of all the freedoms that man has and has had. Sociologists have determined that there’s precisely nine thousand freedoms.”

“Like?” prodded Greg curiously, swivelling in his chair to face Chuck.

“We-e-ell, it had all types of … of details; stuff about Paine and Mill and Nietzsche, and sociometrics and ethnograms and biostatistics … and I don’t know what — government’s technocrats have waded through all kinds of crap. They’ve concluded that 21st century humans have, or can have, exactly nine thousand freedoms. Like, just take one freedom, Communication. From plain talking to coded speech to music to … um, yes, ritual gift-giving to, what was it … gypsy-camp markers to smoke-signals, would you believe we have, if I recall correctly, exactly six-hundred and-seventeen modes of Communication? At least that’s what that research report says.”

“Six-seventeen? What were some of the others? I mean the other modes of Communication?”

“Gawd, I dunno. I remember they’ve, like, enumerated different ‘elemental’ freedoms within … what was it, a ‘group-level’ freedom, and those are within a ‘top-level’ freedom. Like ‘eye movements,’ ‘head movements,’ aah … yes, ‘muscle tone,’ ‘foot shifting,’ ‘finger-tapping’ and so on fell under ‘Body Language,’ which itself falls under a ‘top-level’ freedom, ‘Communication.’ Man, it’s freaky, I tell ya. Supposed to be a ‘research report’, but what with its different volumes it’s really like a book. It’s over three thousand pages.”

Sam appeared in the doorway of their office, looking a little flushed. “Hey, guys. Just on the news. The invasion got underway.”

“Oh, great! Now we’re killing Norwegians!” exclaimed Greg, opening a web-browser and going to news.yahoo.com.

“What’s the government-controlled media gonna call this? After all the ‘Oil Wars’, now the ‘Water Wars’?” muttered Chuck morosely.

“Um, yeah,” answered Chuck sheepishly.

Seeing Greg’s querying expression, a sly, insinuating grin spreading on his face, Chuck continued, “Hey, I found it in my pocket! I don’t know — perhaps it fell in … perhaps Janie put it there. So what?” he ended on a petulant note.

Greg clapped Chuck on the shoulder and laughed out good-naturedly at his defensiveness, setting Chuck laughing too.

“So nothing … dude!” he said, in a friendly way. “That first dynlib we built, the one for the disable-and-patch, it’s still just ‘oh dot d-n-l.’ We needed a name for it. I’ll call it ‘Mistletoe’.” Greg was referring to the dynamic-library which would, at run-time, disable or lock the CPUs on the first-pass and apply the anti-virus/anti-worm patch.

They turned back to their workstations, still working but easing off for the day.

“Damn!” said Chuck suddenly. “Hey, we gotta stress-test that random key-sequence generator I wrote before we leave for the day.” Glancing at the time, he continued, “Oh hell, Greg, Hode will be here soon. We should’ve started testing it earlier today.”

“Already banged the hell out of it. It’s good to go.”

“Oh … you did? Cool! Ya know, I wonder though that there’s no test-team. I mean what’s Hode thinking, and that guy Burton? We’re testing each others’ stuff. Should’ve had a couple of good QA guys.”

“Well … I suppose Hode knows that what we write doesn’t need testers,” said Greg with a touch of conceit. Grinning and crooking an eyebrow at Chuck, he continued, “I mean, in these past few projects, how many bugs — I mean material defects — have been found in what you and I have written? All that’s happened is that the QA guys have wound up getting an inferiority complex because they couldn’t find a single, real bug!”

Chuck smiled and shook his head, and both of them ended up laughing at Greg’s hot-shot ego-stoking. Though egotistical, his vanity was not misplaced; neither was Chuck’s caution: in the three projects that they had worked on together, the testers actually had felt dispensable — Greg and Chuck were not only exceptionally talented, they were also very careful with their coding and debugging. Yet the lack of an independent, professional Quality Assurance unit in any software project considerably increased the chances of a calamitous defect being discovered post-deployment — when the software went ‘live.’

After some time, Greg rose from his chair and stretched. However, with the first step he took, he stumbled, and awkwardly and noisily toppled across a chair. Startled, Chuck got up. Grasping the edge of the table, Greg got back on his feet and voiced an oath or two.

“Dude! You okay?” enquired Chuck. “You know I’ve seen you do this before … like, stumbling, lurching — maybe there’s a balance problem?”

“Yup, there is. Inner-ear problem. In fact, that’s what saved me from my — ah — ‘elective service’,” replied Greg, holding on to the table and grimacing at the words ‘elective service.’ “Not that I’d have enlisted, I’d rather rot in prison than kill innocents abroad.” Except for the spoilt brats of the super-wealthy and powerful, who somehow received unlimited deferments or took refuge in the National Guard, all males had to enrol compulsorily with the armed forces. The draft was back in force in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Except that it was not called ‘the draft’ any more. It was called ‘Elective Patriotic Service.’ Such Orwellisms were consistent with the by-then usual government practice of redefining old terms and inventing new ones to befog the minds of the people.

“Oh — okay.” Chuck looked on with some concern as Greg settled himself in his chair. “I was deferred because of my sciatica. Same here; I’d have chosen prison over getting brainwashed by the armed forces into massacring other peoples.”

He went on, slowly, “Ya know, it’s the armed forces themselves who shoulda bailed us out of this horror. Before it got to this point.” He was voicing a thought more than talking to Greg, blankly gazing into the distance.

“I can’t understand why the national guard, the army — they all … they all attack us, arrest us, when we simply demonstrate,” said Greg. “Are they crazy? Just for holding up signs?! Don’t they understand that we’re doing it for them besides for us? They’re the ones who get traumatized and sick and maimed for life, if not killed, in these wars and invasions!”

“That’s the way it goes — you know,” Chuck replied softly, resignedly. “The oligarchy and the Zioneocons, they make sure to recruit Afros and Hispanics from poor neighbourhoods, and those they call ‘hicks’ and ‘trailer-trash’. They’re expendable — cannon-fodder — to the powers-that-be.”

After a moment of silence, Greg said passionately, “Yes. Young guys all of them, and what a waste. Those stupid, stupid lame-brains. They’re made to feel special by being told they’re heroes, by being given their purple hearts and silver stars. Heroes on their two-bit military pensions, with amputated limbs, strange illnesses. And shattered consciences … or, or brutalized humanities from the horrors they perpetrate on innocent humans. But those corporate plutocrats and Zioneocons — the scum of humanity — they make their millions off those wars and laugh all the way to the bank.” Though conscientious and a true patriot as was Chuck, Greg was seldom quite so bitter.

Chuck said nothing; he knew that staying on the subject would only get Greg wound up. Greg was right, he thought. The public had at last realized that the mega-corporation’s main function was simply to be a front behind which the super-wealthy and the privileged few hid to further their narrow interests and accumulate ill-gotten wealth, and that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘pre-emptive’ wars had been nothing other than wars of loot and plunder for American corporate officers, stake-holders, and Zioneocons. Those ‘pen for hire’ writers who had sung to their tune earlier in the century had been rewarded with book contracts, positive publicity by the corporate-controlled media, and outright payoffs disguised as ‘grants’. But the few courageous writers who had exposed the truth had seen their works damned with faint praise or trashed altogether. And the writers themselves had had their names smeared and been hit with ruinous lawsuits; and those residing overseas had even been murdered by U.S. puppet-regimes or C.I.A. hit-men. Chuck shook his head as he gazed vacantly at his monitor, lost in his thoughts. Murdering writers had become a frighteningly commonplace activity for the American government after they, in concert with Royal Dutch Shell, had murdered Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa early in the century. Neither had had to face the consequences of their crime, for the American people had remained blissfully ignorant and unconcerned. They systematically had been deceived by the controlled media into believing that Arabs, Afros, drugs, ‘terrorists’, and other such hobgoblins hiding in the bush were the enemy, so as to divert their attention while the power-elite and the Zioneocons had been proceeding stealthily with their treacherous conquest of the U.S.A. and its economic structures and financial systems, all the while subverting the ideals of the founding fathers. American citizenry had finally woken up to reality, but it was nearly too late now… .

Chuck’s thoughts were suddenly but poetically interrupted by Greg; still in a fit of passion, he burst out in declamatory tones: “You would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, That old Lie! Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” He spat the words, with venom and bitterness.

Startled for a second time by Greg in twenty minutes, Chuck began “What was th—” when the door opened. It was Wagner.

“Hello, men,” he said, briskly walking into the room. “Now there’s a set of domains we don’t want to hit,” he said, coming up to them. “No dot-gov or dot-mil sites and apart from those, the ones written on this list. Doable, right?”

He showed them a printout; they looked at it. It had several hundred host-names or ‘domains’. Many of them were easily recognizable as being those of the largest and most powerful corporations and the rest were those of large corporate-controlled media, wealthy political foundations, and such.

“Can-do,” said Chuck, brow furrowed. “Just curious why.”

“Talked with Hal earlier today; he brought up a good point. We don’t want to virus-proof the government’s or military’s computers! And if these giant transnationals or big-media get hit with viruses and go down for a while, screw ‘em,” Wagner said with distaste.

“Oh yeah — cool!” replied Chuck. Greg grinned and nodded approvingly.

“Good. I just emailed it to both of you; encrypted of course. Stick it where needed. So, you guys ready? Meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“So? How goes it?” Wagner asked as they walked up to the elevators.

“How goes it? Great!” said Chuck. “To be honest, Hal’s guys have done all the donkey work. Greg and I have the easy part and we’re ahead of schedule. Web’s gonna get vaccinated now, thanks to the Baddler — I mean the Baldur chip. Jeez, what a weirdo name — why, why would they call it that!”

“It’s the name of some god … North European, perhaps; a god of beauty, light, and stars, I think,” Greg said, trying to be helpful, interpreting Chuck’s rhetoric literally. “And that’s apropos — you know, aren’t some websites stars of freedom dotting the vast night-sky of, of ignorance and obfuscation? …and web-servers dot the miles and miles of fibre, and … twinkle with knowledge and information.”

“That’s pretty, Greg,” nodded Chuck appreciatively and Wagner concurred.

Greg chuckled and said that he hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did as they entered an elevator.

Greg, Chuck, and Sam were having coffee and doughnuts in the office, a very early breakfast. They had reached the office by 3:45 a.m. on Monday and had set off the live run at four.

“Let’s see what the latest is from Norway … and also how that standoff with Brazil is developing,” said Greg, turning to his computer and bringing up a web-browser on his monitor.

“You guys think and talk a lot about wars and stuff,” commented Sam.

Greg looked at Sam and then looked through him. His face broke into a half-smile, a joyless smile; his eyes communicated the pain born of a compassionate humanity and carried a jadedness unnatural to their age of thirty-two years. He spoke very softly. “Sam, we Americans have been talking of warfare and dealing in wanton wickedness for over a century. We wouldn’t have to be talking about it and confronting it now if folks at the beginning of only this century hadn’t gotten things as totally out of hand as they did.”

Nobody replied.

“You know,” said Chuck, changing the subject, “I wonder why they asked us to randomize the keys the way they did. I mean, all the CPUs are going to be disabled for what — two, three hours? Nobody’s going to be able to crack any one-K key in even months so we might as well have used the same key for every CPU.” Chuck sounded perplexed. He looked at Sam.

Sam looked at Chuck, tilted his head, and shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Burton and his chief programmer decided.”

“I suppose they had a reason,” said Greg. “Or maybe they just didn’t think of it. Anyway, we’ll find out when Hal comes in this morning — we can ask him.”

“If he knows, if there was a reason,” said Chuck, still bemused.

“Speak of the devil…” said Sam as Burton walked in the door.

“Greg? Chuck? Pleased to meet you,” Burton said, pleasantly shaking hands with them. He gave each of them a business-card.

“Hal I. Burton, Ph.D.,” said Chuck, mis-reading the business-card.

“That’s ‘L’, not ‘I’,” corrected Burton.

“Oh! Yes, sorry. What’s the ‘L’ stand for?” Chuck asked amiably, trying to make small talk.

“My middle-name? Oh, that’s kind of embarrassing!” laughed Burton. “Blame my classicist parents! And their flights of fancy. But anyway, it’s Loki.”

“Huh! Loki. Never heard that name before.”

Greg, however, had. He frowned and smiled wryly to himself. ‘Baldur’. ‘Mistletoe’. And now ‘Loki’. A peculiar coincidence … eerie, in fact… .

Six military policemen silently entered the office and stood along a wall. Greg and Chuck, quite perplexed, stared at them, looked into their faces. Not that they found any variety or even individuality: each man had the blank, glazed, obedient face of an automaton who does as he is told; the face of an ever-increasing number of Americans, in truth.

“Change of plans, boys. We’re not starting the second pass this morning,” said Burton, as two men appeared in the dim corridor outside the door.

Greg and Chuck now looked at these two new arrivals. One of the men was elderly and squat and had a shuffling gait, the other seemed equally elderly but walked with a jaunty strut. They came into the office. Both men were remarkably ugly; their countenances bespoke the arrogance and corruption of unrestrained and untrammelled abuse of power.

“We are going to have to delay that second pass; indefinitely,” the ugly squat man said. Greg and Chuck realized with a sense of confusion that this new visitor was the Attorney-General, Sandler ‘Sandy’ Farm.

“And that’s strictly confidential, strictly confidential,” the ugly jaunty man offered, flashing that roguish grin he doled out like spare change to the fawning, vacuous hacks and flacks of the American media. He shook hands in a faux-friendly manner with Greg and Chuck. They were struck dumb, for this was the Secretary of War, Ron S. Field.

“After all, you are working for the Government of the United States of America so your absolute secrecy is required,” said Farm. His usually sullen — literally ashen — face was beaming, even cheery. “But I thank you gentlemen most sincerely for bringing this project to a successful closure.”

“I guess I can tell you now why we used different bit-sequences so as to manufacture unique five-kilobit keys for every CPU that’s being locked,” Sam said. He wore a smirk and it made him look both stupid and crafty at the same time. “Even if some bunch of idealists somehow cracks the standard re-enable instruction, it would take literally years of cracking for them to figure out the five-K key with which one particular CPU has been locked. And if they do, so what? You can’t use that same key to unlock any other — virtually any other — CPU.”

Chuck looked at Greg, not making full sense of it. Greg returned his gaze.

“You’re very smart engineers, breaking into government computers and reading our white-papers and research reports,” said Field. Nodding at Chuck, he continued, “If you had read that one all the way through — I mean ‘Mankind’s Nine Thousand Freedoms’ — you would have found out that here in America, fewer than several hundred freedoms now remain for the riffraff … I mean for the common man. The top-level freedom to think straight — ‘Unconstrained and Noise-free Cognition,’ they call it — that freedom’s, of course, the fundamental one, and it plus all its derivatives has been off the table for … what, over fifty years now.”

Everyone remained silent. Field went on, addressing both Greg and Chuck, “A small group of people have been working on this project to create voluntary free-slaves for more than two centuries — since shortly after the country was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your idealistic way of thought. And the Web, now –’The World-Wide Web’ is the linchpin freedom.”

“The Web was the linchpin freedom, was the linchpin!” Farm shrieked, punching the air in quite an uncharacteristic spasm of excitement. “That’s why — Yes, yes! — I, I wanted to be here! … when i-i-it it-happened!” he babbled, and started laughing in a manner that was quite maniacal. His face was twitching and his eyes were bulging and glinting as he cackled uncontrollably.

“What … what do you mean?” asked Chuck, distracted and repulsed by Farm’s demeanour. He was still not comprehending, or perhaps not wanting to comprehend. Greg realized in a flash that there would be no second pass. They had been taken. He fell back limply in his chair.

Burton answered. His demeanour too had changed, though in a different way. His very face seemed to have undergone a transformation — as if a snake had moulted its old skin. He looked triumphant, but apart from that emotion, base cunning, greed, and evil had manifest themselves, as if settling into their rightful home after a necessary absence. “I’ll tell you what he means. The Web and the Internet started off as the ARPANet. It was not meant for –and I’m not even sure how … the rabble managed to get it. But we know how to scaremonger the little people, we know how to control you, even if the process is slow and gradual. We’re the rulers, we want the Internet back, and this time we’ll keep it for ourselves. Forever,” he said, leaving nothing to interpretation.

“All right,” said Field, now wearing a cold, disdainful smile. “Time to clear out. You’ll be debriefed at a location in Fort Meade.”

“Hoder’s waiting there,” said Burton, smiling the smile of the serpent.

Someone switched off the lights. The room was now lit only by the corridor lighting seeping in and the glare of six or so computer monitors.

Chuck walked a step or two past Greg, and started to whistle but gave it up immediately. This roomful of hostile strangers silhouetted in the dim light of the monitors did not encourage such ebullience. Greg remained seated, he felt light-headed and nauseous. There was one thing whose loss he was never going to be able to get used to… .

At a signal from Burton, two military policemen walked up to Chuck and Greg to escort them out.

Chuck glanced at his watch. “Should take only an hour more,” he murmured over his shoulder to Greg. Then he added, in an afterthought, “Wonder how many hosts have been hit? It should be halfway through about now.” He felt a sense of desolation, a stark desolation, as he said that.

Greg didn’t reply so Chuck turned around to see why. Just a moment earlier, Greg had swivelled his chair to a nearby workstation, opened a web-browser, and typed in ‘news.yahoo.com’. Chuck could just see his face, a pale, drained oval staring at the monitor.

“Look,” whispered Greg, and Chuck looked at the monitor. (There is always a last time for everything. Even the Web.) Well knowing that all was lost, Greg had acted on emotion in bringing up that website, just for the sake of looking at it once more. But it was not to be. The familiar white-and-blue home-page loaded only partially before the web-browser froze –

‘Error: Server not responding.’

Across America, without any fuss, the Web was shutting down.

The 1989 novel, titled The Third Reich, is the diary of a German office worker named Udo Bergen and his vacation in Spain. There is a girlfriend, a couple they meet, the hotel owner Frau Else, a man named Quernado who rents paddle boats to tourists and has grotesque burn scars on his body. The girlfriend leaves after a fright; the man in the couple drowns and the hotel owner’s husband is taken away to hospice with terminal cancer. The presence of a board game based on the second world war and also called The Third Reich hangs over the story like a surreal presence. Udo is an expert in board games based on World War Two and even makes extra money writing about strategies for different gaming magazines. For most of the book he and Quernado are engaged in a the Third Reich game. Udo is hoping that he can win as Germany while Quernado’s pieces represent the allies. It is as if the game is as real as life and life is only a game. Bergen even says to his game-playing friend Conrad upon his return from Spain: “We (are) all essentially ghosts on a ghostly General Staff.”

It seems that Quernado identifies Bergen as not only an opponent in the game, but as a potential embodiment of Nazi Germany itself. This is despite Bergen stating specifically to Quernado that he is much more of an anti-Nazi than any Nazi at all. Quernado ignores Bergen and plays the game as if he were fighting the war. Like much of Europe and certainly Germany, the fact of World War Two’s horrors defines everything, albeit in a rather murky manner. The game is nothing but a game except when it becomes more, as it does in the mind of Quernado. History has a similar trajectory. As long as it remains in books and museums (or games) it has little threat. It is when history becomes real that it constitutes something potentially more dangerous.

