arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

It is evening, not long after dark. I’m walking fast, and they are walking slowly, arm in arm. A young Hispanic couple, with all of their lives ahead of them. And yet there is something terribly sad and forlorn about them.

I step into the street to go around them. The young man gives me a desolate look, which imprints itself on my heart.

When I return home, my friend asks if I saw anything. Just a sad young couple I say. How do you know they were sad? She asks. Because it was written all over them, I reply--in their demeanor and gait, in the way their arms were entwined around each other. They looked like lost souls.

"Why were they sad?" she asks. "Because they live here," I respond matter of factly. And the terrible truth of it hangs silently in the air.

The social environment in America is politically embodied in the right-wing juggernaut of the Bush Administration. There is an extra swagger in Bush’s step these days, after his "Top Gun" jet landing on the aircraft carrier named the Abraham Lincoln. Tellingly, for the first time in American history, a US President donned military attire, thereby blurring the President's civilian and military roles.

"We are going to become a mega-banana republic," declared Norman Mailer, one of America’s leading writers and a strident voice of what’s left of the Left in the US. "We’re in a pre-fascist atmosphere here in America."

That isn’t quite accurate. America is not becoming a fascist state; it is becoming a necrotic state. Throughout the country, even in small towns, the minority who are still inwardly alive have the disquieting sense of living in a vast necropolis.

While the Bush Administration continues to preach American democracy at the barrel of a gun to the rest of the world, democracy in America has become a sham. The Democrats, who became indistinguishable from Republicans under Clinton, have abandoned the poor and working class to their own devices in this rapacious country.

The Democrats fell into line behind Bush’s militarism Before Gulf War II for fear of being called unpatriotic. Now they are falling into line for another huge tax-cut for the wealthiest fat cats out of unprecedented weakness and lack of message.

As the economy continues to slide, more and more working people are losing jobs and benefits, increasing numbers of children are falling through the fraying social safety net, and even the most decent folks are turning hard-hearted. The dark forces aren’t winning in America; they’re mopping up.

A leading Democratic activist in California said recently: "I believe our guys have been cowardly. We’ve paid for our strategic missteps and lack of outspokenness…and Bush gets to take over the world."

Only a political junkie can fail to see that the problem goes much deeper than "strategic missteps." Right after Gulf War I, some indiscernible threshold of willful neglect and uncaring was crossed. That’s when America lost its soul.

The truth is, this is a country in which "the people" died more than a decade ago. That’s why the reptiles that run the Republican Party get just about everything they want. What’s to stop them?

Can an empire that has imploded remain an empire? Not for long, but a superpower in its death throes can do an awful lot of damage in the world before its cancerous culture stops spreading and its military stops kicking.

Jesus said, "let the dead bury their dead." Spiritually speaking, 1st century Judea must have been a lot like 21st century America.

Living peoples, tend to your souls, or else humanity will indeed perish "not with a bang but a whimper."

Martin LeFevre