This Is Now

America In Divisive Distress And Courting Disaster!

Ameri~ka The Brutish Rule?

By Alfred Lehmberg

This essay is about UFOs only in as much as current political behavior must inspire a reasonable trepidation in a UFO's conjectured occupants. We earn, and decisively, our conjectured quarantine... ...Buckle in.

To start, the wife is a wee bit upset with me as it stands, I say true! She won't avoid being more non-plussed upon finding out about the present controversy I'd engage, or otherwise whack with an outraged literary stick. ...But hey, as you'll come to see, I really do love her and so could do nothing less and remain a proper husband. 

My wife ~is~ an innocent in all this. She's never been to a paranormal chat room, surfed internet fringe forums, made an online friend, constructed a website, or contributed to a special interest internet group. The technology only very peripherally exists in her "meat-space" world. She has other—more traditional if no less valid—interests.

She is ambivalent to UFOs—if concerned regards my interest—a moderate/centrist politically, and she's blissfully unaware regarding a global affectation of an *internet* to move, touch, sway, and stir upon the collective sensibilities of the people who choose to plug themselves into it. Seriously, if I don't tell her myself, she'll likely never even hear of this essay. Her internet innocence is that complete.

Additionally, to further ornament the point, she's spent almost half of a century as the valued wife of a retired military officer who spent 25 years, herself, driving a bus for a federally funded school system without accident or incident. In that referenced time she went out of her way to pay her taxes, was always clean, forever thrifty, gracefully respectful, and certainly brave. 

She still is. She hasn't changed!  Her adopted country; however, seems to have taken some bad options and morphed into something altogether different... ...if... familiar...

More point ornamentation! Her husband had had many top-secret military clearances whilst on active duty as a career aviation officer, so, as a German National, she'd been through numerous Government Intel sieves in her own right over the years. She'd had to jump a huge hurdle agency-wise when we were married, 43 years ago, to get the clean bill of intelligence-health she obviously enjoyed. To wit: I was never denied clearance of any type for any reason and was even on operative stand-by for nuclear surety missions.

So what do I do to turn her crank so hard? I make it sound like I must be using or trafficking in controlled substances, be part of some radical political effort, involved with a terrorist cell, or cultivating some kind of twitchy internet sexual activity...

Well... no, no, no, no, and (...Let me think...) no, reader. At this point evidence for any of the preceding or remotely similar activity would have to be planted, frankly. Put a fine point on that. It may come up again!

What did I do, then?

Well, in a nut-shell, when he had a 90% approval rating post 9-11, I once wrote rather glaringly that our very certainly faux-mandated, apparently vote-thieving, and obviously ethically bankrupt and now former CIC, George W. Bush (...so there's no mistake...) was a "dumb-assed-dry-drunk-double-deserter with an inferiority complex, a paucity of intellect, and delusions of dangerous grandeur." Currently, come to my arms my brother...

...But that scared her. She remains "scared." Should she be?  If so, why? Here's the rest of the story.

She's a German National, remember. A resident alien. She was born in 1950 and raised in what was West Germany to a maturity decidedly foreign, if acceptably so, to the sensibility of a garden-variety American citizen. Her father was a German artillery Captain who was captured early to spend the war as a guest of the US at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Her mother worked in photo intelligence and image interpretation during the war. Nothing twitchy there, then, or later... nothing that precluded, at any rate, the top military clearances I've already mentioned. My wife is no member of Paperclip.

Let's cut to the chase...

Her mother and father told her many of the dark, dark tales about what it was like in Germany prior to and during the awful war years. Her now deceased second father, at that time a keenly edged 86 and a retired Regional Finance Minister—a survivor of the Winter War seeing duty and wounded on the Russian front, additionally—is able to draw... ...comparisons. Others, numerous friends and relatives of contemporary and advanced years that she regularly talks to over there in the "old world", are making the same unsettling... comparisons. Is there a comparison?