Like most of Bolano’s novels, The Third Reich comes across as if it were written in a detached fog. Although the narrator Bergen is part of every scene that occurs, his narration of the life he is in the middle of is simultaneously distant and intimate. Like fog, the closer one gets to the situation or person being described, the clearer Bergen’s tale become. Observations about the other characters in the novel are provided with an omniscience that, once considered, are mostly Bergen’s selfish perceptions. As one follows the interactions of the various characters in Bergen’s beach vacation, the egocentric nature of modern individuated society becomes apparent. Every single person portrayed lives alone amongst the crowd in the Spanish resort town. Relationships easily formed are just as easily dismissed. Friendships seem to be anything but that and love is barely more meaningful than renting a room.

Bolano is a master of style and story. The seemingly innocuous life of Udo Bergen the office worker and gamer is on second glance not what it appears. Death, sex, intrigue and the threat of violence simmer beneath the thin flesh of Bolano’s tale. After all is said and done little has changed. That is our curse. I am reminded of the line from Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Oed’ und leer das Meer.” Post industrial equals post-meaningful. Nothing plus nothing is still nothing. The charm is in the telling, not necessarily in the living. Bolano comprehends this fact and tells his story well.

Romana Clay: Welcome to Mind over Media, where the news is news. I’m Romana Clay. As should be obvious to anyone, the Internet has supplanted newspapers as the primary source of news for increasing numbers of people. Last year, a survey by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 41% of respondents chose the Internet as their primary news source, whereas a mere 10% chose a newspaper. The proportion was highest, as might be expected, among people aged 18 to 29. But is this decline in newspaper popularity due to technological innovation, or are newspaper owners and editors chiefly responsible for its demise, and is this demise permanent? Today, we begin a two-part investigation of the declining relevance of print journalism with Professor Joseph Howe, Director of the Centre for Media Integrity in Victoria, B.C. Welcome to the show.

Professor Joseph Howe: Thank you.

RC: Professor Howe, let’s get right to the point: is the Internet dooming print journalism to technological extinction?

JH: First of all, an established machine or technique does not simply die because a newer or better one comes along. The television did not spell the end of movie theatres, as many feared. The discovery of polyester, nylon and other synthetic fibers did not put established textile industries out of business. The automatic transmission did not make the standard transmission obsolete. Each maintained its economic niche or adapted to create a new one. In the face of technological innovation, history shows that co-existence, not extinction, is more likely. So there is no basis for blaming the Internet solely for the decline in daily or weekly newspaper readership.

RC: But newspapers are dying; even the New York Times admits that print’s days are numbered. Doesn’t the Pew poll show the newspaper going the way of the buggywhip?

JH: Not really. Yes, the newspaper has lost audience and revenue to the Internet, and it will never be as important or as influential as it was in the pre-computer age. On the other hand, newspapers have on-line editions, as well as on-line advertisers and subscribers, so it isn’t a total loss. Having said that, newspapers—in fact, all media—have to adapt to a world where they can no longer dictate truth and shape reality. But instead of adapt they fight.

RC: But newspapers have an Internet presence. Is this not a sign of adaptation?

JH: A minor one, largely forced on them by circumstance, but not a true adaptation. You see, the Internet is probably the greatest force for truth and democracy since the invention of movable type in the 16th century, and this terrifies the traditional media, especially newspapers.

RC: But why should they be terrified?

JH: Because they don’t serve the public good; they serve the corporations that own them, and through them the political interests and lobby groups that these corporations support. You will not find newspapers turning to the Internet to write balanced, rational reporting, for example, on the Middle East, the environment, labour issues, or national security because serving the public interest is bad for business. The tragedy of our time is that as the Internet helps people become better informed, newspapers become ever more shallow and manipulative as they prop up the official fictions that sustain their corporate owners.

RC: You said that newspapers are shallow and manipulative, but hasn’t that always been true to some degree?

JH: Yes, but the Internet has shown us just how shallow and how manipulative they are. Before the worldwideweb, we had no external reference point. Sure, there have always been counterculture or dissident publications, but none that could challenge the authority of the newspaper or reach a mass audience in real time.

RC: You’re not saying that the Internet is perfectly honest, are you?

JH: No, of course not. There’s a lot of garbage out there, but among the garbage is the balance and contrarian views that are conspicuously absent in newspapers. Without the Internet, the world would not have been able to expose the official fictions surrounding, for example, the September 11 attack, Operation ‘Cast Lead’, or the attack on the Mavi Marmara. The Internet is a threat to corporate power, and therefore newspapers, as corporate properties, cannot accept the need to adapt. Mendacity, not technology, lies behind the fall of newspapers. It all comes down to opportunity cost.

RC: What do you mean by ‘opportunity cost’?

JH: The cost of honesty versus obedience. Let’s say a newspaper runs a properly researched story or opinion piece on a matter of great public importance. If it runs up against corporate political interests, the writer could lose his job.

That’s what happened in March to Ottawa Sun columnist Michael Harris, who had his column taken away after he had the temerity and good sense to condemn Stephen Harper for being in contempt of Parliament. Publisher Rick Gibbons denied any cause and effect, of course, saying that Harris’s column was cancelled to make way for ‘new voices’, but that’s just the standard newsspeak to justify corporate censorship. The same thing happened to Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin five months earlier. The good news is that he was picked up by the Toronto Star.

On the other hand, if a paper runs mindless pap, it risks losing readership. One of the most bizarre cases of this occurred last October when The Vancouver Sun ran a fawning eight-part series on Justin Bieber just because he was in town for a concert. Even the managing editor couldn’t hide his embarrassment.

RC: If the Internet is providing the news and analysis that newspapers cannot or will not provide, what do newspapers have to offer their readers?

JH: Newspapers still do a decent job of reporting local news—crime, fire, city council, that sort of thing —and there will always be a readership for it. Beyond that, not much. To avoid angering their corporate owners, one tactic is to lard the paper with mountains of non-news—advertorials, soft features, sports and infotainment—so that readers won’t notice the absence of real news. The newspaper, and media in general, is really little more than a Weapon of Mass Distraction, and the exodus from print to web reflects the growing belief that a news diet should feed the mind, not starve it.

RC: Can you give us an example?

JH: One egregious example took place in Vancouver during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The editors of the Picayune-Mirror repeatedly tanked the front page in favour of redundant, trite cheerleading pics of the Vancouver Canucks, who made it all to the way to the finals. If you look at the monitor, you’ll see a series of front pages of the Picayune-Mirror. Yes, the playoffs was an important local event, but that does not excuse throwing away the front page, especially when the paper’s back page is also the sports ‘front page’. Given the already bloated sports section and the reporting overkill in the news section, there was no justifiable reason to bastardize the paper. On most days it looked like a Canucks sandwich—all bread and very little meat.

RC: Why did the editors do it?

JH: I asked that exact question, and was simply told that the publisher gave the order to give the Canucks the same saturation coverage as the 2010 Olympics—sports reduced to news filler. Why this was necessary, I never found out, but you can tell from the headlines that accompanied these pics that news judgment played no part: ‘Rock this Town!’; ‘Drop the Puck!’; ‘Make Your Plans’. What made the editors think they were being paid to be cliché-addled hustlers?

RC: At this point, news-hungry readers had to be asking themselves: ‘What news is not reported?’ ‘What do I need to know that I’m not being told’?

JH: Exactly! Clearly the Picayune-Mirror doesn’t respect its readers, so it forces them to go elsewhere for news, and the Internet is the most likely place.

RC: Has the Picayune-Mirror or any other paper actually lost readership?

JH: I can’t say for certain because the newspaper climate in most cities is nearly monopolistic. Apart from the throw-away transit rags, the Picayune-Mirror is one of two dailies in Vancouver, but since both are owned by the same company, circulation figures and reader attitudes cannot be taken at face value. However, we can reasonably conclude that newspapers are doomed, but not just for technological reasons.

RC: Thank you, Professor Howe. (to camera) When we return, Picayune-Mirror editor Bruce James will join us via satellite. (Two-minute commercial break) We’re back, and joining us from Vancouver as promised is Bruce James editor of the Picayune-Mirror. (to the TV monitor) Mr. James, you’ve been following Professor Howe’s comments. How do you respond to his comments about the state of newspapers and yours in particular?

Bruce James: Well, obviously I take great exception to Professor Howe’s characterisation of my paper. I don’t think he understands it at all. The Picayune-Mirror isn’t a broadsheet like the Globe and Mail, so it doesn’t have to live up to his high-falutin’ standards. It’s a parochial tabloid. Our readers aren’t interested in international or national news—they want to read local stories, the ‘picayune’ details from their neighbourhood. They also want to see themselves, their interests, reflected in the paper. That’s why we put on the front page the kind of story we think readers would be talking about.

RC: But doesn’t Professor Howe have a point when he criticizes you and the other editors for filling the front page with redundant sports pics that have no news value?

BJ: Who says they have no news value? Sports is news, and the Canucks were the biggest news story at the time.

JH: No, Mr. James, they weren’t. A hockey series, no matter how important, is not ‘news’. That’s why there are separate news and sports sections. Besides, you had the whole back section to promote the Canucks; you didn’t need to tank the front.

BJ: I resent your use of the term ‘tank’!

RC: (cutting in) Mr. James, I think Professor Howe’s point is that the back page, which also had a full-sized hockey pic and a thick hockey section, seemed adequate to the task, and that giving away the front page seemed like overkill.

BJ: Our readers are interested in the Canucks, and we give them what they want.

JH: Even if that means under-reporting real news? Last I checked, the Picayune-Mirror was a newspaper, not a sports paper.

BJ: I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job!

RC: (cutting in) Uh, gentlemen…

JH: Well, then, perhaps you’d tell us the news value of running a Canucks calendar or pictures of fans on the front page.

BJ: I don’t have to account to you!

JH: All I want is a straight answer to a simple question, but you seem incapable of giving one. You think you can exempt yourself from having to do honest journalism by using the excuse that the Picayune-Mirror is just ‘a tabloid’.

BJ: How you could equate the measure of me as a journalist based on whether or not I address the musings of someone so insignificant as yourself?

RC: (cutting in) Mr. James, that’s quite enough!

BJ: Then I suggest you tell your guest to show me some respect!

JH: (to James) You mean the same kind of respect you show your readers?!

RC: (cutting in) All right, that’ll do. Let’s take break and see if we can all calm down. (The camera pulls back and cuts to a commercial, and then the argument continues off-camera.)

BJ: (to Howe) I’m getting a little tired of this line of questioning.

JH: (to James) And I’m getting tired of your refusal to answer questions.

BJ: I am not interested in offering you my comments!

JH: Oh, that’s great! And you call yourself an editor?!

BJ: Now you…

RC: …Gentlemen! We’re on in 30 seconds and I would like to move the show to another topic. So let’s put our anger away, shall we? (short pause.) Okayyyy, we’re back, and I’d like to change focus a bit by going back to something you said earlier, Professor Howe. You said newspapers are forcing readers to go to the Internet by under-reporting real news. Can you elaborate?

JH: I hardly know where to begin. Well, take international news, which is just as important to local readers as local news is. In 2008-2009 Israel launched a genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip called Operation ‘Cast Lead’. It was a wholesale massacre of civilians based on trumped up charges that the Hamas government had launched rocket attacks. In fact, the attack was six months in the planning. It rightly disgusted the world, yet there was virtually no mention of the illegality of the attack or of Israel’s use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus, which are expressly forbidden by law. I asked Bruce James at the time if he would write an editorial denouncing the use of these banned weapons and he said he would if I produced proof. I did, but he reneged.

BJ: (cutting in) I never said anything even close to writing an editorial condemning Israeli action! Given we had not to date written an editorial supporting their action, something I supported, why would I commit to writing an editorial condemning their action. I was well aware Israel admitted to using them in Lebanon. I personally do not support the use of these weapons, but I also don’t support Hamas missiles attempting to destroy another country’s vital desalination plant.

JH: Your knee-jerk equation of Hamas rockets with Israel’s use of DU and white phosphorous is grossly immoral and dishonest. One Jew had died in all of 2008 before the assault. Does a ratio of more than 100:1 dead Arabs to Jews sound like justice to you? Does this not sound like genocide, especially when Israel was deliberately starving Gazans and denying them medical care?

BJ: You lose all credibility with me when you play the genocide card, and your vitriol and hate have rendered reasonable discussion impossible! Go fuck yourself. You, sir, are a frothing, horrid little man. (James takes off his clip-on mike and storms off the show. Clay and Howe look at each other in disbelief.)

RC: (visibly discomfited) That…did not go nearly as well as I had hoped.

JH: No, indeed, but at least he showed our viewers why the newspaper is dying.

RC: We’re out of time, which is probably just as well. (to the camera) On our next show, Professor Howe and I will look at how the media frames and decontextualizes the news.

(Camera pulls back. Credits roll. Fade out.)

I had my “Citizen Journalist” cap and T-shirt on and I was in the middle of it — in the middle of Times Square — excited and wondering what next… and giddy with a sense of power in numbers and power in the justice of a cause — something I hadn’t felt big-time since the 60s and 70s, and hadn’t felt little-time since the march against starting the war on Iraq (and we all know how that went!), and there he was… standing there listening and observing like everyone else, but giving off these vibes like he was taking it all in, like he’d seen it a million times before in a million different places. And it was good, and, somehow, he was blessing it!

I didn’t recognize him at first, I say. He didn’t look like blue-eyed, brown-haired Jeffrey Hunter in the King of Kings (that I’d seen as a teen), and he didn’t look like the gentle, brown-haired hippie with the white peasant shirt and burnt-sienna robe and the beatific smile; not that guy with the throbbing blood-red Valentine’s heart in the middle of his peasant shirt (that some of my relatives used to hang on their walls).

No! Fact is, he was kind of Semitic looking, with a somewhat aquiline nose, and brown skin, slightly built — kind of a cross between an old-time Jew and a modern-day Palestinian: a 30ish Woody Alan with a bit of Yasser Arafat! He was wearing a nondescript sport jacket, a white shirt, no tie, and laced up old-fashioned sandals.

I approached with some apprehension. “It’s you?” I asked.

He nodded. “You were expecting the Lord of Hosts?”

“What… what are you doing here?”

“So… where else should I be… at a time like this?”

“You’re… you’re one of us? You’re on our side?”

“The question is, to paraphrase Abraham…”

“Sarah’s husband?”

“No! Mary Todd’s! Your Abraham, your Lincoln. … The question is: Are you on my side?”

“I think we are. … I mean, it’s multi-faceted, you know. There’s so many things wrong! It all seems to be culminating now. The environment, the climate, geophysical changes, economic collapse. …”

“It’s a megillah; that’s for sure!”

“The damn MSM… they keep saying, we’ve got to define what we want, you know. They’re bitchin’ and whining: What’s the program? What do the protestors want? But… there are so many things! If we start putting it down on paper — they’re going to get their hired media guns to tear us apart, point by point. They’ll throw money at their hired guns. If some of us get our heads above the crowd, if we speak out and others start listening and nodding their heads—then, the media will anoint them “leaders” and then the hired guns will go after the leaders. So… it’s all of that! That’s what the problem is! It’s the way money works in this world—in the world they’ve created. It’s about money as power! It’s about their raping the planet and then their throwing money around to hire the guns and the soldiers and the media freaks… and the whores and the pimps taking the money and stuffing their faces while the people are eating the scraps left over after the boots have stomped through the fields.”

“Sure, sure; it’s an old story. Look, why do you think I did what I did? You think it was easy? You think I wasn’t scared? You think I wasn’t shaking that time in Gethsemane? I was shaking, I tell you. I was scared! But I couldn’t stand it. … The money-changers… in the Temple! In God’s house! Herod’s eating peacocks’ balls — like his Roman over-lords — and the people are dying of leprosy! We’ve got money for soldiers all over the place, money for tribute but no money for doctors! I couldn’t take it any more! I looked around; I couldn’t take it anymore!”

“You went among the lepers. …”

“I broke bread with them! Just like Buddha! You know the story of Buddha? He broke bread with the lepers, and while they were eating, a leper’s thumb fell off! And Buddha brushed it away, just brushed it away, just kept eating. … You know why? You know why?”

“No.”

“He didn’t want to embarrass the leper! What a mensch! Such a mensch!”

“You admire Buddha?”

“Of course! Courage, humanity, vision! What’s not to like?”

“The MSM, they make it seem like… you guys… like you’re all in your own little worlds. The churches, the temples, the mosques, the shrines, the religious wars—”

“Fuck the MSM! Fuck the religious wars! You got this one little planet! You got this one little marble — and marvel — of a planet! That’s all you’ve got! That’s all you’re going to get! You’ve been raping it for centuries! Raping and pillaging and slaughtering your own kind and every other kind! When will you grow up? When will this idiot human race grow up?”

“That’s what it’s about, you see. That’s what we’re trying to do, why we’re here! We’re trying to grow up! This Globalization thing. … The bankers and the corporations and the speculators and the celebrities — they all wanted it to line their pockets better. Being millionaires wasn’t good enough. They wanted to be billionaires! Being billionaires wasn’t good enough; they wanted to be multi-billionaires! And, meantime, they’re taking more and more from everyone else. They’re plundering and they’re raping and they’re slaughtering and lining their pockets. Eating peacocks’ balls… and lining their pockets! They don’t know when to quit! They don’t know where to draw the line!”

“They never do!”

“And this globalization thing, it was all for their benefit… only… there was another side to it. That’s what we understand now. That we can talk to people on the other side of the world… and they’re just like us! They’re also sick of this crap! They don’t want to kill and die for the top 1 percent — for people who don’t give a damn about them! People who turn them against those who are like them! We’re all in it together! We can understand that now!”

“’Suffer the little children to come unto me,’” I said. I didn’t say, ‘Let only the rich kids come to me.’ That’s the message, you see. Equality! Be as a little child. Believe you can create the world anew. And you will!”

“I think so… I hope so… but…”

He understood. I didn’t have to say anything else. I had never really needed to say anything, but he had let me speak so as to know myself. His eyes were kind, and old, and wise, and a tear coursed down his cheek from one of them. “It’s going to be hard,” he said softly. “The Centurions don’t give up without a fight. The Pharisees and the Sadducees don’t give up without a fight.”

“A kind of crucifixion. … Is that what you mean?”

“In a manner of speaking. One way or another. You’ll have to go through it.”

“And then?”

“And then?” He looked around at the crowd that kept multiplying, multiplying — like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. “What else?” he said. “You become God-realized! … Resurrection,” he said. “And…, a new beginning.”

Characters:

Antonio Scalia (aka “Big Tony” — BT)

Clarence Thomas (aka “Little Bell” — LB)

Scene: Big Tony has pulled Little Bell aside in the parlor of a Georgetown apartment.

BT: I thought we needed to have this chat about this upcoming Walmart case.

LB: Yazzah. …

BT: You see, essentially what we’ve got here is a bunch of hysterical women trying to bring down one of America’s iconic institutions.

LB: Yazzah. … That’s how I sees it.

BT: Well, you see, there’s this whole principle at stake here. (Putting his hand avuncularly on LB’s shoulder–) Little Bell, if this goes through. … I call it “collective redress,” you see. Well… it’s as dangerous as the notion of “collective bargaining,” you see. These women are trying to work the courts, I’m telling you. They’ll bring down the System, I’m telling you. They’ll bring down the whole fucken System!

LB: Yazzah. That’s right. That’s how I sees it.

BT: Marone! Can you imagine? Why, if we allowed them to do this… we’d have anarchy, I’m telling you. Soon we’d have the Hispanics… and they’d be organizing and they’d be suing the whole fucken government to get Texas back! Give it back to Mexico! Hell, man, we’d have the Injuns organizing and they’d want Massachusetts back—and all the rest of it! Why, we’d have your Black brothers organizing—some hothead young radical who hasn’t been co-opted yet, some little sperm cell that didn’t get washed out with the douche bag, and he’d be out there radicalizing the unemployed. … You know what he’d say, doncha?

