America is under siege. Not by Osama bin Laden, not by possible right-wing fanatics spreading anthrax spores throughout our mail system. No, the United States of America is at war with itself. It is an ideological war over ambiguity and paradox. It is a war in which the people of the United States will either accept the ambiguities, difficulties and limitations of democracy, capitalism, and freedom, or which the people will acquiesce to history's commonest answer -- rule by force, centralization, and the seedlings of dictatorship. We are already seeing the loss of civil liberties in the name of "Operation Indefinite Justice." George W. Bush has signed, at the behest of Congress, the USA Patriot Act, a sweeping act of legislation which, if not tempered adequately, could open the door to draconian measures on our own people in the name of the so-called greater good. Furthermore, greedy business interests lobby Congress and the President (the President is one, himslef, in my opinion) to fix the economy by giving therm billiuons in tax relief and "stimulus" spending. Similar business interests are trying to work, like Frank Baum's humbug, behind the curtains to open up needless oil drilling in Alaska, or to suck billions of tax payer monies for a needless and wasteful missile defence.
    These are common cynicisms, however, and I will leave their evaluation and dissemination to others. What I write about here are the front lines of America's ideological war with itself. I have already defined the war in terms of America's tolerance for ambiguity. As United States citizens, we do not tolerate well the ambiguousness of democracy. Our own systems of government and social order are not meant to lead us to certain security, ever rising prosperity, and certainty that our Republic will grow ever stronger and remain dominant. Rather, our systems, and I mean specifically the system of democracy and the system of capitalism in the U.S., are designed to be highly flexible and self-sustaining. After all, if there is a constant in the world, it is change, and our twin systems are a response to that. Both democracy and capitalism are systems designed to withstand the permutations and vicissitudes of constant change while those who hold power within those systems are subject to its constant flux. Thus, a rich person may one day find her stock portfolio plummetting just as a President must some day relinquish their office.
    Yet, already in our nation's history we have been unable to restrain ourselves from tinkering with the system. We, as humans, want some certainty. We want to know at least that when we wake change will not have been so great while we slept that the world is nothing like it was yesterday. However, in the United States, we have grown accustomed to too little change and have grown spoiled as a consequence. We want ever increasing profits for corporations after a decade of unparalleled growth and we want that power to remain right where it has always been --- in the hands of the CEOs. Never mind that all through the 90s, their profits grew vastly disproportionate to their lower level "co-workers." Likewise, the U.S. populace is willing -- even overtly discussing -- the possibility of "giving up" freedoms allowed us by the Constitution. I think any who seriously consider this be brought forth on charges of treason. Such serious consideration borders on terrorist acts and certainly plays right into their hands.
    These words express the real front lines of the ideological war of the U.S. Words, which are protected by the Constitution, mark where shots get fired, where victims lay, and where battle lines shift. In short, this ideological war is truly a war of the 21st Century. It is an information war, a "spin" war, a war of manipulated information the likes of which dwarf Hitler's propoganda machine. 23 September 2003.

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