re Amerikaka (NP?)

[Doug Millison]

Nice try, Mike Weaver, but  it's either the Bush way or the highway on
Pynchon-L these days.  Watching the US slip ever farther away from
democratic principles and luxuriating in its own internal propaganda as the
US consolidates its one-superpower hegemony, it becomes easier to imagine
the sort of drift that must have taken over right-thinking and even
intelligent people in Nazi Germany.  What they were doing must have seemed
right and obvious every step along the way. Pokler couldn't see it coming,
let himself get entangled, he never really had a chance the way the movies
hooked him in of course, realized too late what crimes he helped commit.
Let's just keep flying that flag, shopping in the mall, glued to the Tube,
back to normal but don't relax that vigilance because you can't be too
careful about those "swarthy Arab males" and anti-American ideas.  If it
weren't for those pesky starving millions of Afghans we could easily enough
slip into a long run for this America Strikes Back movie, let the bombing
go on indefinitely (as it has in Iraq this past decade) with the occasional
Special Ops Movie of the Week. But I'm afraid the starving Afghans are not
going to let Americans go easily into the dark dream this time.