LB: Nossah. …

BT: Why, he’d tell’em they had a right, that’s what he’d say… that they had a “Constitutional right” (!) to file a grievance against the whole goddamn government, that’s what he’d say. A collective action… a class-action case against the whole goddamn government, Clarence! The whole goddamn government!

LB: Yazzah. That’s what he’d say. I do believe it!

BT: And they’d listen, Clarence. They’d listen! An’ you know why?

LB: Nossah. …

BT: Because we’d of set the precedent, that’s why! With this goddamn Walmart case. … So, you see, Li’l Bell, that’s why we can’t do it. We just can’t do it!

LB: Yazzah. I sees it now.

BT: (A little calmer now–) Okay, so the Jew and the skirts will throw a fit…, who cares?

LB: Which Jew, Sah?

BT: Breyer, of course! Talk about a guy who’s living in the past, huh? He thinks it’s still the old days with Jews marching arm-in-arm with the colored folks at the NAACP!

LB: (Smiling–) Yazzah! Them were the days!

BT: Okay for them days, I guess, but Breyer’s gotta get with the program! I mean… ideas like a class-action suit against grievances…? What kind of grievances? How they gonna prove it? So…, a skirt doesn’t advance up the ladder of success like a guy does. Does that mean it’s a policy? I mean, what if the Palestinians got hold of such a notion, huh? I mean, where would we be? Where would it end?

LB: Yazzah. … I sees that.

BT: Do you know where we’d be?

LB: (Hesitantly–) Nossah.

BT: Up shit’s creek, that’s where we’d be! I mean the whole damn Empire, that’s where we’d be! The whole good-Jesus N.W.O.! (Suddenly cautious–) None of this is going past us, right LB? I mean. …

LB: Nossah! (Solemnly; raising his right hand–) On my word of honor!

BT: I mean… it would be like the Nixon tapes, fer god’sake. I mean, if it were to get out.

LB: Yazzah.

BT: I mean, it would be like that goddamn Ellsberg, ya know.

LB: Yazzah. That’s right. Like that goddamn Ellsberg.

BT: (Looking around; still suspicious–) What the hell is that on the wall?

LB: Huh?

BT: Over there? What is that? (As he approaches, the robot fly buzzes away, lands nearby.) Goddamn fly! You see that? Goddamn fly! What kind of maid service they got in this place? Huh? The whole country’s falling apart and a bunch of hysterical women want to sue Walmart!

LB: (Shaking his head–) It’s bad! No measure! The folks has no measure no more!

BT: Well…, we’ll have the Jew and the skirts putting up a fuss, but we’ll just get Gwen Ifill or someone in the media to say something about the “liberals” on the court and then the American people will go back to sleep. They’ll stop paying attention soon as they hear that word. They’ve been conditioned now.

LB: Yazzah, that’s the word! (Hits his thigh–) “Conditioned!” (Laughs.)

BT: (Avuncularly again–) And, of course, that hybrid in the White House—he won’t say anything. He’s smart. He knows his place. He’ll keep his mouth shut. He can talk about marching on the picket lines when he’s a candidate, when he’s campaigning, but… he knows how the game is played. He’ll send Michelle off to Africa or something like that. Set her up with a meeting with Mandella an’ all the boobs will say, “See, they’re such good people! They really care!”

LB: (Laughing–) They really care! That’s a good one!

BT: Well, I’m glad we had this little talk, LB. I feel better now, knowing I can count on you!

LB: (Serious again–) Yazzah!

BT: Oh, yeah, there’s something else on the docket. Something about environmental groups being able to sue power companies that release too many emissions. (Starts laughing–) Can you imagine!

LB: (Laughing–) Nossah!

BT: Well, they know where they can stuff that case, right, LB?

LB: Yazzah! Stuff it!

BT: So…, how’s the little missus, LB? She treating you good?

LB: Yazzah! She’s a good one. Long as she keeps her mouth shut when she shouldn’t be pokin’ her nose where it don’t belong! But, I keeps her quiet now.

BT: That’s good, LB. That’s good. Wish the skirts would mind their lessons! They just don’t know what we’re up against. Crazy people want to bring down the whole System, the whole kit-n-kaboodle that we built up over the thousands of years! The whole financial system! The IMF…, and the World Bank…, and the central banks…, and the Rothschilds…, and the corporations…, and the nation-states with their sham democracies that hold it all together… the religious institutions… the kings and queens… the whole goddamn mother-fucking System! Like it was nothin’!

LB: The whole kit-n-kaboodle!

BT: Well, we’re not gonna let’em! We’re not gonna let’em do it, by God! No, sir! We don’t have this beautiful military-surveillance System for nothing, by God! We ain’t gonna let’em do it!

LB: Nossah! Tha’s right! Not gonna let’em! Not gonna let’em bring down the whole kit-n-kaboodle!. … Nossah. … Nossah. … Nossah. …

We’re starting to get the hang of it. (There’s only so much you can learn by watching internet videos.)

We’ve been at it for twenty minutes. But he still isn’t cooperating.

“We’re going to need more water.” I say to Carson, who stands by the door. “Go and fill the other bucket, would you? And get some towels.” Water is pooling under the bench, running all over the basement floor, making it slippery.

“I’m on it,” Carson says, and heads upstairs to the bathroom.

Ex President Slush is a stubborn bastard. You got to hand him that.

Or maybe it’s just, like Mason said, that the motherfucker really doesn’t understand the questions we’re asking him. Like we’re speaking a different language altogether.

We snatched him from the bathroom of a bookstore where he was touring to promote his best-selling “memoir.” While he was taking a break from signing autographs. Carson was hiding in the closet with the chloroform ready. Caught him with his pants around his ankles while he was reading a glossy new copy of his book, Tough Calls. Engrossed in his own so-called story upon the toilet, he never saw it coming. Never even had the chance to wipe. Which is why he stinks vaguely of shit, even now, lying on the bench. Mason helped Carson hoist him—half-naked and unconscious—out through the bathroom window, and out the back alley. Then it was into the car and gone.

We switched vehicles in a nearby tunnel. (The first vehicle had been stolen the night before.) The second was a rental that we’d got for cash down and with fake id. A few miles down the road, we switched out of that one too and into Greta’s minivan. Just like they do in the movies.

*****

While we’re waiting for the water, Mason takes advantage of the break to lean in and scream in Slush’s ear. “I ask you again, how many civilians died as a result of your invasion of Oroq?! You floppy eared piece of shit. Don’t you know? Speak up! How many people did you and your buddies kill?”

Slush turns onto his side and coughs. “Hunh?” His eyes are bloodshot and red as they rise. “Kill? Me?” I’m guessing he never read the John Hopkins study. I’m guessing he believes that American bullets have magic powder on them that only allow them to kill “bad guys” and “evil doers.”

“How many goddamn refugees did you create, Slush? How many homeless are now huddled in refugee camps and slums because of you and your pals?”

“Hunh? ?.. We…We….brought …’em …freedom…” He coughs.

“Wrong answer you piece of shit. It’s over one million, you unbelievable ass.” Mason yelled. “Over a million dead because of you.”

“And two to three million refugees. Two to three million!” He grabs Slush by his hair. It’s grayed considerably since he was in office, I’ve noticed.

“Hnnmmm….Sladdam Asam … s…a murderer.”

On some level you’ve got to stand in awe of this kind of obtuseness.

“You’re the murderer here, you sonofabitch. Don’t you get that? We tried and convicted you in the car on the way over. Don’t you remember?”

I can tell it’s all that Mason can do to keep himself from grabbing Slush by the soaking throat and throttling his head down on the bench. Maybe choke him to death for real. I stand tensed ready to stop him. Because that isn’t the plan. We need Slush alive.

Just in time, Carson returns with the water. And we’re back at it again.

Carson stuffs. Mason straddles and holds. I pour. Greta watches from the door. (She doesn’t approve, as she has made clear.) Carlos videos the whole thing from the corner. You better believe we’re going to get his confessions on tape.

*****

“Hmmmphfff….Hmmmmphfff….Hrrrgggll…”

“You think this is funny now, Buddie, you pig? How many people did you and your posse do this too, hunh?” Mason interrogates, or rather berates, between my pours. “Did your buddies in the CIA ever let you see it up close?”

“Hmmmphfff….Hmmmphfff.” Slush spits. Gags.

“Oh yeah, Slush-puppy. You like this?”

The ex-President, the mass murderer, the war criminal, the silver spoon millionaire, the puppet of the ruling class, the phony cowboy, the official signature on torture and coup d’etat, gags and chokes and shakes so hard on the bench that this time it takes not only Carson, Mason, and myself but also Greta rushing up too to keep him held down in place. It’s almost like he’s having a seizure. The sonofabitch is surprisingly strong for someone his age. Like he’s a vampire that has grown powerful off of other people’s blood. But we’ve still got him pinned.

“Hmmmphfff…Hmmphhfff.” I finish one bucket and ready the second. It’s still cold from the tap. I can feel Greta’s eyes in the back of my neck.

Tortura de Agua. That was what the Spanish Inquisition had called it. Water Torture. “Would you call this torture, Mr. President? Does this count as torture?” I ask, and give him a chance to answer. Carson withdraws the cloth.

Slush doesn’t say a word. Just gasps for air.

“I don’t know… does this look like torture to you, Carson? Whaduyou think?”

“Not sure, Roger.” He answers me, “Let’s ask the Commander in Chief. He should know.”

“WHAT DO YOU THINK, MR. PRESIDENT?!” Mason shouts, shaking him by the jaw. Slush shivers and gasps.

“What’s that? ‘Damn right,’ you say?” Carson leans his head in, pretending as if he heard it from Slush’s sputtering lips. “He says, Damn right, it’s torture. Damn right. ”

“I couldn’t hear him.”

“Me neither…SAY IT!” Mason shakes him harder now. After his violent spasms, the ex-Prez has now suddenly gone limp. His head is flopping back and forth in Mason’s hands. “SAY IT!”

“Hunh…Hunh nnnnh …?”

“Tell us if waterboarding’s torture now, you prick. Tell us.”

Carlos steps up to the bench, filming over our shoulders, not to miss the money shot.

But still I’m thinking Slush doesn’t quite understand the question. And I’m sure that with the water coursing down over his gagged tongue and down his throat to the point of virtual drowning, he is not in a place to appreciate the irony of our interrogation. He looks disoriented. His eyes are starting to roll back. I find myself almost feeling bad for him. Maybe Greta is rubbing off on me. His lips creak open and we are all hunched, watching him, listening. If only he would admit it, we could end this thing.

It’s right then that President Budd M. Slush vomits. And not just all over himself. All over the bench. All over us. All over everything.

*****

It wasn’t my idea to waterboard him. It was Mason’s. Carson’s too.

Carson was of the opinion that the goal was to somehow make the former President “see the light.” To see the error of his ways. Maybe not the entire light—who could stand that without going blind? But some beam, some glint of it. Of his terrible wrong-doing. Of his guilt. Of the suffering that he had caused and helped to cause. His idea was to break Slush down, physically, but also with pictures of mangled Oroqi children and so forth. In a way, his goal was to save Slush’s soul.

Mason was more cynical. Vengeful too. He had no hope of “turning” or “teaching” Slush whatsoever. He just wanted to cause the mothafucka pain. He wanted pay-back. For the million or so Oroqis that had died. For the tens of thousands of his brothers and sisters who had wasted away in prison cells. For Mason’s own brother , Greg, a US Marine, who had died a painful death, gasping and choking on desert sands. For his father laid off and out of work for the past four years, since the economy tanked. Because of Slush.

As for me, I’d love to put a big dunce cap on the bastard like they did in the old Chinese Cultural Revolution and parade him through the city streets. Let the masses confront him face to face and tell him what they really think of him. Make him confront the parents of those who have been killed in the wars. Make him confront the brothers and sisters of those who drowned in Louisiana. Make him grovel in the mud of the 9th Ward. Make him look into the faces of those he lied to. Of those he robbed and ravaged. We’ll find a way to make him listen. Parade him around in his underwear carrying a sign that says: “I admit it. I lied. And a million died.” Let inner city youth, and welfare mothers slap that spoiled smirk off his face.

The real kicker would be if we could somehow get him out of the country, and over to Oroq. Or even just down to one of those Latin American countries he tried to topple. To where the real victims are. Just you imagine that.

But this is fantasy. I know—we all know—we are on lockdown for the foreseeable future. That the security forces are out and looking for Slush, and for us, though they don’t know who “we” are. We best not press our—already considerable—luck. The new president himself has come on the television, eloquently pleading on Slush’s behalf, and threatening deadly retaliation against whomever is responsible for this “terrorist abduction.” Also against anyone who harbors them…them meaning us. We joke bitterly amongst ourselves about which country will be targeted for invasion “in retaliation.”

With the amped up police presence on the streets, and their satellite surveillance, if we walk Slush outside, it would only be a matter of minutes before Secret Service and SWAT teams would be on us like white on rice. We’d be dead—bullets in our backs and in our heads—before we made it to the end of one city block. This is not 1967, and we are not in Maoist China. We are not in a revolutionary situation, as much as we’d like to be. No matter that with all that’s gone wrong in this world, we by all rights we should be in one. But alas, with the way things are, even if the Feds weren’t on to us, no doubt some passing dumbass would call and report us for the reward money and the five minutes of fame. Meanwhile some dipshits on the street are sure to mistake our people’s court for an open-air autograph signing. Or for part of an elaborate publicity stunt to increase book sales. Sales of Tough Calls have shot through the roof, by the way. Even as we torture Slush on the bench, I realize, we are making him rich.

No, we don’t have the masses to back us up. At least not yet. How quickly people forget. I swear that if someone had pulled this off five years ago the country would be in the streets celebrating. But not now. People have forgotten. The media has let them. Helped them. Made them, even. The TV screens burn the truth out of people’s brains.

So we—the six of us—stand in, holding the place of a justice to come, until the people are ready to come forward. We stand here in this dark basement, wiping up the president’s vomit and smelling his shit, trying to think up a way to remind the people of what’s been forgotten. Of what they need to know. Of what is to be done.

Greta’s idea is to collect a $100 million ransom for Slush’s life. And then get to organizing and arming the people, which is where it’s really at.

Frankly I can hardly believe we’ve been able to hold him this long without the walls crashing in on us. I never said it aloud, but I was convinced deep down that he would have had some homing device on him, some radio-beacon microchip implanted under his skin, to prevent such a scenario from befalling a former President. Like they do for pets these days, to prevent them from ever getting lost. I frisked him down to the clammy skin, but found no such lump. He is alone and at our mercy.

*****

Since we can’t be parading ex-President Slush through the streets for a display of people’s justice any time soon, my back-up proposal is that we take some photographs of him. Compromising photographs, shall we say. Photos of Slush wiping his ass on the Constitution, for instance. Photos modeled after the poses that those US soldiers put the prisoners into at Ebu Garb prison. Photos of him holding confessional signs that say things like “Damn Right, I’m a war criminal.! J ” We can release them over the internet somehow. If Wikileaks could do it, why can’t we?

Regina has already made a big white dunce cap out of stiff, sturdy paper. And also a set of placards with phrases painted on. There’s an orange jump suit for Slush to wear. She takes a towel and dries Slush’s dripping face, gently. Sits him up on the bench, like a baby, hands still tied behind his back. Groaning, he almost looks human. Depleted, huffing and puffing, exhausted and pathetic. But close to human. Is he about to cry?

Carlos gets into position with the camera.

*****

Well, somebody had to do something, didn’t they? To hold this sonofabitch accountable for his war crimes and crimes against humanity? The spectacle of this killer collecting royalties and signing autographs , dipping his pen in the blood of the people—it was just too much to bear. When the state fails to enact justice, the obligation to do so falls back to the people, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you agree? Wouldn’t Thomas Jefferson for Chrissake? Or are we just supposed to sit back and let these devils run free on their 100-acre estates?

The new President’s pussy ass Justice Department sure wasn’t going to take action. His Party is far too complicit themselves in similar crimes to ever lead such an investigation, let alone a prosecution. The state would not and could not act….And so, we did. And will.

It’s not just about Slush either. We’ve got a whole list. You can probably guess at the names yourself. That is if your brain hasn’t been fried too.

The goal is not just to show them the error of their ways. Or to give them a taste of their own medicine. It’s to show America and the world that we—that we all—don’t need to bow down or beg before the Slushes of this world. That we can—if we really want to—pull them down off of their high horses and into the muck they created. That we can hold them accountable. That we can achieve some semblance of justice. In this world. Not just the next one…that is if you believe in that Judgment Day stuff.

I mean, if our little tribune of the people—there’s just six of us in this—could pull this stunt off, just imagine what 600 could do. Or six thousand. Or six million.

Please note: The author of this fictional story does not in any way shape or form advocate or condone abducting or torturing retired US war criminals or any other public officials for that matter, nor does he condone or advocate any other acts of criminal violence. He is a peaceful and justice-loving person, who merely happens to believe that torturers and mass murders ought to held accountable for their actions. Which apparently these days is a radical idea.

A: OK, the president wants a detailed plan to take to the congress on immigration…you all heard the speech, you know the outline of the Dream Act, and that damn Arizona thing is beating us to death, so let’s do some brainstorming. While Congress dithers—and we all know they WILL dither—we need something for the president to DO, to show he’s serious. So, the fence idea is on the table…again.

B: Fence? Yeah, we have a high tech fence…a part of one, anyway, and it’s a mess. It’s over budget and mostly what we’ve gotten is a lot of splattered insects, 200 or so fried lizards, and five border agents with laser burns. And the border is so damn long, it would take billions to finish it—money we could spend on more pressing problems, like saving the polar bears. I don’t see…

A: Well, everything we do is over budget—that’s capitalism…and we could put up “no trespassing” signs until the thing gets built…but, Ok, the fence is for down the road, after we work out the bugs…how about trucks?

B: Trucks are good. American trucks with Americans driving. We have lots of trucks in this mighty nation. We eliminate all that NAFTA traffic and we STILL have plenty…

D: But the president acknowledged that it’s logistically impossible to round them all up, so he wants a “path to citizenship.” I don’t know what that means. Anyone?

B: They get right with the law—that’s what he said. And learn English and pay a fine and…uh, go to the back of the line.

A: But how can any of that happen without FINDING them? I mean, if you were here illegally and you knew all that—especially the “back of the line” part, would YOU walk out of your house and flag down a cop and say, “here I am, I want to go to the back of the line!”

D: So…it looks like trucks. I mean, if CNN ever frees up a reporter from the Gulf and sees the government really DOING something about immigration…well, it’ll be great PR. Ok. So, how many trucks will it take?

B: Well (hesitates, consults notes), if there are 12 million criminals…uh, undocumented workers, then….

C: (an aide) That depends on how many will fit inside one truck. We figure that out and then we divide…

A: (Interrupting) Yes, yes, we know all that. So if it takes ten of ‘em to fill a truck, that’s…

B: Military trucks or ice cream trucks or moving vans or what?

