THE VILLAGE VOICE has got a quite lucid piece by James Ridgway clearly detailing the real threats to America right now; most of them from within.

Survivors of the hype. Survivors of the tears, real and crocodile. Survivors of the merchandising. Survivors of the self-serving politician pontifications.

And, so far, at least most of us are survivors of the war against freedom being conducted in freedom’s name.

Richard Nixon was often described as running an “imperial presidency.” The current thief of the presidency is running an imperial presidency that would lack only the imperial pomp and grey-flannel style of the Nixon era. He is a president who wants to be dictator, and who is trying to transform this nation into a dictatorship.

But it wouldn’t be the fascist dictatorship my anarchist pals always rant about. The U.S. Right-Wing Conspiracy (hereafter “RWC”) has a simpler style in mind–the Latin American dictatorship model, in which a hired stooge runs a brutally authoritarian regime on behalf of the 500 families that own everything in the country. One stooge can be replaced by another, but the underlying power structure remains.

I know someone who likes to explain the human condition as a struggle between a “love-based reality” and a “fear-based reality.” I would argue there are many other bases for people’s individual zeitgeists; but the “fear-based” concept works in this case. The RWC thrives on spreading fear, and “terrorism” is just about the most exploitable fear-object you can find.

So we’ve been inundated with piece-by-piece assaults on our rights and freedoms, and accusations of treason against anyone who dares question these assaults. You’ve got any number of pro-corporate, anti-environment, and anti-labor power plays promoted under the new excuses.

But you also have activists, webloggers, pundits, ordinary folk, and even a few politicians speaking out against the ongoing coup-in-process. This is the true resiliant, never-say-die Spirit of America. These, not the RWC demagogues, are the real patriots. If more of us can join this fight for real freedom, we can stand a decent chance of both defending our country and of having a country worth defending.

UPDATE: You recall that recent flap over a proposed civilian-snitch empire to be launched under “anti-terrorist” excuses? Some Senators want to scrap it.

GOOD NEWS: The long-delayed midsummer print MISC is finally almost done, and oughta be out by the end of the month. This might be the last one to be printed on cheapie newsprint.

AND THERE’S GONNA BE a public coming-out event for the ish. MISCosity Breakdown will occur on the convenient Friday evening, Aug. 16, at the early timeslot of 7-9 pm, at the always-lovely Rendezvous at Second north of Bell. As many print MISC contributors as can make it will appear. And we hope you do too.

A LOT OF WEBSITES have been playing up this Australian newspaper article that claims the U.S. government is “planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies.” An actual careful reading of the story reveals a lot of speculation on the writer’s part about the Feds’ proposed “Terrorism Information and Prevention System.” Few actual details on the program have been revealed. But that doesn’t stop the speculation. And it shouldn’t stop you from being wary of such schemes.

The Seattle School Board has just decreed that West Seattle High School’s sports teams shall no longer be known as the “Indians.”

Fair enough; about time, some of you might say. But the board also declared the name be replaced before the start of the next school year. That means the school’s students might not get to vote on a new name.

So it’s up to us, the loyal friends of youth, to help come up with some possible replacements.

The best new WSHS team name I can think of, the “Alkis,” isn’t a tribal name but does derive from the

old “Chinook Jargon” trading language, and hence might still be too native-oriented to qualify. (And besides, some say the name’s correctly pronounced “al-key,” something the authorities might not want to be associated with minors.)

Other possibilities, equally neighborhood-centric but more palatable, include “Admirals” (from the north WS business district) and “Cranes” (from the beautifully rugged cargo-container lifts flanking the Duwamish River). But there’s gotta be something better out there. Email me with your suggestions. I’ll pass them all along to the school officials.

INANE POLITICAL IDEA OF THE HALF-WEEK: Sanctimonious, bipartisan hypocrites in the U.S. Senate have drafted an all-purpose bill to allow police to shut down virtually any public gathering at which drugs might be consumed or even discussed—raves, Hempfests, neo-hippie country festivals, and potentially even scrictly political events at which someone might state that the war on drugs wasn’t a great thing. The bill has already passed one Senate committee. You might consider letting certain people know you think this stinks.

…Die Now.” (Steven Levy, Newsweek)

JIM HOAGLAND ASKS, “Where is the populist outrage that would have swept the Capitol even a generation ago, when investment bankers and tycoons were more target than vital source of campaign funds?”

…has taken old WWII domestic-propaganda posters and added new texts to create some scathing anti-Bush satires. (Warning: The site is on one of those free servers with a daily hit quota, so you might have to access it early in the day.)

