Feeling Safer Yet?

Fess up. Feeling safer?

Be honest now. Is your car flag keeping terrorists safely on their side of the US border? Is your THESE COLORS DON'T RUN sticker scaring suicide bombers right out of the country? Is that little Taiwanese-made American flag in your window guaranteed to stop blast waves and radiation at the property line? Do you sleep better because you bought all the duct tape and plastic sheeting at Home Depot? Are you feeling more secure because that guy named Ahmed who sold you lottery tickets at the mini-mart suddenly disappeared without a trace and his family can't find him either?

C'mon. Out with it. When you go to the airport, and you spend hours being poked, prodded, searched, questioned, surveilled, investigated, ID-checked, herded, and abused, do you feel more confident that a surface-to-air missile will not blow your plane from the sky soon as it gets off the runway and out over the great unknown? Are you COMPLETELY certain that an infiltrator didn't put something in the fuel or loosen bolts on the engines? Are you thankful on arrival, when you open your baggage to see your careful packing job all wadded up, with a notice from a government agency that your protest flyer was un-American? (This really happened, BTW.) Do you get a good feeling about the future of freedom from watching hundreds of obedient sheep submit gleefully to this bondage scene, as if they were S&M bottoms in some San Francisco cellar at 4 AM?

Are you feeling safer on that bus, which presents a great, lumbering target for all manner of ordnance, because the Dixie Chicks were systematically attacked by a ruthless broadcasting octopus owning 1200 stations and untold other musical entertainment assets? Are you feeling safer on your train, as it barrels through that dark tunnel, because government agents shook down Michael Franti for the terrorist act of singing a gentle folk song about bombing the world? Are you REALLY feeling safer in your flag-decked, be-stickered patriotic-graphically-intensive car? Does that PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR FIREPOWER sticker assure you that nobody's mined the freeway entrance? Does it make you absolutely sure that nobody's wired a bomb on your front axle? Does it make you confident that no snipers, trained by US military special ops so you know they're good, lay prone in nearby car trunks aiming Bushmasters^tm at your ten-ring?

Are you reassured by the weekly-changing color alert, flapping madly from yellow to orange to teal to coral to ocre to sienna to sepia? Do you feel better about going to crowded nightclubs because CNN is hot on the job of telling us what color the threat is today? Are you sure that various religious fanatics competently trained in Afghanistan with CIA tax money and Saudi petrodollars are cancelling all manner of dire operations in the US because they saw on Al-Jazeera that these here US of A have gone to Cadmium Alert?

Are you feeling really safe because the US news media are all owned by the same three right wingers, who haven't told both sides of a story in 15 years? Does media self-censorship give you a nice secure feeling? Does the nightly TV parade of blood, thunder, and doom give you peace and serenity? Do you feel better-informed when radio newscasters rip and read fascist government fear-mongering that some phone call in Hamburg was really a secret code for an impending attack on an unknown bridge, shopping mall, or house of ill repute, no, really this time, honest, would we the politicians lie to YOU?

Does Tom Ridge make you feel as if it's OK to go on with your life, even when he orders you to watch everything you ever say, read, write, post, think, dream, fantasize, or do, before Der Vaterland, oops, I mean The Homeland, gets you like nobody's ever been gotten before? Do you feel taken care of when FBI agents call on outspoken artists at midnight, and try to scare them into silence? Are you sure they'll never come for you? Be honest, now.

Do you get a loving feeling from the almost psychotic drift toward 1933 German National Socialist Party art direction and graphic motifs coming from 21st-century US state and federal agencies? Have you resumed walking beneath tall buildings because the postage stamps are starting to look like something Hitler would have printed, or because Nazi Waffen-SS eagles by any other name are popping up all over everything? Are you unafraid of low-flying aircraft because that friendly delivery man who brings your pizza might also be a government snitch who denounces all insufficient tippers before the Inquisition?

Has your sleep improved at night, with the reassuring knowledge that a plan for global empire devised in the 1990s by a bunch of tired Reaganoid black-baggers, Fourth-Reichers, and corporate hacks is now executing in over 100 countries, placing US troops in harm's way in such important places as the Falkland Islands and Iceland? Do you hoist an extra brew for the new US empire?

Are you feeling better about the future because high school students can't wipe their asses because the school can't afford TP? Proud that community college students are paying double tuition to keep the Falklands safe and free? Avoiding the waste of another femtosecond fretting about your vanishing pension, your shredded Bill Of Rights, the arsenic in your water, or the 30-day wait for your doctor while that lump gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger?

Got a happy feeling whistling past the junkyard of history, piled ever so high with the rusting remains of every country in the world that ever sickeningly imploded from thinking it could run the planet? Done worrying about The Arab Street, or The American Street, for that matter? Not concerned for one little moment that your president is busily fighting the last war, not the current one which is in the mind and all about competing visions of what the Supreme Being wants or doesn't want for the relation between power and the individual?

After all, there's no need to pay any mind to any of this stuff. It's all just left-wing paranoia, after all.