JILL NELSON writes on MSNBC about the rise of a “mean-spirited America:”

“…Americans go along with the program or remain silent, too afraid of the Muslim bogeymen thousands of miles away to recognize the Christian ones in our midst. Fearful that we will be verbally attacked, or shunned, or lose our livelihoods if we dare question the meanness that characterizes our government and, increasingly, defines our national character.

I do not feel safer now than I did six, or 12, or 24 months ago. In fact, I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of. In less than two years the Bush administration has used the attacks of 9/11 to manipulate our fear of terrorism and desire for revenge into a blank check to blatantly pursue imperialist objectives internationally and to begin the rollback of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and most of the advances of the 20th century…

“Three years ago, before the bloodless coup d’etat that made George W. Bush president, America was a far-from-perfect nation. Yet there was the possibility, almost gone now, that our country might evolve into a place that lived up to its loftiest democratic rhetoric. Today, I live in an America that makes my stomach hurt and fills me with terror. A nation run by greedy, frightened, violent bullies. It is time to take our country back before it is too late.”

(Found by Kurt Nimmo’s Another Day in the Empire.)

…the recently-ubiquitous “No Iraq War” posters is dead. Morgan Griffin, 66, was a retired Seattle Symphony bassoonist who’d survived several obscure illnesses and had learned to live his life to the fullest. His was a life from which we all could learn a thing or three.

…has become a peurile playpen for W.’s infantile power-suckups; unchallenging and unreadable except as a cheap energy-boost (if you already agree with those guys) or a cheap laff (if you don’t). So it’s surprising to find something intelligent there, such as Stanley Kurtz’s longish peace detailing what it might take to bring real democracy to Iraq. Kurtz’s scenario involve supporting many of the same institutions (especially schools that teach critical thinking instead of mere rote memorization) the GOP sleazemongers are systematically out to destroy over here.

This, of course, begs the question of what needs to be done to establish real democracy in the U.S. Several egghead theorists have written long, near-impenetrable tomes on the topic. I hope to read some of them in the next couple weeks and get back to you.

ROBERT FISK, the UK pundit who’s become a demi-hero to antiwar North Americans, now claims the occupation of Iraq is now “going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined….”

…AND NEWSWEEK‘S ANNA QUINDLEN proclaims that “each time the United States becomes imperial, it betrays the very keystone upon which its greatness rests.”

HAROLD MEYERSON ponders whether the current White House occupant might be the “most dangerous president ever…”

…WHILE ARIANNA HUFFINGTON explains “Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right.”

…is pushing on all fronts, from public schools to research labs, to promote fundamentalist pseudo-science. Can “two plus two equals five” be far behind?

…what the heck “patriotism” means anymore.

…went on in Seattle and other cities worldwide on Saturday, despite the war having been mostly turned into an occupation mission by the previous Thursday. As I’d expected it to be, it was a smaller affair with a greater concentration of the hardcore protest community, some of whom went “off topic” with speeches and signs about assorted other issues. It also attracted a couple of aged-male dittohead counter-protestors shouting, vehement but pre-practiced insults.

Yes, I still believe those of us who protested this war were right to have done so.

Saddam Hussein could’ve been restrained and/or removed without this life- and infrastructure-wasting tragedy. The twelve years of sanctions only kept him and his cronies iin power while impoverishing the rest of the nation. And the UN weapons inspections were working, it now turns out. Saddam was effectively a threat only to his own citizens.

Because Iraq’s government and institutions were designed solely to serve him, he leaves behind a big nothing, a land without a society except that of the US/UK occupation force and the long-simmering ethnicities and other revenge-minded factions.

Iraq might seem now like a big-budget version of Panama or Grenada, a quick-and-relatively-clean invasion/coup. But it puts the U.S. in what still might become a morass of Vietnam proportions.

We’re now going to create, and will have to keep propping up, a client state with powerful, permanent, internal and external opposition. The Republicans talk about promoting “democracy” there, but will certainly try to devise a system in which U.S. stooges and yes-men have all the power. The Islamic fundamentalists (whom Saddam was never one of) will exploit this at every opportunity. This could get messier and messier for years to come.

Antiwar “radicals” like to oversimplify geopolitical situations even more than prowar “conservatives” do. But complication is what we’re gonna get anyway.

