I Like Ike?

I try to spend some time each week mingling with real people. The ones who drive taxis and take their kids to day care and do nails for a living. I do this in real life, hanging out in diners and such, and on the internet. I frequent message boards where I have no interest in the topic of the board and listen.

In the past week or so I saw a thread wherein folks talked about the time in which they would like to live. An amazing number of folks wanted to live back in the fifties. They saw it as a quiet, safe, predictable time. They acknowledged that there was more social control and fear over Sputnik, but all in all thought the illusion that children were all virgins and everybody was nice was worth the cost.

Flash to Our President's recent speech, and all the ones before. The only thing he has to offer is the illusion of fear. "Defeat Them Abroad before they attack us at home. Destroy their bases so that they can't attack us from them. " he said. No one with the tiniest modicum of knowledge or with an IQ bigger than his or her shoe size believes that Iraqis are about to attack us from their bases. Yet he persists in this broad-based fear mongering followed by that smarmy smirk as if he knows something we don't know..

Now these people are not stupid. So when they seem supremely stupid it is time to dig a little deeper. I have been pondering the persistence of this meme in spite of Our President's plunging poll numbers.

It is my growing perception that Mr. Bush is trying to restart the cold war. Cold War II, the "War on Terror", is intended to be an endless period of vague fear, domestic obesience and apparent harmony, and the mass infusion of tax money into military hardware and sketchy ventures. We aren't supposed to ask questions. But we are supposed to pretend that we are happy happy happy.

I said they aren't stupid, and I believe that, but they are more than a little nutty. So I think they believe if they can convey this fear then they can get people in line, get them to act the same. And there is some bizarre connection between this and social control. Ultimately we can all maintain the illusion that everyone is a virgin until marriage, that everyone will happily vote Republican, and that all tax dollars will go into the military.

Ladies, put on your nylons and your lipstick and make hubby those pancakes before he goes off to work.