You Are/Are Not America:
Look, if you're reading this, you're connected, man. You are hooked up, bitch. You know the score. You pride yourself in knowing the ins and outs, motherfucker, the who's and the why's and the occasional how. You follow stories, even if you have to read the Guardian to get the whole deal. You scoff at the notion of a liberal bias in the media. You may or may not show up in NYC to protest in September, but, certainly, the thought has crossed your mind, just like it did to go to the March on Washington back in April before you decided you couldn't - you don't like the toilets on long bus rides and crowds make you nervous, you may have thought. And you may very well be sittin' there, listenin' the hurricane of shit whirling around D.C. with the Chalabi case and Tenet's resignation. You may even spend a minute or two, or more, trying to figure out what's what, how the two are connected, if they are, why Tenet resigned now, how much of a lying motherfucker Chalabi is. And you look around and wonder why the President and his entire administration haven't been forced to run bare-ass naked down Pennsylvania Avenue while the raucous mobs pelt them with rotten fruit until their degraded asses are forced out of the Capitol.

And what you think is true. It is so goddamn true. Jesus, it's hard to exhale some mornings in this America when you're one of Bush's "elite," in that you have made yourself pay attention when all around you are politicians and media people with huge whistles, waving you past, saying, "Nothing to see here, nothing at all." You have forced yourself to look at the dismembered limbs at the scene of the crime, the crushed and decapitated bodies in the wreckage, slowing your car down while everyone behind you honks. And once the images are in your head, they're not going away. Once something has been thought, says Dostoevsky, it cannot be unthought.

However, for the rest of us, the rest of this America, this nation where our "pride" in individualism means we can't have real community, we are selfish sons of bitches. See, we have to deal with the wallet, the gas tank, and on and on (schools, health care, you know the list). And for us, Chalabi and Tenet are too fucking complicated, and we have been beaten down to the point where we don't wanna figure it out. It's easier to just wait and see what the government says about it and worry about getting a day off our second jobs so we can see our kids play Little League.

We should scream. God, we should scream to everyone about the lies, the cover-ups, the crimes, so many crimes that it makes John Gotti look like Alfalfa stealing from the old guy's apple cart. Maybe we won't have to scream for long. Something is shaking loose. Not to get all Buffalo Springfield on you, but something's happening here, something's shakin' loose from the trees of scandal. Maybe there's just an accumulation of disgusting detail of how we've been snookered. More probably, it'll be something like the Plame affair, which seems more than ever to reach into the tastefully decorated Oval Office. Then the story will get cut and dried, good and evil, the terms that Bush prefers to the ever-shifting grays of the world, and we'll all understand, and it'll be what we talk about at our third shift non-union jobs, our church pancake breakfasts, our own America, redefined by this just started hurricane season.

Back Monday.