B: Well, it’s gotta be military trucks, doesn’t it? I mean, if we use private companies, then we’re open to the charge of government intrusion into the private sector, and we’re already taking a beating on that. See how gentle we are with BP? We haven’t sent in the Marines because…

A: They’re all in Afghanistan, or going there or coming back so they can go again…

B; (gives A a dirty look) …Because we don’t want to look like Big Bad Government beating up on Private Enterprise. Fox would just eat that up. So, OK, ten to a truck…

B: Ten? They cram 15 into a VW Beetle! I say make it 20 to a truck. They like close quarters anyway. They won’t be cramped. And besides, it’s not gonna be a camping trip. It’s a criminal roundup!

A: Ok, 20. That makes it about a 600,00 trucks, give or take…

C: Of course we could use cargo planes. Lots of empty space inside; fits maybe 100 of ‘em, so we’ll only need…

B: (irritated) Cargo planes? And land where? In mall parking lots? Besides, the damn planes are all beat up from the War Against Terror.

A: Again I ask: how are we gonna round ‘em all up? I mean, they’re not wearing badges or anything. I mean, they ARE hiding…

B: Easy. We just get the ones that are illegal, and we’ll know that because they’re all brown, with black hair and speak Spanish.

A: OK, that’s easy enough, but there’s another problem: where are they all? I mean, we can’t just break down doors and say, “OK, all illegals, outside!”

B: Wal-Mart parking lots, mostly…sometimes Home Depot.

C: So we get the military—the National Guard; it’ll take all of them—to drive more than a half a million trucks into the states and pick up…

A: What if we need the Guard? I mean, for a disaster or something…earthquake, hurricane, maybe another huge oil spill somewhere?

B: Yeah, sure, and maybe terrorists will blow up the Malibu pier!

C: OK, then…National Guard trucks. We’ll need to get this written and polished up right away, so the president can do an Oval Office talk and put in his rhetorical flourishes and all.

A: Let’s work while we eat. The sooner we get this done, the safer our jobs will be. Is everyone agreed? (Everyone nods and A pushes a button on the intercom) OK, Lupita. Lonche, por favor!

Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…. A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers … Live things, things that lived — that are conscious of us — are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

This morning, as with so many mornings, as of late, I had to undertake an agonizing, intricate procedure to pull myself together, simply to extract myself from bed to face another day.

Television, cell phone, computer glowed before me: The media nimbus boiled: its hypnagogia-like flux of imagery, its counterfeit immediacy and proffered flummery insistent to drowned out auras of extinction rising from veritable nature; the earth’s warnings rising like musical notes … swelling, reverberating, enveloping us. In the Gulf of Mexico … literally falling to earth as chemical rain.

I stood dazzled before the scintillating doomscape of the Anthropocene Epoch. It has entered me … It has made me and undone me. It tells me who I am; it holds me near, enclosing me in the thrall of the false intimacy of its endless spectacle.

Some mornings, I don’t think I can compose myself to face it.

But, most days, I make a start: Gathering up and patching together this tattered flesh-garment of DNA. Then: I call to order my swarming termite-cathedral mind … take a head count of this aggregate of disparate personage deemed me … attempt to quiet this nattering self nettled by formless dread … console this besieged I who awakens in redemptive bed … torn from reverie with dreaming-ocean cosmos to shuffle to toilet for Newtonian piss, to sink for anti-entropic teeth brushing, then commit to wave-particle duality decision of dressing … in order to meet the manifold machinery of the empire’s manifest death-urge revelry.

Awake, dressed, and partially reconstituted, I left the house:

The age of insistent junk rose to meet me: junk groaned and snarled past me on roadways; junk words — mouthed into junk cell phones; junk pixels — texted and twittered into meaningless air.

So many enchanted by junk incantations, staring at glowing, tinny appliances like idiots entranced by shiny objects … giving over the fleeting hours of finite life in the service of Lord Junk — as sky and sea choke in the miasmic wake of our joyless binge — and the earth’s entropic furies gather.

We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever … mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.

I thought of Lorca; in truth, preposterously, I attempted to pray to Lorca who advised that one should listen for the heart of god beating within the monster of the world.

But I am losing heart searching for the monster’s heart. Thus far: finding only my own spleen. For this reason: our collectives striving and private equivocations seem the thanotopic dream of destroyer gods: The nightmare manifested before us as strip malls and shopping plazas … constructed of bones of extinct species; interiors of suburban subdivisions shuffling with resentful phantoms … estranged from the libido of culture and communion; dead zone freeways … the air shaken and riven by the roar of its death-enamered fury.

Before me: Atlanta Georgia, USA … glazed in asphalt inferno of late-June.

Yet, held in the heat-pummeled air above, I saw fuchsia mimosa blossoms hoisting defiant flags above the misery of traffic.

The effrontery of those spindly blooms of fuchsia, its colors as raw as my own nettled heart. It hurt deep within my chest even to gaze upon such a shade of unconquerable pink.

I want to shake branches of flowering mimosa in the faces of the ministers and minions of junk … to see … if they become stricken as I was — as tickled pink as I am.

Later, will I hear reports on the evening news of a million human beings in their offices and cubicles afflicted with seemingly out-of-context desires … suffering from spontaneous longings for the caress of blossom-scented winds … suddenly struck by an ungovernable need to emerge unto city streets and genuflect before the spindling glory of these seditious flowers?

So, in short, the ministrations of the mimosa convinced me to keep on living. But I had little appetite for the endeavor.

The meals prepared from this harvest of junk turned my stomach. I clamped my teeth tight against it. I kept searching for hope’s greenhouse — where blooms of human understanding open and breathe — but I kept wandering into the empire’s slaughtering barn.

I began to mutter, “awful.”

“Awful. Awful. Awful.”

Then I chanted it aloud, “Awful. Awful. Awful.”

Then and there, I decided I would make “awful” my morning and evening prayer.

“He’s awful, She’s awful — This food is awful — The news is awful — Our leaders are awful. You awful people have created such an awful mess by living out the awful implications of your awful lives that all mirrors should be renamed awful frames.

I ask you, Rilke: What awful angels swim through the poisoned sky?

Anticipating the question, Rilke, a century prior, answered:

“I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief –
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.”

So I riffed on it and rasp it, snarled it and sobbed it, whispered it to myself and posited it in public places. I warbled it and choked on it, laughed about it and wept over it.

I returned home laughing and sobbing. I could no longer keep the floodgates closed: The things of the world, massive and minuscule, tragic and preposterous, came coursing into my consciousness: giant squids and chihuahuas arrived, death camps and Dollywood arose, diamonds and Skiddles were proffered, world-destroying comets and blue snow cones hurdled through deep space, while killing sprees and hand jobs, inspired exchanges and insipid palaver, grace and goofiness transpired on earth as always.

My wife found me in this state, both yearning and mortified, hungry and queasy, desperate for solitude and yet longing to be touched.

She reached for me as the two fronts within me met, merging the moist breeze of the tropics and the cold wind of the Arctic … creating pelting hail and huge, warm raindrops … engendering weeping and caressing — as inundating sorrow mingled with torrents of desire.

All the while, I was stammering, “awful, awful, awful,” but the pleasure struck me momentarily monosyllabic and only an ecstatic “A-W-E” issued from me.

Shuddering … awestruck, awfully grateful, I collapsed onto her — awed by the sublime of our simpatico breathing — awed by the soft light of scented candles lambent upon her skin –awed by her generosity in faking her own orgasm concurrent with my own (sometimes there is surpassing grace in such small, selfless lies).

And of equal importance: awed by all the awful things that waited outside of our room that I resolved I would try to endure and transmute into song.

As I drifted towards sleep, I said Kaddish for my convictions. I dreamed my lips left impressions traced in ash. Braille sheet-music caressed me from the breeze of an electric fan. All of my points of reference floated away from me like transmigrating galaxies. Everything was adrift: mind, sorrows, heart and heavens.

Upon awakening in bed with my wife of many years, I turned to her and asked, “Pardon me, but have we met?”

I fumbled for conversation … wanting to make a good first impression.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

As commercial culture replaces public culture and the language of the market becomes a substitute for the language of democracy, consumerism appears to be the only kind of citizenship on offer to children and adults alike.
– Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse that Roared (Updated and Expanded Edition): Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010), p. 24.

What are the implications for a democratic society increasingly under the sway of corporations that subordinate politics, history, public discourse, and non-commodified forms of culture to consumerism, escapist entertainment, and corporate profits?
– Ibid., p. 90.

Growing up corporate has become a way of life for American youth, and companies like Disney constitute a new global force in shaping youth around the world as consuming subjects.
– Ibid., p. 211.

In March 2007, Disney announced early preparation for a new animated production, The Frog Princess. Maddy (as in: Mammy), in true “American fairy tale” tradition, would be a Black chambermaid slaving away in the New Orleans pit of a spoilt, White débutante, only to be rescued ultimately by a voodoo priestess fairy godmother who helps her clutch the heart of a White prince who rescued her from a Black Magic villain. Civilization!

But soon as the 40 million Black people in America got word of Disney’s latest exploits in the realm of racial imagination, holy hell let loose, and the plot and title were at once scrapped: revised as The Princess and the Frog: the tale of Tiana, a fatherless 19-year-old Black waitress (and aspiring restaurant owner), set in Jazz Age New Orleans, who tries to snap a wicked spell placed on a not-quite-White prince, and thereby restore his humanity — only to be transformed herself into a frog, then having to hop through life’s animated twists and turns until arriving at the inevitable ending where both regain their character, fall into sensual bliss, and live happily ever till the credits roll.

The embarrassing effrontery of Disney’s first proposal is in many ways emblematic of the media/merchandise giant’s decades-long anachronistic approach to reality, and stubborn disregard of cultural sensitivity: a characteristic synonymous with corporate hubris. But it also extended a ritual Disney has, since inception, strived to keep secret — injecting highly educational-political-pedagogical shots into the social realm, all the while claiming Innocence as prime and final motif.

How fortuitous for Disney that as it sought to assure the world Black girls belonged better in kitchens and laundry rooms (rather than restaurants and board rooms), a Black family was ascending the podium of international acclaim, and Michelle Obama, wife of the current President, was arousing curiosity from all ends for refusing to recline in the back-seat while her husband ran laps across the country, hoping to convince citizens he could do the job just as good as any of his White opponents/predecessors.

Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock survey this theme with abundant brilliance in a newly released, updated and expanded version of The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, first published in 1999. Disney has long been educational and political, they write, and parents who prefer Disney — because, so the chants go, it offers up innocent and harmless alternatives to the sinful, violent, sexist, caustic courses that make up most TV shows and movies these days — need to widen their eyes more to a reality not so hard to pick up: far from innocent and harmless, Disney’s stuff not only render social and political and historical commentary often skewed toward bias, but at times aim for that exact edge.

When, in 1992, Disney unfurled Aladdin, and blurred the line between ignorance and xenophobia, with the main theme, “Arabian Nights,” confessing,

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear
If they don’t like your face
It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.

The Gulf War had just ended. And, here, Arabs were distorted as grotesque-faced barbarians waiting/needing to be civilized. Walt Disney would have been much pleased. After all his vision, as World War II raged, was to employ film in “molding opinion.” Thus all coincidences were off when in freezing point of the Cold War, twelve years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned to clouds, Disney released Our Friend the Atom, a 53 minute film extolling the virtues of atomic power.

Yet, Disney affects kids and adults with equal authority — with a strident, mythical representation of Innocence that concerns childhood just as much as it does nationhood: kids revel exhilaratingly in the spectacle of fairy tales and everlasting happiness (which only lasts the longer they can buy the hundreds of merchandise lined up to relive various epic moments in various pictures), and adults are steered to examine their country as pure and faultless, and a righteous crusader against evil in this world.

Disney, here, blurs the line between childhood and adulthood, catering to both children and adults’ sense of perfection, and purging the imaginary world it creates of “evil” — one historical record at a time. At Disneyland, “There are no historical records of labor strikes … There is no history of labor unrest. No history of attacks on immigrants. No history of slavery or segregation. No Red Scare, no McCarthyism, no atom bomb.”

Disney so values Innocence and Perfection that employees must adhere to extremely conservative dress codes and conducts — no facial hair, limited hair-length, no earrings or bracelets on men, limited accessories on women; smiley-faces and cheerful dispositions always, complete obedience to script, etc. And when accidents occur, such as passengers being thrust off malfunctioning rides hundreds of feet in the air, employees must keep these “incidents” under wrap. Should ambulances be necessary, hurt passengers would be hurtled into “low-profile vehicles” to keep the thousands of oblivious, potentially soon-to-be-victims everlastingly happy in the “happiest place on earth.”

Disney’s deal with parents is terribly complex. Parents must be willing to submit their kids up for inspection, upon which Disney decides which roles they fit, and which identity-narrative they adopt. But parents must also realize the prize of the birthright: admission of inherent deficiency, both in themselves and in their kids. After all, successful parents don’t need imaginary characters raising their kids: and smart kids don’t need imaginary characters for stimulation: and, more pernicious, a manageable society does not need moral lessons from the world’s largest media and entertainment empire. But such is the deal brokered, which explains why Disney has raked in millions of dollars from the absurd Baby Einstein products which swear to enable toddlers whose parents “want their kids to keep up in a highly competitive world”—a Darwinian society. It also explains why DisneyFamily.com was launched to, amongst other excuses, provide “resources on parenting and raising healthy children.”

For this reason, in Disney’s film history adults have always represented quirky, uncouth, uncool, burdensome characters. Kids are central target — adults: merely proxy. But once the heart of the child has been claimed, the adult is of no use anymore, and kids must come to understand that. Ironically many adults were raised by/on Disney, and stand forever armed to bring down the hammer on anyone who claims Disney does more than entertain —that it educates (explicitly or otherwise). And it’s not so hard to understand why: for who, in right mind and sense, can accuse a bunny-eared, glove-wrapped, oval-eyed mouse of orchestrating an insidious plan to indoctrinate children worldwide?

This has made Disney Teflon for years — even as it carries out some of the most retrograde work practices in the modern world, and bombards children with consumerism, and attempts to subvert parental authority, individual agency, social community, public spaces, and private lives. Disney also wins in a world where the worth of children factor less each day, where hundreds of billions of dollars are cashed in annually from direct marketing to kids of any age, with horrendously minimal concern from legislators and elected officials who with a conscientious vote can end the abuse immediately.

Giroux and Pollock make mention of an addiction more injurious to kids than all the street paraphernalia laws have been installed to haul them off to jail for buying or selling — a zombie-like addiction to various electronic media forms, documented January this year by a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation study suggesting typical American tweens and teens actively engage electronic media for up to 8 hours daily — up 1 hour, 17 minutes in just 5 years. With a 2000 Nielsen Media Research study able to account for only 38.5 minutes spent weekly by most parents and kids in meaningful conversation, it’s clear who the real Daddy and Mommy are —Mickey and his emissaries.

“Too many parents have become mere shadows in the lives of their children, who spend endless hours absorbed by the visual imagery on a screen,” write Giroux and Pollock in The Mouse that Roared. “By exposing them to a marketing pedagogical machinery eager and ready to transform them into full-fledged members of consumer society, the commercial world defined by Disney and a few other corporations conscripts children’s time.” And in an age where kids register over 40,000 TV ads annually, where by 4th grade most have memorized 300-400 brands, the identity of the American child can only fall somewhere between consumer and commodity.

For Disney, Identity reigns supreme. The White female raised on Disney mostly learns that her lot in life is to seek endlessly until finding that knight-in-shining-armor — without whom her life would lack meaning. For the White male, over the White female has he been given dominion: for her existence is incomplete without him; and should he feel just in kidnapping and abusing and maltreating her, she can’t but settle patiently till the inner prince lurking is comfortable enough to set forth, as Belle in Beauty and the Beast recounted: “There’s something sweet/ And almost kind/ But he was mean/ And he was coarse/ And unrefined/ And now he’s dear/ And so unsure/ I wonder why/ I didn’t see it there before/.” For the Black or Brown male or female, if a chambermaid or villain or terrorist or thug or brute isn’t too full a pill to swallow, arrangements can be made for a future blockbuster motion picture that stresses to do better.

Other colored kids don’t belong on LCD screens but in toxic, run-down, roach-infested, union-busting, underpaying factories — to sew and stuff the clothes and dolls Disney sells to Western children at hundreds of times the hourly wages earned by kids slave-laboring in China or Haiti. (For more, see the candid 1996 documentary, Mickey Mouse goes to Haiti: Walt Disney and the Science of Exploitation.) As one child in Orange County, Florida, is swiping a junior debit card to pay for a $23 T-shirt, emblazoned with the face of her favorite Disney pop star, another in Sonapi Industrial Park, Port-au-Prince, is swatting the sweat off her brows and hurrying, before dusk falls, to line up the edges of the same shirt which in a few months would be hung on a rack in some Florida Disney store.

But Disney, the mammoth media conglomerate it is, can flaunt weight and worth around without any worries. It can invade classrooms — as happened with five hundred 3rd grade students from eight Maryland schools in 2006, which helped pilot a “Comics in the Classroom” program employing Disney characters as literacy resources (“kids end up learning without even thinking about it,” the Vice President of Disney World Publishing bragged) — and little pushback is felt. It can sell to kids disposable icons like Miley Cyrus, star of the popular sitcom Hannah Montana, thereby reducing self-expression “to what a young person can afford to buy,” and only faint, distant objections are raised. It can offer crypto-fascism a facelift, with pictures like The Incredibles and The Path to 911, knowing well whatever criticisms fall its way wouldn’t stain a spot on its financial reputation. It can champion conservative causes openly, and sleep tight knowing the cloak of Innocence still spreads unruffled.

“The issue here,” Giroux and Pollock argue, “is not whether people read Disney differently, or even enjoy the glut of entertainment and commodities that the company dumps into the culture, but whether a democratic society can allow an ever-expanding corporate culture to blur the distinction between public and private, entertainment and history, and critical citizenship and consumer identity.” And Disney is today more important than ever, as it encroaches international and indigenous communities where, given its unremarkable human rights record and neoliberal devotions, “everything potentially becomes a commodity, including, and perhaps most especially, identity.”

With the elegant, former CEO Michael Eisner booted out in 2005, and the mild-mannered Roger Iger assuming position shortly after, many saw a moral sea-change and better days for/from Disney hovering over. Close reading, however, suggests differently: for while Eisner governed through imposition (“It doesn’t matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computer, or satellite. Everyone’s going to have to deal with Disney.”), Iger’s lash is no less swift. He prefers the new-neoliberal doctrine of illusion-of-choice, of selling customers fictional identities, of “empowering” citizens to carry out their civic duty — consume.

In 2005, Iger insisted to the Associated Press, “Consumers have a lot more authority these days and they know that by using technology they can gain access to content and they want to use the power they have. … We can’t stand in the way and we can’t allow tradition to stand in the way of where the consumer can go or wants to go.”

What Disney has for nearly a century packaged as family, wholesome fun and entertainment—totally innocent and innocuous — has meant the imposition of narrow and often prejudicial values, ingrained by kids, adults, and the larger society—in the U.S. and beyond. And though Disney may be a global, corporate force wielding enormous resources, those who find fault with its principles have no other choice but to fight on its own turf and terms — with kids, with adults, with society.

“Central to such a challenge,” advise Giroux and Pollock, “is the necessity of addressing how neoliberalism as a pedagogical practice and a public pedagogy operating in diverse sites has succeeded in reproducing in the social order a kind of thoughtlessness—a social amnesia of sorts — that makes it possible for people to look away as an increasing number of people are made disposable.”

