back in the w.r.a.

The Weimar Republic of America's huge late-summer fascist rally was a roaring success, drawing nearly 100,000 faithful stooges of Murdoch's Fox News Network and the Texas billionaire oilmen Charles and David Koch. They drank bottled water and were regaled by the pieties and platitudes of American fascism's star celebrities, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, as they enjoyed the perfect weather of a late-August Saturday afternoon.

The weather, the time of day, the location, and the season of the year all conspired to help to perfect the momentous occasion, cleverly (and cynically) scheduled to occupy the same date and geographical space of Martin Luther King's most famous speech 47 years earlier.

The fascist triumph was, of course, also aided and abetted by the incompetence, cowardice, corruption, and dishonesty of the Obama administration, which has responded to the challenge of governing an out-of-control federal bureaucracy and war machine, and a civilian economy undergoing the worst economic crisis in 80 years, in the worst possible ways.

Since taking office, Obama has ramped up one war in Afghanistan, ponders launching another in Yemen, delivered an anemic and undersized economic stimulus whose funds remain partially unspent, and refused to decisively confront the predatory cannibalism of Wall Street. He makes the moderate Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War and spurred Congress into building the interstate highway system, look like a flaming radical.

For the semi-conscious tools who comprise the mob, the dark president with the African-sounding name remains the object of their resentful attention. If they had even a glimmer of how completely they're being gamed by fascist billionaires whose interests run counter to their own, they might appreciate the irony of yesterday's celebration of fascist ideals. As Malcolm X once told his own followers, "You've been had. You've been took. You've been hoodwinked. You've been bamboozled, led astray, run amuck."

However, no such self-awareness penetrates the dim brains of the tea party crowd, and Benito Mussolini would have been envious of the way a few self-interested American plutocrats have spent millions of dollars and employed modern techniques of brainwashing through sophisticated mass media to produce the effect we saw yesterday. They haven't yet seized the power that will enable them to further enrich themselves totally unchallenged, but they're poised on the brink.

Today I can write this kind of stuff without worrying about a knock on the door. I don't live in fear of being taken downtown to have my fingers broken so that I can no longer type subversive messages from the land of the conscious, or being made the subject of fun and games with electricity.

That won't come until 2013.