Another Bush inauguration gives Americans cause to take French lessons.

There is a considerable difference between French liberty and Saxon liberty within the confines of the United States of America. Some call that difference "the revolution within the revolution." I became acutely aware of the widening chasm between the two at the outset of the First Bush War on Iraq. That caused me to revert from my dim-witted Reaganite attitude, to active independent dissent. Fortunately for me and and my similars, independent dissent is tolerated in this Great Nation of Ours, the Sole Superpower of Civilization upon whom a physical attack is an attack on Civilization per se.

Yes, a dissenter might be beaten up or murdered by super-patriotic Americans every once in awhile, but that is the exception to modern American toleration. There are other ways of dealing with social rebellion. Firing or keeping the lone wolf unemployed or otherwise interfering with his life is the standard operating procedure nowadays, the domestic equivalent of foreign embargoes and international sanctions.

Of course literal dissent is effectually censored by the privately-owned free press, which is, as a matter of course, devoted to the governmental protection of its multi-media conglomeration. That is to say, the mass media of the masses is out to save its own masses, particularly its fat mass. Thus has professional journalism become analogous to organized prostitution.

Truly independent street walkers are few and far between. Most street walkers are hustling for the free sidewalk rags, which in reality want to be mainstream, despite their counter-cultural pretensions. Indeed, if the dissenting party is not a celebrity or a defecting member of the power elite, or if no infamous crime has been committed coincidental to his or her dissenting manifesto, truly independent dissent, no matter how truthful it might be, will not see the light of day in the Establishment Press or in the counter-cultural imitators. It might be posted on the Internet: such a release is tantamount to micturating in a virtually infinite ocean for all the effect it will have on reality. In fact, the naked truth has become so irrelevant to prestige in the United States, where mediated image is everything, that it is considered downright insulting in most social precincts.

I was having a Bass Ale at Wilsons on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as bombs and missiles rained down on Baghdad at the outset of the First Bush War on Iraq. Wilsons was a popular night club and restaurant frequented by Jewish-American princesses, slick meat-market cruisers, Yuppies, celebrities, a liberal number of ex-Hippies, and a few aliens such as myself. Coke was the drug of choice and there was plenty of that to go around; the brokerage employees were outraged by the mandatory testing rules, and had trouble staying awake for 16 hour days as overtime-exempt 'independent contractors" after testing was mandated; but there were ways to get around the rules. All eyes were trained on Wilsons' jumbo television screens on the first bombing night. The spectacular air attack was a rare exception to the usual sports events displayed. Almost all the viewers, including a large group of suited security-industry workers from the World Trade Center offices downtown, cheered in concert with each brilliant burst and resounding thud, as if the home team had just made a touchdown.

"Level that (expletive-deleted) hell hole!" yelled one of the security workers.

"Turn it into a parking lot!" shouted another.

"They ought to nuke it and get it over with!" yelled yet another.

"Hey, buddy, what do you think of President Bush (Senior) now?" asked the man to my right, then took a long pull off his Budweiser - the orthodox beer among Yuppies.

"Do you really want to know?"

"Sure, what do you think of him?"

"I think he's a monster with a long career of sponsoring human rights violations, and he's a mass murderer as well. He and his two boys, Junior and Jeb, should be serving life sentences with Reagan."

"Why you (expletive deleted) S.O.B.!" the man yelled, clenched his fist and waved it in my face. "If I were not a civil rights lawyer, I'd bash your (expletive deleted) head in with a baseball bat right now. If you don't like your country, move the hell to, to... to (expletive deleted) France!"

He was really fuming, his face turning beet red. I turned away and ignored him, focusing on my mug of ale. I kept my peace, but I wanted to say he would be a traitor to the principles this Great Nation of Ours was founded on if it were not for his freedom to express his opinion, and for me to express mine, without being physically assaulted with baseball bats and the like. At least according to some of the founding fathers, several of whom were fond of the principles forged by the French Revolution; and who, by the way, were not afraid to say so in their own country, and to stay and fight for same. But I kept my peace that night. I left Wilsons thinking that fighting for civil and human rights had become a losing battle in America since Kennedy was murdered by the right-wingers, and Johnson messed up.

Not too many people were in favor of free speech that night, not if it was opposed to the First Bush War on Iraq. The tenants of buildings along Broadway between 72nd and 86th Streets showered a small group of anti-war protestors with excrement, urine, eggs - a few bottles were also hurled down from above, objects that could seriously injure or kill a marcher below. The scene reminded me of a story I had read about a few Germanic tribes way back when. When the Christian overlords were overthrown from time to time, the 'barbarians' would revert to their primitive religion, parade about the village with an effigy of their tribal god. Anyone who failed to salute the patriotic god was executed on the spot - he was not given the choice of exile instead.

More than a decade later, on 9/11, I thought of those guys from the World Trade Center, how they had screamed bloody murder for the total destruction of Baghdad from the comfortable bar at Wilsons. I wondered if they stilled worked in the towers when the planes hit, and if so, whether or not they had survived the shocking and awesome attack. To many dissenters against the ravages of neo-liberal globalism and neofascist neoconservatism, Manhattan's Twin Peaks symbolized the military-industrial complex's binary ethic under the Zurvanist god of war and money, an ethic which really presented no choice but to either buy or buy, and to war or otherwise compete for money ad infinitum.

The extremely unwise U.S. president claimed that the towers were not a legitimate military target, compared the momentous incident to the Japanese attack on Peal Harbor, then gave the Purple Cross or its civilian equivalent to the victims of the "cowardly attack".