Their concern, fretfully reflected in the apprehension of my wife, is that the United States seems to be aping the same kinds of *attitudes*, *behaviors*, predilections*, and *activities* they'd seen before—the same kinds of hateful emotional fire, political irrationality, and nationalistic mayhem and malevolence. The same kinds of blurring of church and state. The same kinds of voter fraud and voter suppression. The same kinds of "rights" reduction.

The same kinds?  ...As Nazi Germany?  ...Ouch!

The same (...much worse, actually!) intelligence surveillance. The same cruel Machiavellian-ism. The same unilateralism. The same predatory corporatism. The same institutional duplicity. The same gnawing and depressing fear, worried care to thought and speech...

The same kinds of hell, reader... as was provided by Nazi Germany's Fascists of last Century. Is it the same?

I report, now, that they see in us the rise of what they themselves endured in the previous 30's and 40's, can sense the same approaching catastrophe that that behavior traditionally precipitates, and feel that their concern is more than appropriately justified. Is their fear justified?

My wife is fearful of an eventual Republican-league *Gestapo*, cheerfully facilitated by a powerful and sizable minority of adoring if deluded and terrorized sycophants, breaking down our door and dragging us away for re-education camps, imprisonment/torture, or even arbitrary execution.

She's not unworried about the continuance of our hard won military pension upon which we must depend. She's worried about the falsely punitive attentions of predatory institutions, corrupt agencies, and a rogue government hijacked by demonstrable criminal elements. She's worried about future persecutions imposed upon us at the whim of lawless sociopaths and their willing functionaries.

She's worried about us being falsely identified as an enemy of a 21st Century fascist state, and dealt with accordingly, outside of any law, so with the obligatory extreme prejudice. A true innocent in every respect, should my wife of 42 years be worried?

Fascism is defined as a system of *government* marked by centralization of authority under a *dictator* (preferred figurehead), harshly stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of even lawful opposition through crafted terror, and the use of manipulating censorship or propaganda. It is typically characterized by belligerent nationalism or some kind of baseless racism and sexually motivated hatred. Ultimately, it is a whole political philosophy or movement based upon or advocating such a sorry system for an even sorrier State.

Moreover, it has a penchant for an oppressively dictatorial control mechanism that is passionately, even joyfully, prosecuted. It likes what it does. Reflect a moment on the horror just described...

It puts corporate entities in charge of Government, combines state and church into a *sturch* or *chate* resembling neither, and it is the jealous enemy of an individual's desired freedom. It engages in adventurous wars of empire, as it profits from them, and it lavishly rewards the predatory few at the terrible expense of the manufactured many. It is a singular and perfidious evil in all ways, all matters, and at all levels. I've spent my whole life standing against it.

It HATES liberalism and egalitarianism. It abhors a bill of individual/human rights. It detests due process and equality under the law. It loathes independent thinking. Do we as a Nation begin to resemble any part of the preceding?

I'm a writer of admitted small talent, but a writer nonetheless. I'm also an educated, tax-paying, law-abiding citizen/retired soldier/officer and combat Vet. I'm intellectually placed, medially, near the top of the aggregate bell curve... nothing really special or pointedly seditious about me according to the references I'd mentioned (forgetting a proudly admitted cant to liberal philosophies if not politics) ... but I'm detecting a resemblance to nazism.

Friends of mine far smarter than myself and more professionally experienced and educated than myself detect a resemblance. Persons abundantly experienced with the full-blown examples of same... detect a resemblance. Some of us have to squint the eye a little harder than others, thank your God of choice, but a resemblance seems plain, regardless. Is there a resemblance?

Why would I shoot off my mouth and tempt fate, then, if there were? The answer is obvious.

How could I not, reader? How could I close my eyes and harden my heart to something I know, historically, would threaten me (and mine) right along with you (and yours)... something that would ponderously grow, eventually and certainly (!), to metastasize like the foulest National cancer, later (soon!), if not now?

How could I have any respect for myself, feel confident about the quality of life for my children and grandchildren, or live a proudly valued life on my own... if I didn't speak up now before our seeming National wretchedness was a foregone and egregious conclusion? 