Fighting Disney on its own turf and terms also means critically engaging multiple media forms, creating progressive versions, and refusing to be swept up by animation (as though computer-generated characters couldn’t command harmful suggestions). “Film watching involves more than entertainment,” admonish the authors: “it is an experience that reproduces the basic conditions of learning.”

Only then, by avid learning, can this very real war be won.

“Whether we have to open up our military hospitals or extend the Pentagon budget for health care to civilian facilities, we are determined to share with the children of the world nothing less than the quality medical care that our own children received as military dependents,” said General Samuel “Upright” Justice from his home in northern Virginia.

General Sawyer “True Blue” Edgemont, who served three years as Director of Medical Operations for the Joint Chiefs, said he couldn’t be more proud of the record that the military has established for quality, accessible, and affordable health care for American soldiers, spouses, and dependents around the world.

“Medical care is mission critical for us in times of war and peace,” said Edgemont. “Assuring the right to a healthy body is something we can be honored to stand for wherever Old Glory flies”

Speaking from Pasadena, California, where he serves as volunteer coordinator for a food bank, Edgemont said the idea for Operation Tiny Tim came up in a casual conversation during a Dickens reading circle last summer.

“We have the experience and commitment to excellence in federal health care,” he said. “Why not build from the strengths that we already have?”

General Lucinda “Boots” Billingame said the idea comes at a time when Americans are needlessly divided over health care reform.

“Nothing succeeds like success,” said Billingame, “so I think we can make a lasting contribution to authentic patriotism if we show ourselves and the world that America is very much a can-do country when it comes to efficient delivery of best practices in health care for coming generations.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was unavailable for comment at the time of this report, but a spokesman for the Pentagon, on condition of anonymity, suggested that the active-duty uniformed services would respect whatever mission that Congress and the President should decide to order.

“We’re here to serve the national interest,” said the Pentagon spokesman.

Meanwhile, reporters and producers at the international finance channel CNBC were rumored to be scouring sources and experts to determine which companies would be most likely to secure lucrative federal contracts when the campaign goes operational.

Aides for Republican Congressmen who opposed recent reforms known as “Obamacare” were quick to point out that the program proposed by the retired Generals would be expensive.

“War is not cheap,” said one well-placed aide. “Especially when you consider that the war they’re talking about will never end.”

Aides for Democrat supporters of “Obamacare” expressed concern that the Generals’ proposal would raise the spectre of a “public option” during the upcoming election cycle.

“We’ll be lucky enough to survive voter wrath for the modest expansion in health care insurance coverage,” said one insider, referring to the health insurance bill that passed in March. “I’m not sure the American people will tolerate the idea of No Child Left Behind applied to health care.”

“There is a lot of anger and mistrust out there,” added the insider. “But if an association of Generals says that they can win this Operation Tiny Tim, people on both sides of the aisle might give them a hearing.”

I will do my best.

As a proud people accustomed to confronting challenges and overcoming whatever barriers are placed in our path, we are not prepared to receive or accept any message that acknowledges the hardships we are likely to face in the years and generations ahead. We are not prepared to accept the hard reality that our government is currently designed to thwart the essential reforms that our challenges require.

Is it better to deliver a message of optimism that has no foundation in reality or to deliver a message of hardship founded in reality to inspire the groundswell of outrage that might inspire change?

When I took office one year ago I inherited two wars and a legacy of foreign policy blunders and betrayals that left our nation more hated and despised than at any other time in history. I inherited a financial crisis that had the potential to bring down the global economy and usher in a worldwide depression. I inherited an economy ever more dependent on foreign oil even as the shadow of global climate change darkens our vision of the future. I inherited a society where the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider and where the middle class as we know it is vanishing before our eyes. I inherited a health care system that fails to meet the needs of our citizens and places a burden on enterprise that cripples our ability to compete in a global economy. I inherited a political system that reduces all reforms no matter how critical to the nation’s well being to the lowest common denominator. It is a system that nullifies both the interests of the nation and the will of the people by placing undue influence in the hands of a few senators or members of congress.

I would not deliver a message of reality if I did not believe it is possible to change. If I believed there was nothing we could do to confront these challenges head on, I would herald the small changes we are able to achieve as major victories. But I do not believe that is the case. I do not believe that small measures are adequate to the challenges we face or that there is nothing we can do to confront them.

I am not the first president to be confronted with historic challenges. Some presidents have risen to the occasion while others have failed. While President John Adams failed to recognize the dangers of a weak federal government, incapable of meeting the needs of the people, Thomas Jefferson rose to the challenge. Where Presidents Fillmore and Pierce failed to heed the warnings of civil war, President Lincoln rose to the challenge and (like hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians) paid with his life. Where Presidents Cleveland and McKinley failed to address the rising power of industrial monopolies, Theodore Roosevelt answered the call. Where President Hoover failed to accept government’s responsibility to the people in the grips of a Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt embraced the challenge with the New Deal.

Like those presidents before me, I can defer to partisan politics, continuing to blame my predecessor and the party of opposition for all the problems that plague us, or I can take responsibility and fight for what needs to be done.

My fellow Americans, I stand before you today to testify that the state of the union in January of the year 2010 is precarious. I rise to give warning that if we do not find a way to respond effectively we will pay a price that future generations will continue to pay for as long as these eyes can see.

The challenges we face are every bit as historic as those of Jefferson, Lincoln or Roosevelt and yet our government as it presently operates is incapable of responding in kind. From the day of my inauguration the minority party has determined to oppose every measure, every reform and every initiative that I propose. No matter how detrimental to the welfare of the nation, no matter what compromises I proposed or concessions I granted, they are determined to block every effort and they have found the means to do so not in the constitution, not in the laws of government, but in the archaic rules of the United States Senate.

Because of their efforts, marching in unison to the same beat of Just Say No, they have blocked passage of a health care reform package that included more Republican ideas than Democratic. Because of their efforts, the chances of meaningful financial reforms, jobs and green technology initiatives, middle class tax relief, trade policy reform and other critical initiatives are in jeopardy.

The instrument of this obstructionism is the senatorial filibuster rule. Not a law. Not even a regulation. A rule of conduct, decorum, and a common courtesy intended to protect the dignity of the Senate. The difficulty is they overreached.

As a professor of constitutional law I am in a unique position to determine with absolute certainty that the Senatorial Filibuster rule, as it presently operates, is a violation of the United States Constitution in that it grants the minority of the Senate powers not provided under the provisions of that hallowed document.

The filibuster is such a flagrant violation of the balance of power not even this Supreme Court could uphold it.

I am therefore authorizing the president of the senate, Vice President Joe Biden, to issue a finding of unconstitutionality. I expect the majority party to uphold the finding.

We will then move immediately to abolish or significantly curtail the power of the filibuster so that the government of the world’s greatest democracy will no longer be held hostage by a handful of senators. No longer will a minority of forty-two senators be granted the authority to nullify the will of the majority and the needs of the people. No longer will a minority stand in the path of progress in the nation’s hour of need. No longer will the government of the United States of America be paralyzed.

Once the filibuster is out of the way we can pass health care reform that is clear, simple and easy to understand. We can pass financial reforms to insure that brokers and bankers can no longer game the system until it breaks and pass the buck to the taxpayers. We can pass a jobs bill that puts people back to work.

Now I understand that there are other barriers that senators can use to block the workings of government. I am here to serve warning that any senator who stands for the decorum of the senate over the will of the people and the needs of the nation will do so at their own peril. That is a battle we will fight and we will win.

There is of course another barrier to a functioning democracy that has arisen only recently. It is not some scheme hatched by terrorists in a foreign land but the threat is no less menacing and no less repugnant to the republic. Sadly, it is the workings of our own Supreme Court.

In its recent decision to grant unlimited corporate funding in political campaigns, reversing a century of precedent, the court’s ruling takes its place alongside Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Bush v. Gore among the worst decisions in the history of the nation’s highest court. The implications of this decision cannot be overstated. If Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission is allowed to stand then American democracy is itself in danger.

Just imagine what would happen if congress passed legislation allowing the safe importation of prescription drugs from Canada and other nations. The pharmaceutical industry could target two dozen members of congress and selected senators with literally millions of dollars dedicated to their defeat. Imagine the chilling effect. It would run from every statehouse in the land through both houses of congress and down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office. How many votes would change the next time that bill came to the floor?

We would no longer be a government for the people, by the people and of the people. We would be a government for the corporations, by the corporations and of the corporations. And yes, there is a word for that and it is not democracy.

That is not an America I wish to see. Not on my watch!

As loyal Americans who believe in the principles of democracy we cannot avoid this fight. No matter what the odds, no matter how many obstacles are place in our path, we must do everything in our power to reverse this decision and stop this assault on our fundamental freedoms before it does irreparable harm.

We will do what we can within the workings of government but a decision of this magnitude by the nation’s highest court can only truly be nullified by a constitutional amendment. I have therefore instructed the Attorney General to draft such an amendment and begin the arduous task of pushing it through congress to be ratified by the states.

I implore you as Americans, as we go through this long but essential process, to watch and take note. Those who oppose it stand with the corporations and those who support it stand with the people. Remember that when millions of dollars are sent to defeat your congressperson or your senator for simply doing the people’s business.

One does not know when one is elected president the challenges he or she may face. John Kennedy could not have known that the Soviet Union would attempt to place nuclear missiles off America’s shore. Roosevelt could not have known that Europe’s war would inevitably become America’s war.

We cannot always choose the challenges we will face but history will judge us by how we respond. Because we are on the right side of history, because we stand with justice and democracy, because we know the stakes and because the people stand beside us, we will fight and we will prevail.

Ben Gurion “…realized that the holy book could be made into a secular national text, serve as a central repository of ancient collective imagery, help forge the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants into a unified people, and tie the younger generation to the land.”

– Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 108)

Of what possible significance has Sand’s comment today as America watches in utter disbelief and dismay the demise of the President of Change and Hope into an obsequious and obedient Golem of Israel, subservient to Netanyahu and Lieberman? The great Golem of Prague in the 16th century, a mythological creature created of mud by incantations of the ancient Rabbi Loew to protect the walled ghetto of the Jews, lived without a soul but at the service of the Rabbi. So now, we watch in disbelief Obama bow before the scorn of Bibi and Avigdor as they mock the great agent of change, the bringer of peace to the world, and the savior of America from the ravages of Bush.

The answer lies in a study of mythistory and deception. Mythistory is the creation of historical fact out of ancient stories placing the accuracies of these stories before the evidence of scientific investigation or epistemological study. In 1936, Yitzhak Baer published Galut (exile) stating conclusively, “The Jewish revival of the present day is in its essence not determined by the national movements of Europe; it harks back to the ancient national consciousness of the Jews, which existed before the history of Europe and is the original sacred model for all the national ideas of Europe.” For Baer, the Biblical myth that told of the giving of the land of Palestine to the chosen people gave them proprietary claim to it; indeed, Jewish history “was to be studied in isolation from the history of the gentiles, because the principles, tools, concepts and time frame of these studies were completely different” (Sand 102).

Ben Gurion ignored scientific evidence when it faulted the story of the Bible that recounted “the promise of the Land of Canaan to the seed of Abraham and Sarah.” A necessity, since Ben Gurion was not of that seed, as Shlomo Sand’s evidence demonstrates. Ben Gurion would not allow any external source to challenge the biblical author’s “divine” source. Not even the logic of Thomas Paine, who noted that Abraham’s visit with God in the bush, should it have happened in fact, could determine the existence of that promise since it was a revelation to Moses alone and only hearsay to those who followed him. But Ben Gurion’s efforts prevailed throughout Israel as the Bible became the national textbook and “the creation of a common ‘ethnic’ origin for the religious communities scattered throughout the world, and (a means to) self-persuasion in the claiming of proprietary rights over the country” (Sand 111).

Unfortunately for Ben Gurion’s protestation to the contrary, archeological and scientific evidence demonstrates that the genocide at Canaan never occurred, the Exodus never happened and the kingdoms of David and Solomon were and are but myths. One need only read The Bible Unearthed by Finkelstein and Silberman and The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives by Thompson, and the latest work by Dr. Sand among many to understand the reality. Unfortunately for the Palestinians and for the people of the mid-east, Ben Gurion’s lies and deceptions have insulated Israel from censure for stealing the land of Palestine from its rightful indigenous population. As Sand puts it, “The book (Bible) was transferred from the shelf of theological tracts to the history section, and adherents of Jewish nationalism began to read it as if it were reliable testimony to processes and events” (127).

On May 14th of 1948, President Harry S. Truman received a letter from the Jewish Agency in Mandate Palestine seeking his support, indeed his recognition, of the newly declared State of Israel. In that letter the Jewish Agency declared in no uncertain terms that their government of the new state would bring peace to the area since it would abide by and uphold the United Nations Partition Plan that provided for two states in Palestine, one for the Palestinians and one for the Jews. What the letter did not say was that Jewish forces had been invading and destroying Palestinian villages and towns for the preceding months, most notably, and only a month before the letter, the village of Deir Yassin where a brutal massacre had been inflicted on its inhabitants. The consequence of this deception was the eradication and razing of 418 towns and villages by the combined Jewish forces, the ethnic cleansing of approximately 750,000 natives to refugee camps and to neighboring lands, and the annexation of their lands and homes to the new Israeli state. Yet another form of mythistory created by deception.

All of which brings us to Ben Gurion’s “forging” of the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants into a unified people by means of a Mafia-like control over the masses of Jews brought to Palestine before 1947. The absoluteness of this control as established in documents seized by the Mandate Police and kept by Sir Richard Catling in the Rhodes House Archives at Oxford, included forced taxation to support the military arm of the Agency, the violence used to control “laggards,” the availability of jobs once in Palestine, the network of Zionists in Europe and England to maintain control of desirable immigrants versus undesirable, as well as the control of politicians to enable the Zionist terror against the Mandate forces to continue unhindered, the means of communication within the Jewish community and of all external communication about the Jewish community especially in England and America, and the education of all youth followed by forced enlistment in the Jewish armed forces. Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine corroborates the documents secured by Catling.

Today that ethnic cleansing continues because the Mafia-like controls imposed on the Jews immigrating to Palestine in those early years still exists through the almost total control of the people of Israel by the Israeli military and by the Zionist government’s control of the United States Congress through the coercion of the Jewish lobbies as noted by Mearsheimer and Walt as evidenced in the Congress’ acquiescence to the dictates of AIPAC. One need only look at the most recent capitulation to Israel’s demands by our Congress as it lobbied against the Goldstone Report.

Why should we care that Ben Gurion’s deception became the fodder of the Jews brought to Palestine during the Mandate period? The answer is clear enough. The Zionists controlled all Jews entering Palestine as noted above including the molding of their minds to a religion that was a lie and rights to land that did not exist. That same mythistory was conveyed to the west in numerous books based on interpretations of the Bible as historically accurate renderings of a race of people that do not exist as a race but who believe in truths dependent on hearsay, the mythological flight of a people from Egypt and their wandering in the desert for forty years, an exodus that never happened, the conquering of the Canaanites that did not occur, and the existence of ancient kingdoms for which there is no evidence. Indoctrinated with those beliefs, the Jews under Ben Gurion’s oligarchy believed that they were coming home to a land they had an historical right to regardless of the reality that it was inhabited by others for centuries. That belief allowed for no acceptance of others as neighbors on a land for believers alone, a strange definition of a democracy.

The horror of this deception cuts two ways: the innocent Jews fleeing Nazi Europe were commandeered for the Zionist cause which used their faith for both political and economic ends and the sympathetic allies of the west, conscious of the devastation wrought on the Jewish people by the Nazi regime and feeling guilt for allowing it to happen became innocent accomplices of those willing to manipulate truth to gain power, land, armaments, and wealth. As a result of this baptism in deceit, the Jewish state now grapples with hordes of fanatical “settlers” that firmly believe they have a right not only to the land of Palestine but to the killing of Palestinians because they live on the land given only to the Jews by G-d Himself. Even more horribly, the United States and the United Kingdom have been seized by the Zionist forces through the manipulations of the lobbies that control our representatives thus providing the means to sustain the brutality of the Israeli States’ subjugation of the indigenous people of Palestine against the will of the citizens of these alleged democratic countries.

And this brings us to the Wall that has been built around Barak Obama. Obama is a captive of the Zionist forces that control America’s representatives, its corporations and its mass communications. No one disputes the intent of the American people when they elected Obama as President. He was the man to bring change – to end the wars, to bring health care to all Americans, to fight for the environment, to expand educational opportunities for all – all promises that require the support of the Congress. Yet despite his overwhelming victory at the polls, he is a virtual lame duck President. Why?

Early in his Presidency, Obama made overtures to the Arab world and to Russia and the European Union asserting that America was no longer the pre-eminent world power that thirsted for world domination. His Cairo speech appeared to open a dialogue that suggested the possibility for peace through a return to the Saudi Prince’s Plan based on the 1967 UN resolution, a plan that provided full recognition of the State of Israel by all Arab nations. Almost immediately, Israel reacted, questioning his faithfulness to the Jewish State. From that time to this, Obama’s mid-east policies have towed the line even though he has had to bow before the likes of Netanyahu and Lieberman. Why?

The answer is simple enough. With the Congress controlled by AIPAC and its affiliates, Obama can do nothing requiring Congress’ action if he opposes or even seems to oppose what the Zionists dictate. Perhaps the most blatant decision by the Obama administration that confirms this perspective is the decision to object to the Goldstone Report that condemns Israel for crimes against humanity, crimes identified and confirmed by B’Tselem in Jerusalem, the Jewish states’ Human Rights organization, the International Red Cross, and Amnesty International.

Now we know what Obama must have known these past few months, that the United Nations Human Rights Council has proposed a Resolution on “The Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” This resolution endorses unqualifiedly the “recommendations contained in the report, and calls upon all concerned parties including UN bodies, to ensure their immediate implementation in accordance with their respective mandates.” But the Obama administration and our Congress has opposed what the world understands to be a valid and true account of the brutal actions of the Zionist government of Israel.

There is a wall around this President, a wall he did not know existed when he made his famous speech in Berlin when still a candidate; a wall he did not know he could not tear down even if he became President; a wall that has been built by powers that control America not by the people of America; a wall that uses fear as its mortar, bigotry and racism as its buttress, coercion as its cement, and money as its allurement to maintain control. It is a wall created out of myth twisted into history, taught repetitively as truth till it becomes truth, deceptively designed to drag this once free nation into the depths of darkness and despair that allow the few to control the multitude and in the process to enslave the minds that would be repulsed by what they support if they knew the truth behind the myths.

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.”¹

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and especially within the concept of Jewish identity. It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of deprivation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

The Invention of the Jewish People is a very serious study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration on the Jewish historical narrative.

In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never shared a common origin. Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

In case you follow Sand’s line of thinking and happen to ask yourself, ‘when was the Jewish People invented?’ Sand’s answer is rather simple. “At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people ‘retrospectively,’ out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.”

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a ‘made up’ notion consisting of a fictional and imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually. Furthermore, Sand — who elaborated on early sources of antiquity — comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs.

Astonishingly enough, in spite of the fact that Sand manages to dismantle the notion of ‘Jewish people,’ crush the notion of ‘Jewish collective past,’ and ridicule the Jewish chauvinist national impetus, his book is a best seller in Israel. This fact alone may suggest that those who call themselves ‘people of the book’ are now starting to learn about the misleading and devastating philosophies and ideologies that made them into what Khalid Amayreh and many others regard as the “Nazis of our time.”

