Incendiary Advice

Much of this blog has been about what I - and many others - view as disturbing trends leading towards fascism in the US. Sometimes surrounded by all these instruments playing the same music, it's hard to recognize if we're actually hitting the right notes.

To further bruise an already pained metaphor, sometimes you just need to hear a solo.

That arrived the other day, in the form of the girls' dad.

Up until recently I considered him quite dead to me, for all intents and purposes, after he pulled some seriously shady business. Suffice it to say we didn't traffic in pleasantries much over the past ten years, let alone philosophical discussions on the shape of the country.

That's all changed after we spent two hours on the phone the other night, talking about America.

This guy, former Navy, conservative (albeit somewhat apathetic) on the political spectrum, sounded somewhere to the left of ACLU and ANSWER. I had to ask him to repeat himself, so sure was I that he was just talking smack to make me laugh.

He assured me he was dead serious.

He's pissed about the Patriot Act and its attack on privacy rights. Thinks -- get this -- ObL is a "freedom fighter" for the Middle East (yes -- that's way left of my opinion!) and we were attacked for our failed meddling in the region since the 50's. (While I know enough to fill a shot glass about the details of US intervention in the Middle East, what I do know isn't pretty. So for general purposes, I'm with him on this.)

He believes we as a nation are completely bankrupt in more ways than one: economically, we've sold ourselves to the lowest bidder and flushed American jobs down the toilet by purchasing crap -- because we can't save any money and spend a little more to buy American made --we want everything immediately.

We're bankrupt ethically, willingly selling our civil liberties in exchange for false security (Hey, could he have found my blog somehow?)

Of course, he referred to our government as being communist. I had to explain we are now fascist. Other than that, had we been so like-minded years ago, we'd still be married!


All joking aside, his was the voice that proved, once and for all, what I've been seeing happen isn't some anomaly, or a product of imagination. We've known each other since age 15 and 16.


He's a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them -- and he's not one to blow in the wind when it comes to conviction. Hearing all this come from his mouth was both comforting and alarming; if he's the face of the new radical, this country's in worse shape than previously realized.