Maurice Stoker Interviews a Spy - 4

MS: I’d like for you to briefly expand on that statement about alienation of citizenry from the government.

K: Not all the citizens … not yet anyway. It’s a gradual process. Right now the US is in the hands of Christian mullahs and ayatollahs who gained control of the election process at the primary level and at the PR level … twice elected a God-intoxicated President who casts the universe in black and white terms of good and evil. Fortunate for him, unfortunate for themselves … Americans being the most poorly educated and semiliterate and unable to reason of all the people in the industrialized world and not knowing it because they don’t travel or read or work in difficult occupations requiring thought, which we fill with educated immigrants … they don’t see it. Worse, being more superstitious than any third world country, a lot of ‘em believe he does represent God and talks to God. He is truly a President of the Babbits, but the US has a larger proportion of Babbits now than it did in Sinclair Lewis’s day. In fact, most Americans would aspire to be Babbits, and want nothing more for their kids… . But then Americans are perhaps the most cowardly people on earth ... and they don't understand fundamentalist Christianity's incompatible with freedom.

MS: How do you mean cowardly?

K: Well, how many of these flag-waving patriots you see sending their kids to join up and fight? Army can’t make recruiting goals without incredible bribery, and then the best get out fast as they can. And haven’t you seen the shift in television commercials? Used to be, when I was a kid, they sold everything with sex. Now the citizens are too scared of AIDS and God or whatever to do sex, but they are scared of flu and infection and old age and heart attack and stroke and inability to retire without eating out of trash cans and car wrecks and getting lost in their cars and terrorists and God knows what else … every damned commercial plays to that fear. I don’t see that anywhere else in the world.

MS: You sound kind of cynical.

K: You sound kinda stupid.

MS: So you say this doctrine is being tested in Iraq. How is that?

K: What’re you? Stupid? We tested the same damned doctrine in Vietnam, though it hadn’t been called that. We used it in WWII, Korea, every damned war there ever was. The bit about establishing a viable government is essentially the same as establishing a satrapy.

Where you been? You really think this is about fighting a ragged band of terrorists who found one of the multitude of holes in our porous national security?

K: A war on the liberty of the citizens of the US by the religious nuts running the country. Only the citizens don’t really understand it. This is about government taking more control.

MS: You mean by pushing constitutional powers of the President over the powers of the judicial and the legislative branches of government?

K: That whole separation of powers thing’s been a crock from the beginning. Don’t forget the US was started by a bunch of angry white men … all property owners … who hated to pay taxes. The high sounding words about freedom and liberty and all that was pure nonsense. I mean, women didn’t have the right to vote until the 20th century. And worse yet, that bit about all men created equal in a country full of slaves? Black slaves? And slave-owners like Washington planning to steal land from the Indians? Were they equal? Maybe they weren’t men... .

And now Antonin Scalia holds séances with Clarence Thomas … which is why he wasn’t nominated as Chief Justice … soon maybe the two new nuts’ll join ‘em … to find out how these dead white men would return our century to theirs.

MS: You don’t sound like someone who ought to be defending our national security interests

K: Why? I am part of a sizeable minority within the community living on the taxpayers in exchange for national security. Some are better compensated than others. We mostly do it for the money, dude. I am very well compensated. Plus the fact is I get to live in a free country somewhere in Europe. It’s no surprise lots of us want to work Europe … want to retire in Europe. The US is not a free country, particularly now that the religious nuts are running it. And it’s gonna get worse.

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