How could I remain silent if I recognized that the present day was quickly becoming the antithesis of everything I had learned in school, defended in combat, and internalized in college about these glorious United States and the brave grace of its conjectured contribution to progressive civilization?  I believed these manipulating lies regarding "home of the free" and "land of the brave"!  Freedom's leader!  

I would make that manipulating lie so, efficaciously, of, by, and for the people! How could I not speak up, reader?  How can you remain silent?

I'm a writer like I said. I've a spotless record, top drawer references, decorations, citations, and awards... I'm a quality citizen, an intelligent patriot, and I have given my life in service to our nation as a career military officer and certified (...if underemployed...) public school teacher. I've been a proper *boy scout*, reader, as I've written before, if one with teeth.

No, I've not changed in the interim, become traitorous, or gone, in any way, bad. I've been consistent. ...Not so my Nation, seemingly.

Conversely, it seems to be my Nation, threateningly and unsettlingly, which changes, worryingly, around me! It's taken a hard right turn to convenient and authoritarian ~brutishness~ I can neither respect, rationally support, or remotely admire.

Truly, my nation seems to abandon me, not me it. Hijacked by an apparently if ironically faithless gang of neo-con political radicals scurrilously bent on using our Democracy to destroy that same Democracy... (another talent of the fascist!) these co-opted mechanisms of government betray me, deceive me, are disloyal to me!

...Who the hell am I?

I am you, reader! I'm another guy on site heating our culture's boiler-water. I'm one of the ones, along with you, paying the big freight in blood, sweat, and time! I'm one of the ones, along with you, at the whim of powerful sociopaths hard-wired to discount us, and so by ready extension, you, reader! This is regardless where you think you come down for a political positioning left or right of center. Still, to an ironically vast minority... you're just another steer in the herd they prey upon, even as they pretend to lead your prayer!

I look around myself and see widespread and pointedly unheralded voter fraud (!), political murderousness (!), and life/career-destroying dirty tricks! I see hijacked mainstreams, rollbacks of middle-class nurturing New Deal social programs, and insentient journalists pretending to be oblivious to it all! I see murdered investigative reporters, mindless network TV programs, rampant censorship, and the easy/ignorant complacency of the very purposely dumb-downed to all of this.

I see docile-herd-producing educational systems, insultingly banal and duplicitous textbooks, and all of this atrocity of patent disrespect is officiated by brain-dead and dispirited reproductionist teachers numbingly teaching too many students with too little resources. I see managed illness not cures, multinational corporations without the remotest civil responsibility, and the business of America as only unrestricted, and therefore historically dangerous, business.

Verily, I see hungry men jailed for stealing metaphoric bread while rich men are rewarded for stealing factories producing same...I see no less than the death of our National soul, the corruption of our finest ideals, and the radical rightwing degradation of all the better principles and ethics to which we should adhere, or why had Abortions gone demonstrably UP during a Bush Crime Family watch by a percentage recorded in double digits?  The answer might surprise... Down in an Obama Administration not so ironically...  I digress.  Trump, currently!

I'm not the only one seeing such. Given a conjectured potential for all the aforementioned, I won't be the only one persecuted for reporting it either, presumably. ...If I am to be persecuted. 

Am I to be persecuted?

Yes, my wife is scared and angry with me for stirring this unsettling mess with my equally scared—but outraged—literary stick. Though fear remains... maybe if I'm just a little bit brave now, raise my voice with others, now... others seeing the same kind of wrongness and egregiousness, NOW...

...Maybe I won't have to be consummately brave (...brave to death!) later on. That's my hope; however, wishful; that's my wish; however, hopeful...

I'll keep you posted. If things start getting dicey for me, if it looks like I'm getting singled out for Special High-Intensity Trouble of a "persecutorial" (sic) nature, I'll try to let you know. I mean there shouldn't be any trouble, you know? It's still America, isn't it?

Or is it? Is it Ameri~ka, and we just have yet to cop to it?

I wonder... "America the beautiful" or "Ameri~ka, the brutish rule"? How hard do you have to squint your eye, reader? How scared are you? How afraid?

Be very afraid, frankly, and speak out. You just might save us all. The country you'd save would be your own.

Read on.