Some side topics:

• That much-telecast image of a Saddam statue’s demolition was probably a staged media event created entirely by the US military, with a couple dozen Iraqis brought in as extras.
• Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate for everybody except US business interests.

RICK GIOMBETTI writes at Eat the State:

“We have long since passed the stage in our history when opposition to militarism are merely values to be cherished. Given the awesome destructive power of the weapons at our government’s disposal, we have no choice but to oppose the Bush administration’s belligerence. It is a prerequisite for our survival.”

…MARGARET ATWOOD has written an open letter to America:

“If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They’ll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They’ll think you’ve abandoned the rule of law. They’ll think you’ve fouled your own nest.The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn’t dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country’s hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.”

…a long, impassioned rant about what he insists is a war being fought for “a superpower’s self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony.”

…things to say about this current mess, I’ve gone back to a couple of the past century’s most famous social thinkers. So have some other present-day commentators.

I’m about a third of the way through a dog-eared used paperback copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. The pop-critic’s best known “serious” book popularized the catch phrases “the medium is the message” and “global village.” But it also presented a detailed, reasonably coherent worldview, built around the human senses and how various generations of media effect/extend/attack/desensitize/alter them. He claimed it was the phonetic alphabet, more than roads or weapons or force of will, that brought about the Roman Empire, and by extension the later western powers’ conquests around the world. My the mid-20th century (the book came out in ’64; he was working on it as early as ’59), the “cool medium” of TV (as defined by the degree of the audience’s attention and involvement) was overtaking such “hot media” as radio and movies. This, McLuhan claimed, was starting to change North American society’s whole perceptions and attitudes.

A recent symposium in NYC discussed how these and other McLuhan theories could be used to try to make sense of the current nonsense.

Certainly, the war is the ultimate example of what later PoMo media theorists called “The Spectacle.” It’s both a real war with real death and a media event made with an eye toward home-front PR. TV has become a “hotter” medium since McLuhan’s time (more detailed, less aloof), and live war coverage is “hotter” still. Sleaze-talk radio, the Bushies’ favorite medium, is ultra “hot” by McLuhan’s definition: It not only gives a dumbed-down, one-sided worldview, it orders its listeners precisely how to respond—with anti-intellectual, passive-aggressive obedience.

I’ve previously referred to demagogue radio as a 24-hour version of the “Two-Minutes Hate” scene in George Orwell’s 1984. Lots of folk have noticed the increasing parallels between Orwell’s world and ours. Among them: A new satirical student group, Students for an Orwellian Society. (Slogan: “Because 2003 is 19 years too late.”)

Certainly we’ve got a milieu of economic catastrophe for all but the members of the “inner party,” a regime that loves war, loathes sex, vilifies rational thought, and thrives on fear. The regime wants total knowledge and control of every citizen’s thoughts, words, and deeds. It preaches eternal self-sacrifice for the masses but reserves untold priviliges for itself. Its media minions disseminate nonstop war “coverage,” deliberate detailed lies, exhortations toward “patriotic” fervor, and demonizations against all perceived opponents.

But today’s Republican INGSOC doesn’t yet have the total power its agenda ultimately requires. It might never attain that total power. In the Internet age, information and communication may be unstoppably diffuse, despite the monopolistic efforts of Fox and Clear Channel. Neotribalism, multiculturalism, and the media’s own push toward fractured demographics mean there’s no undifferentiated mass of “proles” to be easily controlled.

But a gang that can’t get total power can still inflict a lot of damage trying to get it.

DAVID CORN wonders whether the war, and the W regime, might soon stumble upon the “Hubris of the Neocons.”

CLEVER ENTREPRENEURS have designed a pro-peace, pro-love, and pro-active T-shirt bearing the slogan “French Kiss for Peace.”

…sez we shouldn’t consttantly rail against Bush’s language blunders. For one thing, we can still “criticize the U.S. President based on his bad policies. It ain’t like there’s a shortage of those.” For another, “Language bullying — or prescriptivism, as it’s more
politely called — is conservative in the worst sense. It advances a stuffy
and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by
supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common
usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain
wrong and cranky.”

DAVID BRODER breaks from the Washington Post‘s recent deluge of Dubya-worship to dare to question a new Federal budget that sacrifices almost everything from education to children’s health, all for the sake of the gazillionaires’ sacred tax cuts….

WHILE SUSAN FALUDI ponders whether we’re seeing the death of certain American mythologies, such as those of morality and justice.