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THIRTY-ONE

Two days ago politics intruded as it has a habit of doing in this bad time. Yes, all times are bad but some times are worse than others. This is one for our country. A Michigan congressman, John Conyers, minority—that is, Democrat—leader of the House Judiciary Committee, went to Ohio with several other members of Congress and a number of staffers to determine whether or not in the late presidential election of 2004 the overexuberant local Republican Party had stolen the election for George W. Bush. The result was a report by Conyers which a Chicago firm published with a preface by me. Yes, Virginia, the election was well and truly stolen and the Conyers team spells it all out in considerable detail. Since the Republican Congress will not allow hearings on what went wrong, Conyers had no recourse other than a book describing in detail how the theft was effected with collusion among high officials and shadowy executives of electronic voting machine companies. Since my name as writer of the preface is on the cover, radio stations with call-in facilities have been ringing me from Arizona to Ohio to Illinois to Texas to—in a few hours from now—New York City. Most of the callers proved to be already suspicious of the election’s validity but as they have been given no information by our monolithic media, the Conyers report is the first hard news from the front. Thus far, the report has not been mentioned in the print media. The New York Times maintains a sibylline silence as it tends to do when proofs of electoral wrongdoing are nailed, as it were, to the church door. The general liberal (what a meaningless word in the American context!) line has been: no one likes sour grapes. So let’s just move on quietly as Gore did in 2000. So what happened next? A blizzard of official lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Of collusion between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, two well-known enemies. The wrecking by Rumsfeld of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries that had not and could not have done us the slightest harm. Simultaneously as their cities were being knocked down at enormous expense to us, the taxpayers, contracts were being given to the vice president’s company, Halliburton, to rebuild those same cities that his colleague at the Defense Department had knocked down. This is a win-win situation for the higher corruption that governs us. Now we are creating air bases in Central Asia to seize Iranian oil reserves? Or, more dangerously, to take on China en route to North Korea or vice versa? Since these so-called neoconservative contingency plans for world conquest will end more soon than late in our destruction one wonders why our media, bought and obedient as they are, cannot see that they are on the wrong side of human history, now more than ever fragile and out of control as we nuclearize space itself and attack nation after nation while silencing those few of our citizens who see what is up ahead for us. Recently one radio caller asked me if it was true that I was the last republican—with a small r. I said I’d better not be since perpetual war for perpetual peace, which is replacing the Republic, will only end in the death of us all. Meanwhile, the glaciers are melting and the seas rise.

Our old original Republic does seem to be well and truly gone. A day or two ago I witnessed the Republican majority of the House Judiciary Committee trash the Democratic minority (which, ironically, actually represents many more millions of Americans than do the “majority” congressional members who represent what Secretary of State William Seward liked to call “the mosquito republics” whose departure in 1860 he quite welcomed, unlike Lincoln, the mystical Unitarian, who chose civil war to keep them attached).