…has some mostly-lucid ideas in a hereby-linked essay in the Guardian newspaper on why and how American pro-corporate ideology is spent, and is the chief reason for our current economic mess and biz-ethics scandals.

The guy’s wrong, however, when he puts the blame for this ideology on some particularly southern-U.S. legacy:

“The states of the Confederacy remain the heartland of the distinct brand of American conservatism that combines Christian, market and America-first fundamentalism to a unique degree, reinforced in the South by a legacy of barely submerged racism.”

In real life, some of our worst white racists have historically been in Northeastern cities and Midwestern small towns. The old northern oil and rail barons of a century ago successfully bought and sold politicians as routinely as financiers do today. And “America First” was historically a slogan that kept us out of WWI’s first four years, and was principally championed by the midwestern agitator W.J. Bryant and the Californian mining heir W.R. Hearst.

Yes, there’s a certain flavor to the type of conservative bombast that eminates from the likes of Texas and Florida. But equally rancid flavors of greed and arrogance can be found all over this vast land mass. Our own Nor’Western corporatethink cuisine is a deceptively mild stew, which hides its base of biz-as-usual crony favoritism under thick yet bland sauces of bureaucratic “process” and rigged “citizen input.”

So on this day when you’re going to hear umpteen gazillion mushy tributes to how wonderful we are, try to remember the nation is built on a fundamental contradiction between the concepts of individual freedom and capitalist licentiousness. The corporate libertarians, who openly invoke the former to excuse the latter, only make the contradiction more visible by pretending it doesn’t exist.

…(after Kevin Seal, natch) claims the recently assassinated Dutch politician you’ve read about wasn’t really as right-wing as international media accounts allege. (Other Dutch commentators and analysts, as you might expect, disagree with the ex-VJ’s assessment re: the politician; and insist the politician was almost as reactionary as the US newspapers would have you believe.)

…new conservative-bashing book Stupid White Men at a big chain bookstore? If you have, let me know. As previously mentioned in this space, HarperCollins (Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house) tried to pull out of its contract to publish the book unless Moore toned down his barbs against George W. After Moore publicized the fracas, HarperCollins backed down and issued the book as scheduled. But you can’t find it (at least in my town) in the chains that heavily depend on promo bucks from the likes of HarperCollins. I’ve heard of record labels burying releases by bands they no longer care to promote; could this be a book-biz equivalent?

Mementos of my own formerly-fair city were everywhere in Stamford and NYC. Starbux stands and Microsoft ads were ubiquitous, of course; but there were also Seattle’s Best Coffee-serving restaurants and Eddie Bauer boutiques. (There’s supposedly a Nordstrom in some suburban mall outside NYC, but I didn’t see it.) The Virgin Megastore in the infamously Disneyfied Times Square stocked plenty of Seattle bands, even the semi-obscure ones. (F’rinstance, a Fartz CD was on prominent display!) One quasi-Seattle-related person, Fantagraphics cartoonist Chris Ware, had a huge display of his (fantastic) original art in the Whitney Museum’s 2002 Biennial exhibition. And the Tuesday edition of everyone’s favorite rabid-right tabloid included a positive review of the new CD by our ol’ pal Christy McWilson.

TRIP ASIDE #2: My flights both ways, as previously mentioned in this space, were on the airline soon to be formerly known as TWA. Thanks to the overcast conditions also previously mentioned in this space, both flights offered the comforting illusion of sailing on a sea of cotton fluff. Only the eastward flight offered a movie (K-PAX, displayed on LED video monitors).

Both flights included stops at the ol’ TWA hub in St. Louis. Right out the window, you could clearly see the old McDonnell-Douglas HQ complex at the other side of the main runways. The building now bears a big Boeing logo, even though it’s becoming increasingly clear that MD has staged a palace coup and essentially taken over Boeing.

TRIP ASIDE #3: I’ll try to scan some snapshot-camera pix I took of NYC, including Ground-0 (still an extremely quiet and solemn quarter-square-mile surrounded by the famous NYC bustle).

…why the U.S. shouldn’t invade Iraq, at least not now. (Found by Edgecurve.)

…Terry Jones ponders what would happen if current ideologies i/r/t bombing any country where a terrorist lives were applied a little closer to home.

A new biography depicts the President-Select as a know-nothing i/r/t American pop culture.

FOLLOW THE WAR-MOBILIZATION of America’s single most vital industry.

ONE MORE REASON I love the CBC: Tonight they ran a documentary about the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, right after a one-hour profile of Olympic women’s hockey players.