Hitler Won After All

Rather often when asking a ‘secular’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew what it is that makes him into a Jew, a shallow overwhelmingly chewed answer would be thrown back at you: “It is Hitler who made me into a Jew.” Though the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, being an internationalist, would dismiss other people’s national inclinations, he insists upon maintaining his own right to ‘self determination’. However, it is not really he himself who stands at the core of this unique demand for national orientation, it is actually the devil, master-monster anti-Semite, namely Hitler. Apparently, the cosmopolitan Jew celebrates his nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be blamed.

As far as the secular cosmopolitan Jew is concerned, Hitler won after all. Sand manages to enhance this paradox. Insightfully he suggests that “while in the 19th century referring to Jews as an ‘alien racial identity’ would mark one as an anti-Semite, in the Jewish State this very philosophy is embedded mentally and intellectually.”² In Israel Jews celebrate their differentiation and unique conditions. Furthermore, says Sand, “There were times in Europe when one would be labelled as an anti-Semite for claiming that all Jews belong to a nation of an alien type. Nowadays, claiming that Jews have never been and still aren’t people or a nation, would tag one as a Jew hater.”²

It is indeed pretty puzzling that the only people who managed to maintain and sustain a racially orientated, expansionist and genocidal national identity that is not at all different from Nazi ethnic ideology are the Jews who were, amongst others, the leading targeted victims of the Nazi ideology and practice.

Nationalism In General and Jewish Nationalism In Particular

Louis-Ferdinand Celine mentioned that in the time of the Middle Ages in the moments between major wars, knights would charge a very high price for their readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms; in the 20th century youngsters have rushed to die en mass without demanding a thing in return. In order to understand this mass consciousness shift, we need an eloquent methodical model that would allow us to understand what nationalism is all about.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a phantasmic narrative. It is an established fact that anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘people’ and ‘nations’ lead towards the embarrassing crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity. Hence, it is rather interesting to find out that Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very seriously. The explanation may be simple, as Benjamin Beit Halachmi spotted years ago. Zionism was there to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry.’ For that matter, the truth of the Bible or any other element of Jewish historical narrative has very little relevance as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Jewish national political cause or practice.

One could also surmise that the lack of clear ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from feeling an ethnic or national belonging. The fact that Jews are far from being what one can label as a People and that the Bible has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop generations of Israelis and Jews from identifying themselves with King David or Terminator Samson. Evidently, the lack of an unambiguous ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from seeing themselves as part of a people. Similarly, it wouldn’t stop the nationalist Jew from feeling that he belongs to some greater abstract collective.

In the 1970’s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer who was bound to become Israel’s all-time greatest rock star, released a song that had become a smash hit in a matter of hours. Here are the first few lines:

   All of a sudden
   A man wakes up
   In the morning
   He feels he is people
   And he starts to walk
   And to everyone he comes across
   He says shalom

To a certain extent Artzi innocently expresses in his lyrics the suddenness and almost contingency involved in the transformation of the Jews into people. However, almost within the same breath, Artzi contributes towards the illusionist national myth of the peace-seeking nation. Artzi should have known by then that Jewish nationalism was a colonialist act at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Seemingly, nationalism, national belonging and Jewish nationalism in particular create a major intellectual task. Interestingly enough, the first to deal theoretically and methodically with issues having to do with nationalism were Marxist ideologists. Though Marx himself failed to address the issue adequately, early 20th century uprising of nationalist demands in eastern and central Europe caught Lenin and Stalin unprepared.

“Marxists’ contribution to the study of nationalism can be seen as the focus on the deep correlation between the rise of free economy and the evolvement of the national state.”³ In fact, Stalin was there to summarise the Marxist take on the subject. “The nation,” says Stalin, “is a solid collaboration between beings that was created historically and formed following four significant phenomena: the sharing of tongue, the sharing of territory, the sharing of economy and the sharing of psychic significance…”³

As one would expect, the Marxist materialist attempt to understand nationalism is lacking an adequate historical overview. Instead it would be reliant upon a class struggle. For some obvious reasons such a vision was popular amongst those who believe in ‘socialism of one nation’ amongst them we can consider the proponents of a leftist branch of Zionism.

For Sand, nationalism evolved due to the “ rapture created by modernity which split people from their immediate past”.⁴ The mobility created by urbanisation and industrialisation crushed the social hierarchic system as well as the continuum between past, present and future. Sand points out that before industrialisation, the feudal peasant didn’t necessarily feel the need for an historical narrative of empires and kingdoms. The feudal subject didn’t need an extensive abstract historical narrative of large collectives that had very little relevance to the immediate concrete existential need. “Without a perception of social progression, they did well with an imaginary religious tale that contained a mosaic of memory that lacked a real dimension of a forward moving time. The ‘end’ was the beginning and eternity bridged between life and death.”⁴

In the modern secular and urban world, ‘time’ had become the main life vessel which illustrated an imaginary symbolic meaning. Collective historical time had become the elementary ingredient of the personal and the intimate. The collective narrative shapes the personal meaning and what seems to be the ‘real.’ As much as some banal minds still insist that the ‘personal is political,’ it would be far more intelligible to argue that in practice, it is actually the other way around. Within the post-modern condition, the political is personal and the subject is spoken rather than speaking itself. Authenticity, for the matter, is a myth that reproduces itself in the form of symbolic identifier.

Sand’s reading of nationalism as a product of industrialisation, urbanisation and secularism, makes a lot of sense when bearing in mind Uri Slezkin’s suggestion that Jews are the ‘apostles of modernity,’ secularism and urbanisation. If Jews happened to find themselves at the hub of urbanisation and secularisation, it shouldn’t then take us by surprise that the Zionists were rather creative as much as others in inventing their own phantasmic collective imaginary tale. However, while insisting on their right to be ‘like other people’ Zionists have managed to transform their imagined collective past into a global, expansionist, merciless agenda as well as the biggest threat to world peace.

There Is No Jewish History

It is an established fact that not a single Jewish history text had been written between the 1st century and early 19th century. The fact that Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with it. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One of the reasons is probably the lack of a need of such a methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As Shlomo Sand puts it, “a secular chronological time was foreign to the ‘Diaspora time’ that was shaped by the anticipation for the coming of the Messiah.”

However, in the light of German secularisation, urbanisation, and emancipation, and due to the decreasing authority of the Rabbinical leaders, an emerging need of an alternative cause rose amongst the awakening Jewish intellectuals. The emancipated Jew wondered who he was, where he come from. He also started to speculate what his role might be within the rapidly opening European society.

In 1820, the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) published the first serious historical work on Jews, namely The History of the Israelites. Jost avoided the Biblical time, he preferred to start his journey with the Judea Kingdom, he also compiled an historical narrative of different Jewish communities around the world. Jost realised that the Jews of his time did not form an ethnic continuum. He grasped that Israelites from place to place were rather different. Hence, he thought there was nothing in the world that should stop Jews from total assimilation. Jost believed that within the spirit of enlightenment, both the Germans and the Jews would turn their back to the oppressive religious institution and would form a healthy nation based on a growing geographically orientated sense of belonging.

Though Jost was aware of the evolvement of European nationalism, his Jewish followers were rather unhappy with his liberal optimistic reading of the Jewish future. “From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a ‘kingdom’, expelled into ‘exile’, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.”

For the late Moses Hess, it was a racial struggle rather than a class struggle that would define the shape of Europe. Accordingly, suggests Hess, Jews better return and reflect on their cultural heritage and ethnic origin. For Hess, the conflict between Jews and Gentiles was the product of racial differentiation, hence, unavoidable.

The ideological path from Hess’s pseudo scientific racist orientation to Zionist historicism is rather obvious. If Jews are indeed an alien racial entity (as Hess, Jabotinsky and others believed), they better look for their natural homeland, and this homeland is no other than Eretz Yizrael. Cleary, Hess’s assumption regarding a racial continuum wasn’t scientifically approved. In order to maintain the emerging phantasmic narrative, an orchestrated denial mechanism had to be erected just to make sure that some embarrassing facts wouldn’t interfere with the emerging national creation.

Sand suggests that the denial mechanism was rather orchestrated and very well thought out. The Hebrew University decision in the 1930’s to split Jewish History and General History into two distinct departments was far more than just a matter of convenience. The logos behind the split is a glimpse into Jewish self-realisation. In the eyes of Jewish academics, the Jewish condition and Jewish psyche were unique and should be studied separately. Apparently, even within Jewish academia, a supreme status is reserved for the Jews, their history and their self-perception. As Sand insightfully unveils, within the Jewish Studies departments the researcher is scattering between the mythological and the scientific while the myth maintains its primacy. Yet, it often gets into a stalling dilemma by the ‘small devious facts.’

The New Israelite, the Bible, and Archaeology

In Palestine, the new Jews and later the Israelis were determined to recruit the Old Testament and to transform it into the amalgamate code of the future Jew. The ‘nationalisation’ of the Bible was there to plant in young Jews the idea that they are the direct followers of their great ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning. Instead, it was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past. The Jews who had now managed to kill their God learned to believe in themselves. Massada, Samson and Bar Kochva became suicidal master narratives. In the light of their heroic ancestors, Jews learned to love themselves as much as they hate others, except that this time they possessed the military might to inflict real pain on their neighbours. More concerning was the fact that instead of a supernatural entity — namely God — who command them to invade the land and execute a genocide and to rob their ‘promised land’ of its indigenous inhabitants, within their national revival project it was them as themselves, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weitzman, Ben Gurion, Sharon, Peres, Barak who decided to expel, destroy and kill. Instead of God, it was then the Jews killing in the name of Jewish people. They did it while Jewish symbols decorate their planes and tanks. They followed commands that where given in the newly restored language of their ancestors.

Surprisingly enough, Sand who is no doubt a striking scholar, fails to mention that the Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not exactly Hellenism’s sons and daughters. The nationalist Jew took it one step further, he bound oneself into a phantasmic blood chain with his mythical ancestors, not before long he restored their ancient language. Rather than a sacred tongue, Hebrew had become a spoken language. German Early Romanticist never went that far.

German intellectuals during the 19th century were also fully aware of the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. For them, Athens stood for universal, the epic chapter of humanity and humanism. Jerusalem was, on the contrary, the grand chapter of tribal barbarism. Jerusalem was a representation of the banal, non-universal, monotheistic merciless God, the one who kills the elder and the infant. The Germanic Early Romantic era left us with Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte and Heidegger and a just a few Jewish self-haters, leading amongst them, Otto Weininger. The Jerusalemite left us with not a single master ideological thinker. Some German Jewish second-rate scholars tried to preach Jerusalem in the Germanic exedra, amongst them were Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzveig and Ernst Bloch. They obviously failed to notice that it was the traces of Jerusalem in Christianity, which German Early Romanticists despised.

In their effort to resurrect ‘Jerusalem,’ archaeology was recruited to provide the Zionist epos with its necessary ‘scientific’ ground. Archaeology was there to unify the Biblical time with the moment of revival. Probably the most astonishing moment of this bizarre trend was the 1982 ‘military burial ceremony’ of the bones of Shimon Bar Kochva, a Jew rebel who died 2000 years earlier. Executed by the chief military Rabbi, a televised military burial was given to some sporadic bones found in a cave near the Dead Sea. In practice suspected remains of a 1st century Jew rebel was treated as an IDF casualty. Clearly, archaeology had a national role, it was recruited to cement the past and the present while leaving the Galut out.

Astonishingly enough, it didn’t take long before things turned the other way around. As archaeological research become more and more independent of the Zionist dogma, the embarrassing truth filtered out. It would be impossible to ground the truthfulness of the Biblical tale on forensic facts. If anything, archaeology refutes the historicity of the Biblical plot. Excavation revealed the embarrassing fact. The Bible is a collection of innovative fictitious literature.

As Sand points out, the Early Biblical story is soaked with Philistines, Aramaic and camels. Embarrassingly enough, as far as excavations are there to enlighten us, Philistine didn’t appear in the region before the 12th century BC, the Aramaic appears a century later and camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the 8th century. These scientific facts lead Zionist researchers into some severe confusion. However, for non-Jewish scholars such as Thomas Thompson, it was rather clear that the Biblical is a “late collection of innovative literature written by a gifted theologian.”⁵ The Bible appears to be an ideological text that was there to serve a social and political cause.

Embarrassingly enough, not much was found in Sinai to prove the story of the legendary Egyptian Exodus, seemingly 3 million Hebraic men, women and children were marching in the desert for 40 years without leaving a thing behind. Not even a single matzo ball, very non-Jewish one may say.

The story of the Biblical resettlement and the genocide of the Canaanite which the contemporary Israelite imitates to such success is another myth. Jericho, the guarded city that was flattened to the sounds of horns and almighty supernatural intervention was just a tiny village during the 13th century BC.

As much as Israel regards itself as the resurrection of the monumental Kingdom of David and Salomon, excavation that took place in the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1970’s revealed that David’s kingdom was no more than a tiny tribal setting. Evidence that was referred by Yigal Yadin to King Solomon had been refuted later by forensic tests made with Carbon 14. The discomforting fact has been scientifically established. The Bible is a fictional tale, and not much there can ground any glorifying existence of Hebraic people in Palestine at any stage.

Who invented the Jews?

Quite early on in his text, Sand raises the crucial and probably the most relevant questions. Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? How is it that in different historical periods they appear in some very different and remote places?

Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites who happened to be exiled brutally by the Romans, truth must be said. Contemporary Jews have nothing to do with ancient Israelites, who have never been sent to exile because such an expulsion has never taken place. The Roman Exile is just another Jewish myth.

“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land” says Sand in a Haaretz interview, “but to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

Indeed, in the light of Sand’s simple insight, the idea of Jewish exile is amusing. The thought of Roman Imperial navy was working 24/7 schlepping Moishe’le and Yanka’le to Cordova and Toledo may help Jews to feel important as well as schleppable, but common sense would suggest that the Roman armada had far more important things to do.

However, far more interesting is the logical outcome: If the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah must be the Palestinians.

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years” says Sand. “But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.’”

In his book Sand takes it further and suggests that until the First Arab Uprising (1929) the so-called leftist Zionist leaders tended to believe that the Palestinian peasants who are actually ‘Jews by origin’ would assimilate within the emerging Hebraic culture and would eventually join the Zionist movement. Ber Borochov believed that “a falach (Palestinian Peasant), dresses as a Jew, and behaves as a working class Jew, won’t be at all different from the Jew”. This very idea reappeared in Ben Gurion’s and Ben-Zvi’s text in 1918. Both Zionist leaders realised that Palestinian culture was soaked with Biblical traces, linguistically, as well as geographically (names of villages, towns, rivers and mountains). Both Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi regarded, at least at that early stage, the indigenous Palestinians as ethnic relatives who were holding close to the land and potential brothers. They as well regarded Islam as a friendly ‘democratic religion’. Clearly, after 1936 both Ben-Zvi and Ben Gurion toned down their ‘multicultural’ enthusiasm. As far as Ben Gurion is concerned, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seemed to be far more appealing.

One may wonder, if the Palestinians are the real Jews, who are those who insist upon calling themselves Jews?

Sand’s answer is rather simple, yet it makes a lot of sense. “The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others.”

Clearly, monotheist religions, being less tolerant than polytheist ones have within them an expanding impetus. Judaic expansionism in its early days was not just similar to Christianity but it was Judaic expansionism that planted the ‘spreading out’ seeds in early Christian thought and practice.

“The Hasmoneans,” says Sand, “were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. It was this tradition of conversions that prepared the ground for the subsequent, widespread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the 4th century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions — pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.”

The Jews of Spain, whom we believed to be blood related to the Early Israelites seem to be converted Berbers. “I asked myself,” says Sand, “how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish Berber Kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism.”

As one would expect, Sand approves the largely accepted assumption that the Judaicised Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which he calls the Yiddish Nation. When asked how come they happen to speak Yiddish, which is largely regarded as a German medieval dialect, he answers, “the Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the east, and thus they adopted German words.”

In his book Sand manages to produce a detailed account of the Khazarian saga in Jewish history. He explains what lead the Khazarian kingdom towards conversion. Bearing in mind that Jewish nationalism is, for the most part, lead by a Khazarian elite, we may have to expand our intimate knowledge of this very unique yet influential political group. The translation of Sand’s work into foreign languages is an immediate must.

What Next?

Professor Sand leaves us with the inevitable conclusion. Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin and their Semitic origin is a myth. Jews have no origin in Palestine whatsoever and therefore, their act of so-called ‘return’ to their ‘promised land’ must be realised as an invasion executed by a tribal-ideological clan.

However, though Jews do not constitute any racial continuum, they for some reason happen to be racially orientated. As we may notice, many Jews still see mixed marriage as the ultimate threat. Furthermore, in spite of modernisation and secularisation, the vast majority of those who identify as secular Jews still succumb to blood ritual (circumcision) a unique religious procedure which involves no less than blood sucking by a Mohel.

As far as Sand is concerned, Israel should become “a state of its citizens.” Like Sand, I myself believe in the same futuristic utopian vision. However, unlike Sand, I do grasp that the Jewish state and its supportive lobbies must be ideologically defeated. Brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and have no room within the concept of Jewish national revival. As dramatic as it may sound, a process of de-judaification must take place before Israelis can adopt any universal modern notion of civil life.

Sand is no doubt a major intellectual, probably the most advanced leftist Israeli thinker. He represents the highest form of thought a secular Israeli can achieve before flipping over or even defecting to the Palestinian side (something that happened to just a few, me included). Haaretz interviewer Ofri Ilani said about Sand that unlike other ‘new historians’ who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, “Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years.” This is indeed the case, unlike the ‘new historians’ who ‘unveil’ a truth that is known to every Palestinian toddler; i.e., the truth of being ethnically cleansed; Sand erects a body of work and thought that is aiming at the understanding of the meaning of Jewish nationalism and Jewish identity. This is indeed the true essence of scholarship. Rather than collecting some sporadic historical fragments, Sand searches for the meaning of history. Rather than a ‘new historian’ who searches for a new fragment, he is a real historian motivated by a humanist task. Most crucially, unlike some of the Jewish historians who happen to contribute to the so-called left discourse, Sand’s credibility and success is grounded on his argument rather than his family background. He avoids peppering his argument with his holocaust survivor relatives. Reading Sand’s ferocious argument, one may have to admit that Zionism in all its faults has managed to erect within itself a proud and autonomous dissident discourse that is far more eloquent and brutal than the entire anti-Zionist movement around the world.

If Sand is correct, and I myself am convinced by the strength of his argument, then Jews are not a race but rather a collective of very many people who are largely hijacked by a late phantasmic national movement. If Jews are not a race, do not form a racial continuum and have nothing to do with Semitism, then ‘anti-Semitism’ is, categorically, an empty signifier. It obviously refers to a signifier that doesn’t exist. In other words, our criticism of Jewish nationalism, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power can only be realised as a legitimate critique of ideology and practice.

Once again I may say it, we are not and never been against Jews (the people) nor we are against Judaism (the religion). Yet, we are against a collective philosophy with some clear global interests. Some would like to call it Zionism but I prefer not to. Zionism is a vague signifier that is far too narrow to capture the complexity of Jewish nationalism, its brutality, ideology and practice. Jewish nationalism is a spirit and a spirit doesn’t have clear boundaries. In fact, none of us know exactly where Jewishness stops and where Zionism starts as much as we do not know where Israeli interests stop and where the Neocon’s interests start.

