Frog in a Pot (or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the War on Terror)

These are exciting times in the United States. Here's an update:

• We armed Afghanistan and the Middle East in the Seventies and Eighties to control the oil and fight the U.S.S.R. We lie to everyone about it.
• The U.S.S.R. crumbles, leaving a triumphant America as the world's sole nuclear and gastrointestinal threat.
• The United States polices the world, starting with a total military strike against Iraq when it tries to control Kuwaiti oil. The Iraqis, terrified by around-the-clock CNN coverage, shit in their burkas.
• Arabs, resentful over United States interference in the region and its constant backing of Israel, try to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. They succeed, sort of - they fill the basement with smoke.
• After a series of attacks against various U.S. targets, including the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, Al Qaeda commandeers four commercial airliners and slams them into three commercial/ political targets in the United States. George Bush reads "My Pet Goat" to preschoolers.
• George Bush declares a war on terror.
• The Patriot Act gives the President the ability to do whatever he wants, including wire taps, random arrests, and body cavity searches without a warrant or reason.
• George Bush drops bombs on empty deserts in Afghanistan.
• George Bush attacks and conquers Iraq. It takes 45 minutes.
• Iraq erupts into a civil war. George Bush calls it "democracy."
• George Bush taps the phones of everyone in the U.S. From this, intelligence gathers countless transcripts of phone sex calls, which are then labeled "Confidential" for "National Security Reasons."
• George Bush decides he wants to have the power to torture people.

Um, what was that last thing? TORTURE PEOPLE? Can this really happen in the United States of America? Check it out:

Here's my question: Didn't we invade and destroy Iraq because they had a cruel dictator that tortured and killed people, including his own citizens?

What exactly is the difference between Saddam Hussein and George Bush? Facial hair?

The baby steps toward fascism in this country have recently become ardent strides, and that terrifies me. What once seemed so inconceivable in the United States in the late forties when George Orwell wrote "1984" is quickly becoming a stunning reality. Ask yourself: how exactly does a democracy become a fascist state?

As always, I think of one example: the Star Wars prequels.

There are many, many things wrong with the Star Wars prequels. One could spill endless ink on the Jar Jars, the sub-retard romance, and Yoda jumping around like a frog and screaming like a deranged Fozzie Bear. But George Lucas (aka The Jowl) got one thing right: democracies give way to fascism through the threat of terror.

Palpatine was a politician in the truest sense: he was a manipulative little jack off. Slowly, he implanted lies about the threat the Jedi posed for democracy. He enforced stricter laws on the governing of the people, all the while using war as the justification. And then, before anyone understood what was happening, he turned into this:

Suddenly law and justice went out the window with Samuel L. Jackson's hand.

How terrifying that there might be a day quite soon when we will look back with regret at our inaction and ambivalence.

It reminds me of the story of the frog in a pot of water. There the frog sits, happy and content. Slowly, the burner beneath the pot of water is turned up. The water temperature rises, although invisibly to the frog; being cold-blooded, his body temperature rises with the temperature around him. Soon, the temperature of the water becomes so hot that the frog boils to death without even realizing it.

If that water had become hot instantly, the frog's natural reaction would have been to jump out of the pot and into safety. But because the temperature change was gradual, he never noticed anything at all until it was too late.

Feel that? The temperature is rising, and the emperor is changing clothes for dinner.