HALF THE COUNTRY

HALF THE COUNTRY

By Peter Fredson

During the past four plus years we have witnessed a great divide in the nation. It has been precipitated by neoconservatives, composed of Far Right Christians and corporate executives managing world-wide enterprises. They both have the same goal in their imagination: total domination. In one case it is total domination of Christianity over all other sects, cults, beliefs and denominations of religion. The Far Right Christian dominionists and reconstructionists intend to have their beliefs, dogma, symbols and icons overcome all others on this planet.

The executives want economic and political domination of all nations, total hegemony, and have already done it in the U.S. by subverting institutions of government, by taking control of the military and its arsenal, and by privatizing public resources to their enormous profit. They live by the rule of the strong and intend to crush any resistance anywhere in the world by the weak. They have taken total control of America’s nuclear arsenal, of its ships, planes, troops, installations, and personnel.

Although many of these bloodthirsty pirates have shown a great reluctance to personally offer their lives, they have shown no such reluctance in allowing other people to give their lives freely for the country that the neoconservatives are fashioning. While on the one hand proclaiming a “culture of life” in which microscopic cells are solicitously and reverently considered as “human” and sacrosanct, they nevertheless show little solicitude or reverence in killing entire humans, individually or wholesale. They don’t even deign to count the Iraqi dead. And they don’t want to show photos of American dead soldiers lest it diminish the popularity of the chief executive

They showed remarkable solidarity while interfering in the case of Terri Schiavo, expressing horror at her medical treatment to the extent that a senate medical leader issued a snap diagnosis that Miss Schiavo was perfectly okay and only needed a drink of water, upon which a horde of televangelists descended upon the hapless patient offering glasses of water for her to drink and walk again, by the grace of Jerry Falwell. They even had the federal courts reconsider Miss Schiavo’s case, not only once, but three different times. Yet, despite all this solicitude and holy horror, hundreds of people like Miss Schiavo die for lack of care, lack of money, lack of administration attention to Medicare and medicines.

The administration would much rather dwell on having people say “NO” to sex, rather than use condoms. They would rather let AIDS sufferers die, by the thousands, rather than do anything meaningful about AIDS. For some neoconservatives, AIDS is a punishment from God for sinning, and sinners merit death, so why bother? Their pity is for show, to demonstrate their great piety, but their actual response to victim’s cry for help is to let them die.

Half of the country believes Bush is an environmentalist, while the other half thinks he is a plundering scoundrel, interested only in the environment to the extent of extracting some profit. Half the country believes Bush is protecting the water and air of the country, while the other half reacts in horror at his restricting regulations on people exploiting the environment.

Half the country still believes that Saddam Hussein was harboring great stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was actively planning to attack the U.S. with nuclear bombs by using pilotless planes, and was an “imminent” danger to the world. Not only that, but he was EVIL, evil beyond redemption, evil beyond that of Dick Cheney, and had to be eradicated. Bush used terror to panic the American public into giving him the ability to declare war without a reason, but for a pretext, for a lie. And half of the country still believes that the lie was not a lie but a good-hearted benevolent attempt to spread democracy, and freedom and liberty and all that other good stuff to the benighted Muslim who were snared in the web of evil to the point that they had to be exterminated by Shock and Awe.

The pretext, to avenge thousands of 9/11 dead, worked and ten times more Iraqi dead became “collateral damage” of the neoconservative plan to seize Iraqi oil. The pretext worked, fooled the entire congress and public, and Bush became transformed into a smirking swaggering “hero of democracy.” Half the country believes he is a saint, or hero, while the other half detests, condemns and fears his reckless, petulant, corrupt, and irresponsible, rule.

Of course, it is not Bush acting alone. He has assembled a magnificent cast of bloodthirsty war hawks, determined to teach the world a lesson. Diplomacy is weakness, while bullying the world, or the United Nations, is part of the neocon game. So the people appointed, which may seem like fascists and sanguinary pirates to many, are the stuff of which this administration depends for stability. They are not only sanguinary, but devious and secretive, aggressive and obfuscating, and about as compassionate as Nile crocodiles where profit can be obtained.

Either hang together or hang separately, is the mantra. Impeachment by an adoring and applauding Republican senate is impossible. And now there is an attempted take-over of the entire judicial system, which appears on the point of success. So all three branches of government will be consolidated under a few War Hawks. It only remains for a new constitution to be drafted, and a theocracy to be formally installed. Then perhaps a new Caesar can be given a laurel wreath.

So half of the country will rejoice, sing “Hallelujah”, to a new saint, awaiting the apocalypse, while the other half will be engulfed in misery, arrests without warrant, lacking most civil rights, losing their pensions, jobs and security, and having to endure the most vicious and corrupt administration in U.S. history.