As far as the Palestinian cause is concerned, the message is rather devastating. Our Palestinian brothers and sisters are at the forefront of a struggle against a very devastating philosophy. Yet, it is clearly not just the Israelis whom they fight with rather a fierce pragmatic philosophy that initiates global conflicts on some gigantic scale. It is a tribal practice that seeks influence within corridors of power and super powers in particular. The American Jewish Committee is pushing for a war against Iran. Just to be on the safe side David Abrahams, a ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ donates money to the Labour Party by proxy. More or less at the same time two million Iraqis die in an illegal war designed by one called Wolfowitz. While all the above is taking place, millions of Palestinians are starved in concentration camps and Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. As it all happens, ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews and Jews in the left (Chomsky included) insist upon dismantling the eloquent criticism of AIPAC, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power posed by Mearsheimer and Walt.

Is it just Israel? Is it really Zionism? Or shall we admit that it is something far greater than we are entitled even to contemplate within the intellectual boundaries we imposed upon ourselves? As things stand, we lack the intellectual courage to confront the Jewish national project and its many messengers around the world. However, since it is all a matter of consciousness-shift, things are going to change soon. In fact, this very text is there to prove that they are changing already.

To stand by the Palestinians is to save the world, but in order to do so we have to be courageous enough to stand up and admit that it is not merely a political battle. It is not just Israel, its army or its leadership, it isn’t even Dershowitz, Foxman, and their silencing leagues. It is actually a war against a cancerous spirit that hijacked the West and, at least momentarily, diverted it from its humanist inclination and Athenian aspirations. To fight a spirit is far more difficult than fighting people, just because one may have to first fight its traces within oneself. If we want to fight Jerusalem, we may have to first confront Jerusalem within. We may have to stand in front of the mirror, look around us. We may have to trace for empathy in ourselves in case there is anything left.

1. When And How The Jewish People Was Invented Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, p 11.
2. Sand, p 31.
3. p 42.
4. p 62.
5. p 117.

“O.K., my little Veggies,” he asked, “what important lesson have we learned from this cautionary tale?”

Peter Parsnip was the first to germinate a reply, “That animals can talk!” he shouted with flatulent enthusiasm.

“Fair enough,” responded farmer Midland, barely concealing his highbrow contempt. “What else?”

“That pigs like to wear clothes and get drunk,” offered Spudwell Potato Head, one of the simpler complex carbohydrates on this or any corporate farm. Midland’s eyes rolled involuntarily as he grimaced ever so slightly. Frankly, he was beginning to question the wisdom of reading allegorical literature to life forms as congenitally unsophisticated as vegetables. Just at that moment, however, he was pleasantly surprised by a bright green head of lettuce.

“We learned that socialism is evil,” said Mr. Green the Head Lettuce thoughtfully.

The ebullient farmer unleashed a toothy grin that spanned from ear to ear. “Exactly!” he exclaimed.

Unfortunately, the profundity of Head Lettuce’s revelation was clearly lost on the rest of the audience, which remained in what can best be described as a persistent vegetative state. Undaunted, Farmer Midland sought to capitalize on what he at least viewed as a teachable moment.

“In fact,” he began, “the animals in this story represent the unbridled lust for power of an out-of-control government bureaucracy.”

“But Mr. Midland, sir, wasn’t it the animals who were suffering at the beginning of the book?” inquired a somewhat naive bale of new mown hay. “I mean, obviously horses and cows are evil, but I actually felt sorry for the cats and dogs on that farm. Wasn’t Mr. Jones kinda mean to them, too?”

At this point, the sycophantic Mr. Green intervened to buttress his corporate master’s argument. “Admittedly, this particular farmer may not always have acted in the interest of his livestock, but we should be careful not to extrapolate generalities from any one individual case…” As Head Lettuce searchingly scanned the crowd of crudités and locked eyes with of a bunch of carrots, he could see they were thickly glazed.

Meanwhile, Farmer Midland lost no time in resuming the rhetorical offensive. “Look, whatever you think of Mr. Jones’s actions in the story, you must admit they indicate he was under a lot of stress due to unwarranted government interference in his business. Government regulators not only unfairly penalized Jones for storing raw pork in an unrefrigerated warehouse warm enough to incubate flies, they further hampered his profit-making ability by restricting the sale of meat from diseased animals too sick to lift themselves off the ground.”

“There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though,” interjected Rudy Rutabaga. “Are you saying that when the animals in the story chased the farmer away, that was kind of like the government taking over the farm?”

“That’s right, rootboy,” chimed in Mr. Green, running out to patience. “Remember, all you need to know is this:

“1) Animals make up the government;

“2) Animals eat plants (i.e., us); therefore,

“3) The government will eat us if we let them.”

The medley of mixed vegetables wilted in horror. “Then who can we turn to to protect us from the government?”

“That’s where we farmers come in,” declared Mr. Midland proudly. “We represent the free market garden established to serve your unhybridized ancestors, the cause for which so many of them were willing to be sliced, diced, mashed, and pureed. So don’t let their sacrifice be in vain. Take my advice: gather up your fiber, lock tendrils together, go march into those livestock pens while you still can, and show those government farm animals who’s boss!”

After some initial debate, the intrepid vegetables finally agreed with Mr. Midland and Mr. Green, and resolved that they’d better act quickly if they were going to save themselves. So they formed up in ranks, raised up a mighty battle cry, and charged off into the holding pens where they were immediately trampled and eaten by the grateful livestock.

“Now all we have to do is drag these government animals into the bathtub and drown them,” said Farmer Midland with a wry smile. “Then we can enjoy a proper feast.”

Mr. Green laughed nervously. “How do I know you won’t try to eat me?” he asked.

Mr. Midland was quick with his answer. “That’s simple. You remind me too much of money, and only a fool devours the thing he loves.”

Upon hearing this, the head of lettuce breathed a miasmic sigh of relief.

“Besides,” the farmer added, almost as an afterthought, “salad sucks.”

“I just hope each and every one of my loyal helpers manages to land on his or her financial feet,” offered the distraught and visibly shaken elder Claus, CEO and – until recently – managing stockholder of the firm. “I know this was as much a shock to them as it was to me.” Some three hundred elves are expected to lose their jobs as a result of the acquisition, which could send the unemployment rate in the sparsely-populated North Pole region soaring as high as 93%.

According to company executives, the future of CII’s charitable wing – The Claus Foundation – remains uncertain. When contacted by reporters following Tuesday’s announcement, X. Claus declined to specify what plans, if any, he had for the philanthropic enterprise. He was, however, willing to share a few tantalizing details in an exclusive interview granted to the Wall Street Journal‘s Pamela Pabulum:

WSJ: Mr. Claus, thank you for agreeing to talk to us.

X. Claus: My pleasure.

WSJ: First of all, I’m sure our readers would love to hear your expert assessment regarding any fatal flaws in your uncle’s business model which may have led to the kind of long term stock devaluation the company has undergone in recent centuries. What can you tell us about that?

X. Claus: Well, it’s not really a mystery, is it? I mean, you run a giveaway program that rewards every kid in the world for simply being “good”, and what do you expect? I don’t even know how to quantify “good”, do you? It’s too vague a term to be of any use in business, and it’s certainly no basis for a corporate strategy. In my opinion it’s SOCIALISM writ large, pure and simple, and it has no place in a free country like ours.

WSJ: So it’s safe to say you’re not planning to continue producing toys?

X. Claus: Look, here’s the bottom line. We’ve issued urgent instructions to all middle management at Claus Industries to redirect the company’s resources away from the non-profit manufacture of toys and into the highly lucrative and growth-oriented health insurance and pharmaceutical sector of the economy. Accordingly, we’ve changed our name to “ClausCare Inc.”

WSJ: Sounds ambitious.

X. Claus: Pamela, we’re all about the future here at ClausCare.

WSJ: So I guess the children of the world won’t be getting any free goodies in their stockings this year.

X. Claus: Regrettably, no. But I am proud to announce that as an introductory promotion this coming Holiday Season, our marketing department plans to provide enough free lumps of coal to fill every child’s stocking up to the brim. Clean Coal. From the Cheney Family Strip mines in Hell Hole, Wyoming.

WSJ: I’m sure the children will be thrilled.

X. Claus: I hope so. We’re all really tickled about it here at ClausCare, I can tell you. And since it looks like Congress is going to pass a Health Care Reform Bill that requires some 40 million new customers to buy health insurance from private industry without recourse to some blood-thirsty totalitarian government plan involving Nazi “Death Canneries” that grind up old people and turn them into dog food, you can be sure we’ll be coming around to every house on Christmas Eve to sign up all 40 million of you new customers to vastly improved health care contracts. And don’t worry; You’ll be entitled to the sort of comprehensive coverage and up-to-date medical care envisioned by Our Founding Fathers back in 1776. That means free mercury-oxide for all, and no deductibles on leeches.

WSJ: Sounds great. By the way, what does the initial “X” in your name stand for?

X. Claus: It’s a nom de guerre, really. A nickname I picked up at Harvard Business School. It’s short for “Exclusionary.” You see, the guys in my fraternity just started calling me “Exclusionary Claus”, since my major in business school was insurance underwriting, and it just sort of stuck. In fact, my grad school professors got together and presented me with a special award for “Most Creative Writer of Exclusionary Clauses.”

WSJ: Can you give us some examples of your work in that department?

X. Claus: Sure. I was the driving creative force behind several industry favorites, including “Whereas the party of the first part, having failed to disclose his or her previously unforeseen medical condition…” And then of course there’s “In the event the insured fails to meet any of the extrinsic financial obligations imposed after the fact by the insurer in a timely manner…” And my personal favorite, “Under no circumstances shall a condition or complaint resulting from, or perceived as having resulted from, a nuclear conflict not directly attributable to the actions of the insurer result in…etc., etc.” That last one got me an honorable mention at the Health Care Expo in Las Vegas last year.

WSJ: Your Uncle Santa traditionally used helpers in his work, by which of course I mean his elves. I gather they’ll be considered redundant at ClausCare?

X. Claus: Unfortunately, yes.

WSJ: Will you be retraining any of those elves to perform jobs at ClausCare?

X. Claus: Well, there’s a bit of a problem there. You see, because Uncle Santa insisted on paying his employees a living wage for the past 1700 years or so, he had the luxury of skimming off the top of the elf gene pool. But because we here at ClausCare believe strongly that Freedom means “working for free”, we put a lot of advertising dollars into convincing working-class people to undermine their own best interests without expecting any compensation in return. This philosophy requires us, for obvious reasons, to dredge the bottom of that same gene pool as it were, to get at the deep sedimentary layer often referred to as “the salt of the earth.” What we recover by this process is a different class of helper: less mercurial and more leaden of mind; less cerebral, more visceral in nature. But suffice it to say these workers serve our purpose quite well. Because of their near total absence of annoying brain wave interference, the predigested talking points we provide them to recite at public meetings are retained in their pristine state, you know, right off the printed page, as it were…

WSJ: Are these creatures even elves?

X. Claus: Well, genetically speaking, we’re not exactly sure. We refer to them as “Oaves.”

WSJ: If I’m not mistaken, the Urban Dictionary defines “oaves” as the plural of “oaf.”

X. Claus: Hmmm…Interesting. That may be true, but for us it’s a useful acronym. It stands for “obtuse, agitated, vituperative, and educationally stunted.” But for all that, these oaves are worth their considerable weight in gold, and frankly, we couldn’t operate without them!

WSJ: Yeah, I’ve seen them on TV; they can suck the intellectual oxygen right out of a room.

X. Claus: Damn straight.

WSJ: So, everybody knows Santa used a magic sleigh pulled by flying reindeer to make his appointed rounds. How do you get your “oaves” from town hall to town hall?

X. Claus: Well, Pamela, now that, thankfully, we’re out of the toy business, we decided to scrap that old wreck of a sleigh and replace it with a fleet of brand new, state-of-the-art coal-burning buses.

WSJ: Your buses are powered by coal?

X. Claus: Not powered by coal, heated by coal. They’re actually pulled by invisible unicorns.

WSJ: Forgive me, but aren’t unicorns imaginary?

X. Claus: Of course, but our oaves don’t know that! One should never underestimate the power of credulity to change the world, let alone pull buses. Actually, we’ve told the oaves they can help the invisible unicorns by pushing with their feet, and we’ve cut holes in the floorboards to facilitate this. It’s sort of …ponderous I suppose, but trust me, if the buses moved any faster, the oaves would be confused by all the blurred scenery. This way they can all stick their heads out of the window, relax, and enjoy the ride.

WSJ: One last question, Mr. Claus. Will ClausCare’s corporate headquarters remain at their current location at the North Pole?

X. Claus: Well, the North Pole is, in some respects, an admirable location. It’s extremely remote and inaccessible by phone or even internet, which makes it ideal from the standpoint of avoiding inconvenient medical claims by our customers. But I’m afraid my doctor (and by my doctor I mean, of course, the entire Health Insurance Lobby) has expressed some concerns about the climate. He points out that the average daily high temperature there is a relatively balmy minus 30 degrees F. and growing warmer (not due to any man-made climate change, I should point out). His recommendation is that in order to avoid fatal cardiac thaw, I should move to the South Pole, where it is a full 20 degrees cooler on average.

And as retired Texas congressman Dick Armey likes to say, “The only heart-warming stories we in the insurance business enjoy telling involve hungry cannibals around a campfire.”

WSJ: Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Claus.

X. Claus: Not at all.

From Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:

In order to fully understand currency and price movements, one has to realize that the securitization of debt, and creation of derivatives amounted to a huge virtual printing press, primarily fueled by a massive increase in risk appetite which allowed for a huge expansion in the value of claims on financial assets and goods and services. It is worth pointing out, that the Fed has little to no control over this “printing press” at this point, which at last count was responsible for over 90% of the liquidity in the system.

The faux-prosperity of the last decade was largely the result of a wholesale credit system, which created a humongous amount of credit via sketchy debt instruments, off-balance sheet operations, massive leverage and derivatives. (The Fed’s liquidity and conventional bank loans play a very small part in the modern credit system) Securitization — which is the conversion of pools of loans into securities — is at the center of the storm. It formed the asset base upon which the investment banks and hedge funds stacked additional leverage creating an unstable debt pyramid that couldn’t withstand the battering of a slumping market. After two Bear Stearns funds defaulted 20 months ago, the securitization markets froze, credit dried up and the broader economy went into a tailspin. Now that investors know how risky securitized instruments really are, there’s little chance that assets will regain their original value or that the market for structured debt will stage a comeback.

Bernanke’s Term Asset-backed Loan Facility (TALF) is an attempt to restore the crashed system by offering participants generous government funding to purchase securities backed by mortgages, student loans, auto loans and credit card debt. But skittish investors have stayed on the sidelines. The severity of the downturn has dampened the appetite for risk. So Bernanke has cranked up the money supply, cut interest rates to zero and flooded the financial system with liquidity. His actions have convinced many of the experts that the country is on the fast track to hyperinflation, but that may not be the case, as explained in the Hoisington Investment Management’s Quarterly Economic Review:

Despite near term deflation risks, the overwhelming consensus view is that “sooner or later” inflation will inevitably return, probably with great momentum.

This inflationist view of the world seems to rely on two general propositions. First, the unprecedented increases in the Fed’s balance sheet are, by definition, inflationary. The Fed has to print money to restore health to the economy, but ultimately this process will result in a substantially higher general price level. Second, an unparalleled surge in federal government spending and massive deficits will stimulate economic activity. This will serve to reinforce the reflationary efforts of the Fed and lead to inflation.

(But) let’s assume for the moment that inflation rises immediately. With unemployment widespread, wages would seriously lag inflation. Thus, real household income would decline and truncate any potential gain in consumer spending…

Inflation will not commence until the Aggregate Demand (AD) Curve shifts outward sufficiently to reach the part of the Aggregate Supply (AS) curve that is upward sloping…..Therefore, multiple outward shifts in the Aggregate Demand curve will be required before the economy encounters an upward sloping Aggregate Supply Curve thus creating higher price levels. In our opinion such a process will take well over a decade. . . .

The statement that all the Fed has to do is print money in order to restore prosperity is not substantiated by history or theory. An increase in the stock of money will only lead to a higher GDP if V, or velocity, is stable. V should be thought of conceptually rather than mechanically. If the stock of money is $1 trillion and total spending is $2 trillion, then V is 2. If spending rises to $3 trillion and M2 is unchanged, velocity then jumps to 3.

. . . The historical record indicates that V may be likened to a symbiotic relationship of two variables. One is financial innovation and the other is the degree of leverage in the economy. Financial innovation and greater leverage go hand in hand, and during those times velocity is generally above its long-term average.

As the shadow banking system continues to collapse, velocity should move well below its mean, greatly impairing the efficacy of monetary policy…The problem for the Fed is that it does not control velocity or the money created outside the banking system. (Thanks to Leo Kolivakis, of Pension Pulse, “Is Inflation inevitable?“)

Bernanke can print as much money as he wants, but if the banks are hoarding, consumers are saving, businesses are cutting back, and all the money-multipliers are set to “Off”; there will be no inflation. Demand has to pick up, so that money begins to change hands quickly leading to vast amounts of new money competing for the same number of assets. But that won’t happen while the economy is shedding 600,000 jobs a month, housing prices are tumbling and consumer balance sheets are being repaired.

So if inflation is not an immediate risk, and the economy continues to shrink, isn’t Bernanke doing the right thing by trying to restart the securitization markets?

Opinions vary on this topic. On the one hand, Wall Street’s method of deploying credit appears to be more efficient than conventional (bank) loans because the money is provided by investors who are looking for higher yield rather than bankers tapping into reserves. The problem is that securitization creates incentives for fraud by rewarding loan originators who lend to applicants who have no way of repaying the debt. Unless the system is heavily regulated to insure that traditional lending standards are maintained, speculative bubbles will reemerge and there will be more financial disasters in the future. The former head of the FDIC, William Seidman, anticipated this problem way back in 1993 after cleaning up the S&L crisis. Here’s what he said in his memoirs:

“Instruct regulators to look for the newest fad in the industry and examine it with great care. The next mistake will be a new way to make a loan that will not be repaid.” (Bloomberg)

If regulators had heeded Seidman’s advice, they could have steered the country away from the present calamity.

The problem with an unregulated credit system is that investment banks and hedge funds can skim lavish salaries and bonuses for themselves on the front end before anyone discovers that the loans are fraudulent and the securities worthless. Even so, neither Congress nor the Treasury nor the Fed has taken steps to re-regulate the financial system or to hold any of the main players accountable. It’s “anything goes.” Bernanke has acted as Wall Street’s chief enabler by underwriting shoddy non performing loans, propping up rotten assets with low interest funding, and bailing out investment giants with trillions in taxpayer-backed loans. None of the $12.8 trillion Bernanke has loaned or committed to financial institutions has been approved by Congress. The Fed operates beyond any mandate and outside of any law.

The debate about securitization goes beyond questions about the quality of the underlying loans to focusing on the process itself. Securitization greatly amplifies leverage by repackaging debt into complex instruments. It’s a way of turbo-charging credit expansion. Joseph Stroupe summarizes the issue in a recent Asia Times article:

Remember that there are two fundamental camps with respect to the answer to the question of what lies at the root of the present crisis. One camp holds that America’s new generation of financial assets that resulted from the recently invented financial process known as “securitization” are fundamentally sound in value, and that an over-reaction on the part of investors to the subprime crisis has resulted in a panic-induced collapse in their valuations.

