Signs of the End...

The post-9/11 mood of hyper-patriotism is beginning, finally, to run its course.

A whole generation was bamboozled, but it is beginning to see the folly of its youthful enthusiasms.

I predict that the government and allied right-wing groups will continue to find and/or create new opportunities to try to keep the mood of hyper-patriotism alive (i.e., we will continue to be subject to manufactured terror scares, to witness police entrapment of hapless immigrants and misguided nobodies, to endure more non-issues like "shari'a in our courts" bruited as the latest threat to the American way of life), but I sense exhaustion setting in.

One sign of where we might be in the curve of this arc is the increasing shrillness of the patriotic displays to be found at sporting events, in advertisements, in shopping malls and airports, in Hollywood films (Hollywood--that old reliable ally of the Pentagon's propaganda machine), on the Action McNews Network...

But the party's over. The pendulum is swinging back. The Invisible Whitmanian Republic is due to show signs of life, like mischievous green blades (Leaves of Grass) protruding, unannounced, from the cracks of a city sidewalk.

I am not predicting a full-scale people's revolution--the American Spring that we so desperately need. Not at this point. The National Security State has time, money, and momentum on its side. Things will get worse, much worse, before we can hope for better. But I do think that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, ordinary guys, intelligent, principled heroes, true patriots, are just the beginning of the end of the nightmare orgy of mindless hyper-patriotism that has afflicted this country with disastrous results--for us and for much of the rest of the world.

God bless them.