by John Bottoms

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players."

--William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The script is written, the cast members know their lines and cues, the props have been carefully laid out on the set, and the audience is seated and waiting with breathless anticipation.  At the proper moment the director will give the word, the curtain will rise, and It's Showtime!

If that's the feeling you get reading the news these past weeks, momentarily expecting some cataclysm to hit the proverbial fan and mark the start of Act II of the War on Terrorism, you're not alone.

We hear of terrorists smuggling nuclear weapons into New York and DC.  A belligerent American president threatens several countries which pose no immediate threat.  US troops are fighting wars directly or through proxies on multiple fronts.  Violence among nuclear-tipped foes, exacerbated by America's War on Terrorism, is waxing worldwide.  The long-standing cold war between US-backed Israel and the Palestinians is getting hotter by the day.  The number of people who have come to fear and loathe the US grows in direct proportion to the scope of our wars; today Afghanistan, Colombia and the Philippines; tomorrow Iraq, Somalia, Georgia and probably others.  How can we not be incubating the next generation of terrorists?

Against this backdrop of manufactured and enhanced global danger, the boys in Washington have been working overtime to assemble the remaining structures of a police state, much of which is hidden from view.  AG Ashcroft has ramrodded midnight legislation which effectively suspends the Bill of Rights through a Congress nearly (and conveniently) absent over fears of anthrax contamination.  Government insiders are down to quibbling over details of what type of National ID they can force on us, making us seek the state's permission to exist each time we are required to show our internal passport.  The government has "federalized" our airports, patrolling them with agents answerable only to Washington.  They have created a shadow government at an "undisclosed location" near their heart of power by which they hope to rule even if the worst happens.  This new ruling body removes the government's last remaining accountability to the American people through their representatives in Congress, who have already been rendered politically impotent against a popular war president.

All that's needed is the spark to set it all off, some new large-scale attack on the American homeland, and the moderating influences which have kept the Washington warmongers and police statists slightly in check since 911 will be swept aside like the "isolationists" of 1941.  Such an event would change our view of the world from one in which terrorists once wounded an unprepared nation to one in which they can overcome our best defenses and strike us at will.  All bets are off in the wake of such an attitude shift.

It's as if we're caught in our own personal "The Truman Show" in which The Director is pulling the strings behind the scenes to keep us from knowing that our reality is scripted.  The sad and frightening irony is that our self-important rulers are just as unaware that they are working from a script written by their philosophical forebears such as Thomas Hobbes, who preached that civilization is possible only under the rule of the state.  Current events illustrate the fallacy of Hobbes' thinking, as we endure our civilization being undermined and weakened by the state.

And for what purpose is the state putting us at risk from terrorists, and stealing our freedom at the same time.  The only clear thread which stands out in each of these conflicts is oil; oil from Kazakhstan, Arabia and Colombia to enrich American corporations and keep Republican politicians in power; oil by which the US government can control potential competitors in Europe and Asia.  We are being  put at risk to maintain a mercantilist system which was rejected by our country’s founding fathers, but has again come to dominate the world economy.

New terror attacks and martial law are not inevitable, but each day that we continue down the path we're on increases the chance that they will come to pass.  We must realize that in today's world, the costs of global military dominance exceed its benefits; that we cannot be free nor rich in a world that hates us for our violence.  We the People must insist on writing our own scripts, and force our government to dismantle their mercantilist system and its clockwork machinery of murder and suicide before it's too late.

March 5, 2002