This camp believes that the securitization model can and should be revived, and that when investor confidence is restored in financial assets now seen as “toxic”, then all will be well again, almost magically, as toxic assets become valuable and attractive once again. All that need be done, it is believed, is for the government to work with Wall Street to jump-start securitization, a model this camp vehemently denies has failed, even though many trillions of dollars both spent and committed already have so far failed to get securitization’s heartbeat going again.

The other camp believes that the toxicity is inherent in the very nature of the newly developed financial assets themselves, and that once investors recognized this fact, then that is why their values collapsed. This camp sees the securitization model as fundamentally flawed, based as it is upon artificial inflation of assets, the shortsighted growth of serial asset bubbles created by an unholy de facto alliance of government, big Wall Street banks and credit-rating agencies whose credibility and integrity were profoundly compromised, and unsustainable negative real interest rates (the creation of a massive credit excess), without which the securitization model simply won’t run.

Bernanke says that the securitization markets are “frozen” and that the toxic assets should eventually regain much of their original value. But this is just wishful thinking. Investors aren’t shunning these assets because they’re afraid, but because the banks want too much for them given their implicit riskiness. Stroupe’s analysis is closer to the truth; prices have collapsed because investors recognize the inherent toxicity of the assets themselves. The market isn’t driven by fear, but by common sense. $.30 cents on the dollar is probably all they are worth.

Putting Credit Back Where it Belongs

Do people realize that the reason their home equity is vanishing, their 401ks have been slashed in half and their jobs are at risk is because Wall Street was gaming the system with leverage and financial innovation? The current downturn is not really a recession at all; it’s more like a self-inflicted wound perpetrated by avaricious speculators who put a gun to the economy’s head and blew its brains out. The banks and Wall Street have created a capital hole so vast that the entire economy is being sucked into the abyss. And it all could have been avoided.

Credit production is too important and too lethal to entrust to profit-driven vipers whose only motivation is self-enrichment. The whole system needs rethinking and public input before Bernanke wastes trillions more trying to revive the same crisis-prone business model. If “credit is the economy’s life’s-blood,” as President Obama says, then it should be distributed through a government-controlled public utility. The real lesson of the financial crisis is that privatizing credit has been a disaster.

The first decade of this new century has been a period of disaster, a time set for killing.

Tonight, with a smug shirk, I have asked for a final opportunity to share some indignities on the journey I have traveled as imperial president and the bleak future of our nation.

Five days from now, the world will witness the vitality of my departure. In a tradition dating back to our founding, the presidency will pass to a successor chosen by the rigged two-party system, the Corporate duopoly. Standing on the steps of the Capitol will be a man whose history reflects the depressing promise of Capitalism and my failed legacy.

This is a moment of declining employment and home evictions for our whole nation. And I join all neo-cons and neo-liberals in offering best wishes to President-elect Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their two beautiful girls. They will surely need it.

Tonight, I am filled with sadistic allegiance to Dick Cheney who stole the vice presidency and to members of the junta; to Laura, who brought joy to this house and love to my life; to our wonderful daughters, Barbara and Jenna; to my parents, whose examples have made me what I am over my lifetime.

And above all, I thank the U.S. sucker voters for the deluded trust you have given me. I thank you for the pretzels and shoes that have altered my spirits. And I thank you for the countless acts of sacrificing your loved ones, pensions, jobs and health care that I have witnessed these past eight years.

This evening, my thoughts return to the first night I addressed you from this house, September 11, 2001. That morning, terrorists which my incompetence allowed, took nearly 3,000 lives in the worst attack on U.S. soil since fellow citizen and well-trained veteran Timothy McVeigh blew up the Omaha federal building.

I remember standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center three days later, surrounded by rescuers who had been working around the clock. I remember talking to brave souls who charged through smoke-filled corridors at the Pentagon and to husbands and wives whose loved ones became heroes aboard Flight 93. These actions took the attention, responsibility and culpability away from me and my failed administration.

I remember Valerie Lucznikowska, the executive director of the Congress of International Modern Architects, whose nephew died in the Twin Towers collapse. Valerie said, “I believe that NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] knew that the South Tower was going to be attacked before it went down…There were lots and lots of clues about the fact that the government had prior knowledge.” Oh, Valerie.

As the years passed, most propagandized U.S. television consuming addicts were able to return to their shopping life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on how to take away Constitutional rights, pass the PATRIOT Act, end the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, do away with civil liberties, and spy on you. And I vowed to do everything in my God-given authoritarian powers to undermine the Bill of Rights.

Over the past seven years, a new Department of Homeland Security has been created to protect the Father Land. The military, the intelligence community and the FBI have been transformed into agencies that the people fear. Our nation is equipped with new tools to monitor everybody’s movements, monitor your bathroom breaks, break up peace group meetings and their pesky demonstrations.

And with strong warmongers at our side, we have taken war to foreign lands where our natural resources reside under their grounds. Afghanistan has gone from a nation, where the Taliban whom we armed and supported threw out the Soviets, to being a young Capitalism that is the world’s largest opium producing nation.

Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship that we supported and supplied military weapons to, with a dictator we supported, to a crony democracy at the heart of oil country and a friend of me and my friends, the oil magnates.

There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions, but there can be little debate about the lies, deceit, death and destruction.

The United States has gone more than seven years without a false-flag attack on our soil. This is a tribute to those who toil day and night to stop me — people who watch me closely, law enforcement advocates who say I am not above the law, intelligence analysts I have exposed, Bill of Rights advocates and opposition personnel, and the men and women of the United States Veterans For Peace.

Our nation is blessed to have citizens who volunteer to defend the United States Constitution in this time of danger. I have cherished fighting these selfless patriots and their families. And the substantially diminished United States Constitution owes you a debt of gratitude.

And to all our men and women in uniform listening tonight, there has been no higher honor than not attending any funeral for your fallen comrades.

The battles waged by our troops are part of a broader struggle of two dramatically, but necessary, different systems. Under one, an empire spurred on by a rich and powerful band of fanatics demands total world hegemony, condemns women and children to be collateral damage and marks non-hegemonists for murder.

The other system is based on the conviction that United States’ exceptionalism is the universal gift of Almighty God and that free markets and Capitalism light the path to wealth accumulation.

This is the belief that gave birth to our nation. And in the long run, advancing this belief is the only practical way to make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful.

When people live in neo-liberalism, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue wars. The Supreme Court does. When people have less citizen power, they will cede their lives to the non-compassion of the market place.

So around the world, the United States is promoting free markets, worker exploitation, structural adjustment, greed Capitalism and the indignity of stolen natural resources. We are standing with lackeys and young Capitalistocracies, providing aid and medicine to bring dying neo-liberal societies back to life, and sparing the owning class from further wealth deterioration and loss of profits. And this great republic, born alone in wiping out an indigenous population, embracing slavery and denying women the rights of citizenship, is leading the world toward a Nuage where the free market belongs to all nations.

For eight years, we have also strived to expand unemployment and home foreclosures here at home. Across our country, students are rising to meet corporate imposed testing standards in public schools and are being left behind. A new Medicare prescription drug benefit is bringing less peace of mind to seniors and the disabled. Every taxpayer pays lower income taxes as we print more paper money that is worth less and less.

The addicted and suffering are finding new hope through cults and other faith-based programs. Vulnerable human life is better bombed. Funding for our veterans has nearly doubled as the number of veterans has increased ten times. The country’s air, water and lands are being measurably drilled and exploited. And the federal bench includes crony neo-con members, like Justice Sam Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to reject free market principles. Facing the prospect of a financial collapse, we took socialism and socialist measures to safeguard our economy. These are very tough times for hardworking families, but the toll would be far worse if we had not acted. Unfortunately, socialism saves Capitalism.

All of us are in this together. And together, with sadness and much of your pain, we will attempt to reinstate our free market economy at all costs. We will show the world once again that the inherent self-contradictions of the “free enterprise” system that Karl Marx wrote about will always lead to its collapse. We have proved that.

Like all who have held this office before me, I have experienced setbacks and there are things I would do differently, if given the chance. But to hell with that.

Yet, I’ve always acted with the best interests of Capitalism in mind. I have followed my Savior and done what I thought He told me. You may not agree with some tough decisions Jesus and I have made, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to do what He told me.

The decades ahead will bring more hard choices for our country, and there are many guiding authoritarian neo-liberal principles that should shape our course.

While our nation is not safer than it was before I stole the presidency, the gravest threat to our people remains in not having another illegitimate and war mongering administration. Our enemies are our inability to resolve conflicts without projecting power and we will be patient and determined to strike again, anywhere, anytime.

America did nothing to seek to prevent this conflict. But we have conjured up solemn responsibilities, and we must meet them. We must resist peace-making. We must keep our resolve. And we must never let down on our war making.

At the same time, we just continue to engage the world with failing confidence and a Geneva Convention-ignoring purpose. In the face of threats from our citizens, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning to the Bill of Rights. But we must reject criticism and its companion, dissent.

Retreating behind our Constitution would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on further eroding Constitutional rights. If the United States does not lead the cause of Capitalism, that cause will not be led.

As we address these challenges, and others we cannot foresee tonight, the United States must maintain its torture making capabilities and practice.

I have often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world and between the two, there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere, except when we do it.

Freeing people from oppression and despair by bombing them away is eternally right. This nation must continue to speak out for Capitalism and the free market. We must always be willing to act in their defense and to advance the cause of neo-liberalism.

President Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” As I leave the house he occupied two centuries ago, I share that optimism. I want you to forget about the crimes I have committed.

America is a young continent, actually two continents, full of vitality, constantly growing and renewing itself. And even in these tough times, much of its eyes move away from the United States to a broader horizon ahead.

I have confidence in the promise of America because I know the character of all its dozens of nations. And, they have black people there also. This is a continent that inspires immigrants to risk everything for the dream of escaping the grip of the North.

Ours is a nation where citizens show calm in times of my oppression and compassion in the face of the suffering I have caused. We see examples of the United States character all around us, and Laura and I have ignored protestors never allowing them to join us in the White House, not for a single evening.

We see the U.S. character in Bernard Madoff, a ponzi scheme principle, who opened a new charter program to wealth from the ruins of Hurricane Recession. We see it in Richard Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, a former profit-making company, as he made $14,415,914 in total compensation in 2007 according to the SEC. This is possible only in God’s country. We see it in the 1.8 million veterans and 50-million people who have no health care.

We see the U.S. character in our elderly who have to chose between paying for medicine and paying for heat. Their children delivered some surprising news. They cannot afford college, nor can they find a job. These brave souls now live with their parents.

These good old people are 60 years old, 18 years above the age limit for military service. But their petition for a waiver was granted because they had no other way to make ends meet. They enlisted in God’s army. Their children enlisted also. God bless them.

These people could not be here tonight, because they will soon deploy to Iraq, where they will help save Capitalism and uphold the legacy of my failed policies.

In citizens like these, we see the best of our country, resilient and hopeful, caring and strong. Semper fi! Boo-yah!. These virtues give me an unshakable faith in blind patriotism. You have faced my disasters and trials, and there is more ahead.

But with the courage of our people and confidence in our Constitution, defense of my diminishing this great document will never tire, never falter and never fail. You will never arrest and prosecute me and Dick Cheney as the Constitution demands.

It has been the privilege of a lifetime to serve as misguided and un-elected president. There have been good jogging days and tough jogging days. But there have always been jogging (and chain saw brush-clearing) days. But every day, I have been inspired by my own greatness and been uplifted by the inaction of our people against me.

I have been installed to represent this nation we love. And I will always be honored to carry a title that means more to me than it ever will to any of you — CEO of the United States of America, Inc.

And so, my fellow citizens, for the final time, good night. May God continue His blessings on this house and our next president. He is going to need it following in my footsteps. And may the ultimate Poohbah In The Sky bless you and our wonderful country.

*G.W. Bush’s actual speech can be found here.

Gaza’s offensive against Israel continued today, sharply escalating with a ground incursion that cut off the southern part of Israel from the north.

The Israeli death toll climbed past 400, at least 60 of whom were civilians, according to UN estimates. 4 Palestinian civilians have been killed as a result of Jewish settlers firing rockets into Gaza in response to the military operation led by Hamas.

Cloud bursts with flaming smoke trails were seen over Israeli cities as Hamas employed white phosphorus munitions. The use of such munitions as weapons targeting soldiers or civilians is prohibited by international law, but Hamas says it is only using the munitions legally to provide a smokescreen for its ground offensive.

There have been reports of Israelis with chemical burns from the phosphorus rounds entering hospitals, but the reports could not independently confirmed since Hamas has refused to allow any foreign journalists to enter Israel.

The United States led an effort at the United Nations to issue a resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities, but the effort was blocked by Russia. The Russian ambassador to the UN said, “We don’t want a one-sided cease-fire that would see Gaza end its operations only to allow Israel to continue firing rockets into Gaza. We are seeking a sustainable cease-fire.”

Russia has repeatedly reiterated its demand for Israel to recognize Gaza’s right to exist and renounce violence. Russia’s foreign minister said earlier this week, “Israel is responsible for ending the cease-fire. Gaza has the right to self-defense. No nation would sit by and just watch as rockets exploded in their towns, hitting homes and schools, without a response. No country would tolerate that.”

Israel’s rocket attacks against Gaza sharply escalated after Gaza’s offensive began 9 days ago. Prior to that, no Palestinians had been killed since the cease-fire began last year on June 19. Israel’s Labor Party led by Ehud Barak agreed to the truce in exchange for an easing of the siege of Israel by Gaza.

Barak is also the head of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), which Hamas lists as a terrorist organization.

During the first week of the cease-fire, Hamas soldiers fired upon Israeli farmers near the border in at least seven separate incidents. An 82-year old Jewish man was wounded in one of the incidents. The IDF claimed that this was a violation of the cease-fire, but Hamas responded by announcing a “special security zone” along the border in Israel and warned that it would fire upon any Jews that entered the zone.

At the same time, Hamas also stepped up its operations against the IDF in the Negev region, stating that the cease-fire only applied to northern Israel. Two Jewish militants were killed in one targeted assassination.

Tzipi Livni’s Kadima group responded by firing rockets into Gaza City. The Labor party urged Kadima to observe the cease-fire so that the siege of Israel would be lifted. Hamas warned Barak that his party would be held responsible for any rockets fired from Israel into Gaza by other groups and closed border crossings once again after a brief respite in which it allowed several trucks to cross into Israel delivering humanitarian supplies.

The IDF claimed that Gaza’s firing at Jewish civilians and closing of the borders was a violation of the cease-fire, but held to the truce until after November 4, when Hamas launched an airstrike into Israel, killing 4 militants and injuring several others. Hamas said the Jewish militants were digging a tunnel under the border in order to cross into Gaza to kidnap a Hamas soldier. Hamas released satellite images with arrows pointing to what a spokesman said was the location of the tunnel. Hamas also blamed Barak’s IDF for violating the cease-fire by launching rockets in response to its airstrike.

Human rights organizations have criticized Hamas for its policy of blockading Israel, which they say had brought the Jewish people to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The present military offensive has worsened the situation for Israelis, many of whom have no electricity. Many bakeries in Israel have run out of bread and cannot make more. Israel’s overflowing hospitals are running out of fuel to run generators, and the blockade has prevented them from receiving medical supplies which would assist in helping those injured in the present conflict.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh yesterday rejected the charges, saying “There is no humanitarian crisis in Israel. The humanitarian situation in Israel is exactly as it should be.”

Haniyeh also dismissed charges that Hamas forces were targeting civilians in its operations. “Hamas does everything to prevent the loss of life of civilians,” he said. “Israelis were even warned to leave areas where the terrorists are hiding. We are only targeting militants. It is Israel that is using human shields in violation of international law. It is Israel which is responsible for the loss of innocent lives.”

Critics of Hamas argue that Jews have no place to flee since Gaza has closed the borders and has bombed numerous targets deep within Israeli territory so that no place is safe.

A top Israeli leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, was killed earlier this week when Hamas targeted his apartment building. His wife, Sarah, and two sons, Yair and Avner, were also killed in the bombing.

The UN’s estimate of 60 Israeli civilians killed counts only women and children, and is therefore only a minimum figure. The UN is unable to estimate the number of men that were combatants versus civilians and has said this number is therefore likely to be extremely conservative.

Russia’s Pravda newspaper reported today that most of the men arriving at Israeli hospitals appeared to be civilians. Most seemed to be coming in with their wives and children who were injured along with the men in Gaza’s bombing raids. None were identified as members of the IDF.

Member states of the European Union criticized Russia’s decision to veto any resolution calling for a cease-fire. Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “We need an end to the violence now. The blame-game can continue afterward, but the immediate goal should be to stop the bloodshed.”

A spokesman for the Kremlin said Hamas needed more time to root out “the infrastructure of terror” in Israel and to cripple the IDF’s ability to fire rockets into Gaza towns. “Russia is leading the effort to achieve peace in the region,” he said, by seeking “a sustainable cease-fire.”

Although his image is well known, there is no official photograph on file with American border control, and he has never been fingerprinted or body-searched. Most disconcerting of all, he delivers parcels to children all over the world, including the children living in the Axis of Evil. His intentions with this activity are not understood beyond some fuzzy generalization about kindness and generosity to all. Clearly, here was the world’s largest unplugged pipeline to potential terrorists.

It was only after receiving no response to several urgent letters from the State Department requesting an immediate meeting in Washington that a decision was made to approach Santa’s North Pole solitude. As usual in such matters with the people now running America , a wing of America ’s most lethal killing machines was employed for the purpose. You never know what you might encounter in such a forbidding place.

As the planes first zoomed over the icy silence of the North Pole workshop, one of the pilots decided to swoop down for a closer look. He was one of those daring fly-boys, and his tail struck the only wire for thousands of miles around, the North Pole Telegraph, sending his plane hurling into the workshop in a ball of flames with tons of ammunition and missiles exploding.

Santa and Mrs. Claus rushed out of their snow-blanketed gingerbread house to see what was happening, trying to calm the terrified reindeer running from their stable at one end of the house. The elves, too, scurried towards the stable, trying to stop the reindeer from running or flying off.

Above, in the dark vault of sky, the other pilots observed the explosion and saw missile trails smoking into the air. They also saw the frantic activity below and quickly concluded their comrade had come under anti-aircraft attack. So they swooped down in attack formation, rapid-fire canon tearing into everything ahead of them.

Most of the reindeer fell in the snow, spurting warm blood across the bluish-white surface. Most of the elves, too, fell gasping for life. Mrs. Claus received a wound in the head and instantly fell limp. Santa tried heroically to reach his wife but realized the situation was hopeless and turned, running into the darkness accompanied by Prancer, the only surviving reindeer.

The only witness to the massacre is one surviving elf now living somewhere in Canada under an assumed identity, fearful for his life. It is only from his testimony that we know anything about Santa’s fate.

Realizing the horrific mistake they had made, the pilots dropped white phosphorus bombs with the intention of incinerating all evidence. The entire North Pole lit up and Santa and Prancer could be seen in the distance on a huge block of ice drifting off into the dark sea, the ice everywhere cracked and weakened by the combined effects of white phosphorus and years of global warming.

Within in a few hours, the beating sound of a black helicopter approached Santa and Prancer. The elf, from his hiding place in a snowdrift, could only make out intermittent sounds across the howling coldness, but it seems armed men emerged from the helicopter, shot Prancer and shackled Santa, shoving him into the dark, beating machine. The elf heard a word that sounded like Guantanamo and Santa has not been heard from since. Reports of his fate reached the International Red Cross and organizations like Amnesty International, leading to inquiries, but these have been met only with silence from American authorities.