From the May 2005 Idaho Observer:

And, "Poof!" Citizens living in the land of the free are suddenly enslaved to a cabal of murderous technofascists!

It’s kind of funny in a cynical sort of way: The Bush years are making the Clinton years seem like the Truman years. We thought Ruby Ridge, Waco, the flushing of property rights, Whitewater, Vince Foster, Monica Lewinski (et. al) had been the ultimate insult to the noble office of the president of the United States of America. I guess those were the good old days—back in the 90s when we only allowed government to kill our neighbors, late term fetuses and our national pride.

But today we are allowing government to kill anyone, imprison everyone, torture whomever, wage war anywhere, tax everything, lie cheat, steal, backstab and doubledeal while accepting its Machiavellian activities as standard U.S. administrative protocol.

Unlike President Clinton who made feminists, minorities, gays, environmentalists and disabled persons very happy at the expense of Conservatio Republica, the Bush administration has successfully united many formerly divergent groups to oppose whatever it’s doing (no one really knows what the Bush administration is doing because it’s either lying or silent about key components of its agenda).

It turns out that Americans have been cognitively dissonant since the 1790s when Founding factions began undermining the very Republic they ratified into being.

Cognitive dissonance is a common psychological response to trauma. People’s ability to function is largely dependent upon the world around them being consistent with their expectations. If what we see around us is contradictory (dissonant) to what we perceive as normal, our minds seek to reduce the cognitive conflict. The phenomena also extends to ourselves if we behave in a manner inconsistent with our perception of ourselves. Pretending conflicts don’t exist is the most common method of resolving them.

Our administrators designed a cooker a long time ago based upon our capacity to pretend everything is okay—and the frog-boiler principle. It was more sophisticated than a cast-aluminum kitchen pot, of course— made of ink, paper and concealed guns—but it was designed to work the same way: By the time cognitively dissonant people realize they are being cooked like a pot o’ frogs, they’re already floatin’ and bloatin’.

Soldiers on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan aren’t murdering innocent people; Congress isn’t funding the war on terror to conquer nations and enjoy the spoils; "Support Our Troops," to the average American, doesn’t mean "kill all the Arabs and take their oil." To soldiers, members of Congress and cognitively dissonant Americans, we are, as a nation, liberating the Iraqi people because—God bless America—"we are the defenders of freedom."

For those of us who began unraveling and decoding the mechanisms of our collective enslavement years ago, we can talk openly and objectively about today’s headlines because the venal and oppressive cretins making them are behaving in a manner consistent with our expectations. But those for whom all this is very new, the shock is too much. Were they to accept that the White House is currently occupied by the most sadistic, technotyrannical monsters in world history, they would also have to do something about it.

This simple component of human psychology gave the U.S. government leave to suspend due process (Alien and Sedition Acts of 1794), destroy the south and prevent secession (Civil War), manufacture reasons to fight World War I (and World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Gulf War I, Gulf War II), create and administrate The Great Depression, import drugs from Central America for sale in the U.S. to purchase weapons for CIA wars in resource-rich third-world nations all over the world—and imprison one in every 138 Americans. And on and on...

Though it may appear at first blush that these events and their trickle-down effects on the American way of life were random, they do, in fact, indicate a pattern: The systematic growth of government beyond the confines of the Constitution that created it and the supplanting of American civil liberty with real and statutory chains.

The U.S. government did not just "suddenly" become ruthlessly imperialistic. Revisionist history reveals that the process of setting the central government free of its constitutional straightjacket was well underway long before the sacred constitutional ink had dried. Once we dispense with our grammar school-induced fantasy of our nation’s birth and the virtuous role it has played in making the world safe for democracy, we can clearly see how certain key events throughout the last 220 years should have aroused the people’s concern. But their inability, decade upon decade, to reconcile what was really happening with their Yankee Doodle Dandy perception of the kindly Uncle Sam has culturally institutionalized the cognitive dissonance phenomena in the collective American mind.

And here we are: Perched on the edge of our national demise. Because the actions of the current administration are so brazenly imperialistic, for many it’s like, "...and then I woke up this morning and here I am in the land of Oz!"

But for those who have been studying revisionist history for several years, it’s more like, "...and then I woke up this morning to the realization that the state of the union I had been anticipating and dreading, has arrived."

I think it is fair to attach degrees of responsibility to every generation of Americans that has come before us; it was their inability to recognize events for what they were that allowed subsequent events to occur. But the buck seems to be stopping with us—our generation. Generations of cognitive dissonance have encouraged the U.S. government to inflict misery anywhere in the world. And we are now charged with the task of stopping it, or face the wrath of about 6 billion angry people for our complicity. (DWH)