Not that I wanted the real towers to fall. Nor did I want those who had screamed for the First Bush War on Iraq to die. But I did wonder if the one-god's justice balances out those sort of ungodly death wishes, just as natural disasters in one part of the world are balanced by natural disasters in other parts. Little did I know, when I was a hungry, unemployed young man watching the foundations being laid for the World Trade Center, that I would eventually stand on the top of one of them with my second wife, and, some time later, watch them burn and fall from afar.

9/11 brought to mind the scene described in Revelations: the merchants stood offshore, watched the city burn and wept for their lost fortunes. I was told by a friend of mine, a Moody Bible school grad, that Revelations was inapplicable because the president was not a Jew, and that the apocalyptic event has to take place in Israel some time after the Temple is rebuilt.

"But," I said, "the president is a frustrated Old Testament Jew, not a loving Christian-Jew, and he might be the false messiah who appears before the Temple is built. The Quranic version as to place and combatants might be the truer version." That really got my friend going, and, after cursing Muhammad, he pulled out his Bible and started citing scripture.

France, as a place for American dissidents to take up exile, came up again when I objected to the rush to the Second Bush War on Iraq, which was planned before the second Bush took office. The third Bush is now training for the presidency, presenting himself in several cameo appearances overseas as the world's most compassionate observer of natural disasters. President Bush overestimated the greed of his constituents while quietly enjoying his gentleman's ranch; when he saw that his stinginess fell far short of the charitable public mood, he seized the opportunity, as Condaleeza Rice said in her confirmation hearings, to present a compassionate image to the world. Shortly after Governor Jeb Bush returned to Florida from his Asian tour, he announced his new budget, devised, he said, to conform to true conservatism, to protect "our" future: state health care benefits to poor working folk would be eliminated; however, the budget proposed is actually larger than the existing budget, for more welfare must be provided to the affluent and rich. Once Jeb Bush is elected president, no doubt he would include Iran in the war on terrorism, the war to free the world from its plural prejudices whether the world likes it or not. Take heed: once Iraq's Shias are empowered by the second Bush blitz for "democracy", the ayatollas will rejoice at Qum and Nijaf.

Yet again and again have I been called a traitor for honestly speaking my mind. One superpatriot and friend, a heroic policeman who has a low tolerance for ambiguity and who tends to wax enthusiastically about America's "superior northern European culture", kindly recommended that I take up permanent residence in France. This time I thought seriously about doing so despite the rumor that Americans are charged double in France until they learn the language - I love my mother tongue so much that I have difficulty learning foreign languages, although I do like their musical qualities.

I was not so angry with the president himself this time, but I was terribly disappointed by the unwisdom of the people who supported such an extremely unwise man and therefore the forces of darkness and corporate board tribalism pulling his strings behind the scenes. A number of the supporters were my friends, and they still are, their support of the worst president in United States history being the only mark against them. Part of being a friend is overlooking faults in your friends, is it not? But what if those faults will eventually ruin them and their families? One should say something, right?

To make matters worse, a man shouted me down the other day even though I had done or said nothing at all. "You (expletive deleted) traitor!" Someone standing next to me in a coffee shop had called the president a "Texas jackass". His remark was attributed to me by the rude young man - he works for a bank. A friend of mine who witnessed the episode jokingly told me that the government was setting up jackass courts to deal with people like me.

I thought seriously of renouncing my citizenship shortly thereafter. I wondered if some other country would take me in; or, if not, whether I might be held without benefit of due process at some undisclosed location, perhaps offshore in Cuba, where George and Fidel tend to violate the human rights of all those who are not for their versions of full democracy for the power elite. Bush, with 550 prisoners, outscores Castro in absolute numbers of political prisoners held in Cuba. At least Castro gives dissidents mock trials in kangaroo courts. By the way, editors at the Miami Herald have come down against the regressive U.S. repression at Guantanamo, and have urged "the public" to do something about it, but the public loves its brutal strong man and cares only about its own mass, particularly the flabby side.

I even thought of defecting to Cuba, where, notwithstanding its defects, it is not dishonorable to be dirt poor, and where the duty to work comes with the right to a job instead of the right to sleep in doorways and be generally despised by the incredibly stupid affluent people who, even after the Great Asian Tsunami, comfort their unconsciously bad conscience by telling themselves poor and homeless people want to be poor and homeless, as well as mentally and physically ill.

I would be a voluntary exile in Cuba, I supposed. But I decided against it because I figured my chances of becoming a Yummie were quite slim given the language barrier. Surely my fondness for critical philosophy and free speech would land me in a Cuban prison in short order - an excellent place to compose a libertarian manifesto.

"Fight or flight", that is the crucial question after the question, "To be or not to be", is answered, of course in favor of Being instead of Nothingness. Why go into voluntary exile? I asked myself. Why run? Why not stay and fight? Perhaps I could write an incoherent manifesto and study nuclear bomb-making instructions on the Internet. No, that is not my style. I should at least study Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Thoreau again, and be a one-man homeless protestor if I and my protest is not co-opted by the Mainstream - smart godfathers and Columbian drug kingpins try to hire rebels instead of killing them. After all, given the pace of imperial globalization, wherever an exile winds up, he shall soon find the same fate he ran away from, just as the Arab found Death waiting for him at the next oasis.

Nevertheless, I am still thinking about exiling myself to France. A Frenchwoman has told me all about the sociable life in France, and I am tempted to defect. I may visit the embassy and see if I can get some sort of sanctuary, perchance in a monastery with an Internet hookup. My second choice is Germany; a choice that does not seem so ironic when one understands that, due to some old race-mixing and migrations, there are more Saxons in some parts of France than there are in Saxony. Still, there is a considerable difference between French liberty and Saxon liberty in the United States. Some call that difference "the revolution within the revolution." Quebec is another option I shall consider: I understand Franco-American Canadians are marrying defectors to save them from Anglo-Saxon Americans.