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Don Monkerud ~ STWR Member

Senior columnist for WhatTheyThink.com

Living in Fantasyland

The Beatles song, "We all live in a yellow submarine," is apt for today's America as it moves deeper into Fantasyland.

Is history repeating itself or are the fundamentalists correct in saying evolution didn't happen and we are victims of fate, divine creation, intelligent design or whatever they call it these days? Have we made any progress since 313 AD when Constantine opened the door to the Christian takeover of religion or are we returning to the Dark Ages, studying how fathers should kill their first-born sons to please God?

Today's occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, a fundamentalist push to dominate America, DeLay ethics-if you don't like the rules, change them-in Congress, and Bush's domestic policies prompt fairytale comparisons and elicit questions of morality, philosophy and plain common sense. Can we find our way through this thicket of inanity?

We look back at most wars and find them stupid, wasteful and unproductive. Didn't we learn anything from our failed war in Vietnam? Apparently not. In the 2004 election, Americans handed control to a group of draft dodging, chicken hawks, who bravely sit behind desks and cut domestic programs, increase military spending and promote "just wars."

Bush and his administration ignored Clinton's warnings of terrorism and went on a lengthy vacation to Texas. That deserves re-election in today's Fantasyland. Baldly lied about Iraq using nuclear weapons on the U.S., Americans left Frontierland for Fantasyland, where nothing makes sense except our fantasies.

In Fantasyland parlance, it makes sense to kill 100,000 Iraqis to keep them from rowing up the Potomac to bomb Washington D.C. An infinitesimal majority voted for Bush on the premise that "it's better to fight them in Iraq than in the U.S." Iraq wasn't planning to attack? That's okay; they might have thought of it in the future. They didn't have anything to do with 9/11? That's okay; God told Bush he's doing the right thing.

Meanwhile a daily barrage of illogic, distortion and downright stupidity about government policies floods the airwaves. Fat jowled, wealthy, egotistical bullies such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly extoll shipping jobs overseas, lowering education benefits, cutting taxes for people already more wealthy than God, and bombing anyone who doesn't agree with them.

Slick White House lawyers make mush of logic from the airy heights of Fantasyland. Torture is okay because it has been "redefined." Deploying a costly missile defense system that doesn't work is okay, because it's "better than nothing." Destroying the environment is hunky dory because it loses "the cost-benefit analysis."

Meanwhile, Bush passes out pink slips in his new "ownership society," cuts 300,000 children from the food stamp rolls and ends childcare assistance for another 300,000 children. The hookah-smoking caterpillar must have come up with this number; it's the same number of people who earn over $1 million and will receive an average of $19,000 in new tax cuts.

The caterpillar's fingerprints show up on the deep cuts in education, health care, and veteran's benefits while Bush buys government "covert propaganda." The cuts are vitally necessary to protect corporate profits, more than half of which will flow to the wealthiest one percent of taxpayers.

There's additional re-arranging of the seats in Fantasyland. Bush's proposed Social Security restructuring will cost $1.4 trillion for the first ten years, rising to $3.5 trillion in the second decade, and does absolutely nothing to alleviate the long term Social Security problem. Don't look too closely at the numbers because only the Mad Hatter can understand them. So what if Iraq costs more than $300 billion and the 10-year cost of making the tax cuts "permanent" runs to $2.1 trillion? We can simply put it on the charge card. Have another cup of tea won't you?

In this Fantasyland, up is down and down is up, light is dark and dark is light, it's good versus evil and you are either with us or against us. We want "a strong leader" to command us, first the punishment and then the trial. Meanwhile, we go deeper in debt buying truck-sized cars, supersized helpings of grease-drenched fast food, and piles of cheap throwaway junk from Wal-Mart, imported from China, a Communist dictatorship that we once abhorred but now adore. Ah, what a beautiful yellow submarine this Fantasyland makes.

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