Dear Dirty America

ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE 
Natl Correspondent
Los Angeles, CAI feel like a human sloth. I’m terrified that some psychopath who is out killing slothful humans is going to break down my door any minute and bludgeon me to death with a rusty pipe taken from the dumpster out back. With my brains on the floor, I’ll find out the truth: either my soul is active and pulsing, and it floats away, and I realize I am and always was that consciouness; or the lights go out and I’m dead. The chance for either is 50/50.

My killer will feel vindicated for ridding the world of worthless human scum, and I’ll admit, his feelings wouldn’t be far from reality. With this pitiful, low energy drive, I am scum. My thoughts are in the gutter, and it’s all because of John McCain and Carl Levin and all their asshole buddies. Either way, the big questions tonight are, What am I contributing to the world? What have I ever contributed?

Certainly I haven’t written any blog posts as riveting as Paul Krassner’s 1967 piece where he details LBJ fucking the wounds in Kennedy’s corpse. I would try to come up with something just as special in this time of personal despondency, but I don’t have the stomach for it. McCain’s scrotum explodes on the Senate floor while he speaks of the military indefinitely detaining US citizens? That’s funny. Or Carl Levin screwing the ghastly hole he just helped blow into the side of Uncle Sam’s skull? That’s not nearly as funny. Especially when it’s on the Senate floor and he’s making a bloody mess of our rights and liberties.

Why do I feel so slothful? That might be a question for an astrologist, because I suspect it has something to do with the cycles of lunar and solar activity. I could be wrong. I might come roaring back with a vengeance tomorrow. I might be low on B12. But the fact that I’ve sat in my chair all day and ate only cereal is the weighty kind of personal knowledge that pummels anybody’s brain like a schizo with a rusty pipe.

I’ve done nothing worthwhile. I don’t have the nerve to leave the house. Not today or tonight.

I’ve been listening to radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones talk about what the renewal and expansion of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) really means for this country: utter and complete tyranny and executive control over American citizens. The decision, Jones says, will now be made with each and every military person and police officer in this country, when they are given orders to detain an American citizen who has not been charged with or convicted of any crime.

Will our own military turn against us? Will they support the final deathblow to our Bill of Rights? If there was ever a time for all Americans to collectively stand up and voice their disgust for the Wall Street-funded Washington D.C., it is now.

Levin and McCain’s bill has done nothing short of declaring war on the American people. Usually I think Alex Jones is a little “over the top” (although he would boldly disagree, if he thought my opinion mattered, which it doesn’t), but I think he’s right to sound the alarms and bang the old liberty drum.

Our Congress doesn’t represent America any longer. Only 9 percent of Americans approve of them. That’s almost hitting the margin of error mentioned in standard polls. America doesn’t even recognize these fools and Wall Street puppets as legitimate any longer.

Glenn Greenwald sums up the bill:

 here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

Anybody who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda or the Taliban or “associated forces” is liable to be detained by the military. That means donating a chunk of money to a humanitarian organization that then, unknowingly, hands off food or supplies bought with that money to an impoverished individual in a third world nation who is allegedly loosely tied to some terror network.

This is where you might start talking about how you haven’t done anything wrong, and for anybody who is innocent, there is nothing to worry about.

Except that this expansion of the AUMF goes further than ever before to codify the unadulterated power of the Executive branch in being judge, jury, and executioner for any American it deems questionable. Sure, Pres Obama nailed Al Awlaki without charging him with any crime, and the White House refused to offer evidence of Awlaki’s guilt (he was a glorified Al Qaeda blogger). That was bad, but Obama didn’t have this super power in writing. And then one of our drones disintegrated a 16 year old American boy. That was really heinous.

It is the official end of due process, the First and Fourth Amendments, and a bloody mockery to our founding fathers who feared this kind of dictatorial control over the American populace.

Maybe I’m lamenting this bill for nothing, but it seems better to overreact to the idea of our military detaining its own citizens without due process than underestimating it and pretending this is a necessary step in the War on Terror.