"I know what thou'rt thinking: 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'
Well, to tell thee the truth, thou art more lovely and more temperate,
and with all these rough winds, I kinda lost track of summer's lease
myself. But being as this is the eye of heaven, and often is his gold
complexion dimm'd clean off, thou've got to ask thyself one question:
'Doth this give life to thee?' Well, doth it, punk?"

http://www.eff.org/files/subpoena.pdf

Though the EFF is right to sound the alarm about privacy issues in connection with government attempts to monitor traffic, their own news stories show how much the government relies on ISPs and web site owners for logged information. I am firmly of the opinion that, given sufficient advance notice, government agents could monitor specific traffic nearly anywhere they want (beyond the peering points where they already attach). They're not backing up the Internet every hour, though, and can't go back in archives to see who visited every site.

Progressivism is ridiculed as fringe in televised, self-fulfilling prophecy. Most recently we saw (or more properly didn't see) the idea of single-payer universal health care made to vanish, and in its place a steadily-diluted concept of a nonspecific "public option" that threatens no insurance company executive's (or shareholder's) profits. In a time of real financial crisis, the simple fact that a single-payer public health plan can deliver much more care per dollar, despite the fact that such plans have already worked well for decades in medicare, VA and overseas, despite the fact that the constantly-derided "socialism" is how we already get an awful lot done in America, Big Money does not want us to entertain the notion as it is dragged, kicking and screaming, toward some sort of reform.

We see two major parties largely under corporate control, working to dismantle our liberties and rob our families, and no third party gaining traction that might serve our interests, a state of affairs never questioned by the MSM--and never allowed by the MSM to be questioned.

We know of looming ecological disaster, yet the MSM offer no solutions beyond the same ol' consumer capitalism, with occasional vague references to green technologies as mere flavoring.

Big Money drives our discourse as far to the right as it can, for the obvious reason: change threatens the status of the plutocrats. They try to keep our eyes glued to our televisions via a constant stream of pap that appeals to our worst impulses, offering token novelty without daring to promote real change.

A continent rich in resources to explore and settle, defended by Stone Age peoples against technologically and numerically superior racists ==> Manifest Destiny ==> The American Dream ==> capitalism's cargo cult ==> the worship of greed ==> supply-side economics ==> the outsourcing of actual work and thought ==> feudalism.

An underclass of white Americans, conditioned to think of themselves as privileged, are beginning to realize that they are merely serfs. That shouting you hear is the sound white privilege makes when it's wounded.

Will an American majority really be willing to accept withdrawal from our shadow wars without the achievement of some clear, if necessarily arbitrary, victory condition? Would we be able to withstand the right-wing propaganda labeling this as defeat, or as a Democratic loss of nerve when victory was sooooo close?

I don't think so--or Obama would already be drawing down. No, we love militarism too much just to let it go.

The same goes for the other issues you've listed. Most Americans might be inclined progressively, if allowed to think, but the MSM won't let them think. We are too easily led to resist when the television tells us how real Amurkans stand. Corporate framing will be too much for us, I'm afraid.

Henry Rollins describes taking on Iggy Pop.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTUgEOcByAU
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDInaAcTl9U
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeC1KV3IeEg

Or prudery. Or schoolyardishness, or whatever it is.

If more Americans were live-and-let-live, more of our politicians would be, too. I'm afraid that our love of guns and bluster is of a piece with our fear of not being goddamned mahnly enough. We have internalized the conservative sense of entitlement without ever being secure in it. We require, or are amused by, constant reinforcement of the myth of the ten-foot-tall Anglo-Saxon American male, in coonskin cap and totin' automatic weapons, who takes giant strides across the globe, kicking women and minorities of all stripes with a rebel yell and whiskey-drool, leaving a trail of radioactive mine tailings, ash and mass graves wherever he goes.

We can't get our heads around the fuzzy concept of men who like sleeping with other men, however often it happens in our most macho of communities: soldiering, cowpunching and incarceration. We'd prefer to believe every case an aberration rather than a fact of life, to be snickered at--and bloodily avenged--rather than accepted.

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"....Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief."
--Macbeth, 5.2.20-22

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