...is Charlie Patton's take on walking "Down That Dirt Road."
Bob Dylan echoes the sentiment: "Yes, I'm walkin' down the highway/With my suitcase in my hand..." (from Freewheeling, 1963).
I'd change a couple things about Dylan's version, though. For one thing, I'd never try to walk any significant distance carrying a suitcase. That's a good way to cripple yourself. And I'd change his tag line to, "I feel just like I'm walkin' through some unknown land."
Or as Michael Moore put it, "Dude, Where's My Country?"
It's hard to recognize the dear old U.S.A. these days, no matter whether you're driving (or walking) down one of its excellently engineered highways or watching it unravel on the evening news.
And it's impossible to describe what's happened to us over the course of the last 50 years without using the word "fascist," but launching that incendiary monosyllable causes all kinds of trouble. It triggers images of Hitler and the piles of rotting bodies being bulldozed into mass graves at Dachau.
On top of that, the word is chronically misused by people who have no idea what they're talking about. That includes everyone from adolescents who respond with "God, you're such a fascist," to a parent who has forbidden marijuana consumption in the house, to that daily passenger on the political short bus, Jonah Goldberg (a devotee of newspeak if there ever was one).
Furthermore, we're not living under a fascist government (yet). Harry Reid could never have pulled off his brilliant hijacking of the Senate two days ago, for purposes of getting a bunch of deadbeats to cough up the goods, under a fascist dictatorship, any more than the thousands of kids who walked out of classes all over the country yesterday to protest the war could have gotten away with it if the neocons had squads of storm troopers they could mobilize.
But...is the current administration a fascist enterprise? Totally. Adamantly. Enthusiastically. And the Bush administration happens to be running things right now. Its allies, hirelings, goons, and media mouthpieces, while they don't have total control, are calling all the shots.
So yeah, the U.S. today is a fascist country.
I don't want to get embroiled in a definition of fascism here, especially when other people have already adequately done so. Seattle-based journalist David Neiwert has masterfully dealt with the subject at his blog Orcinus, in an article which draws at length on a noteworthy structural analysis of fascism produced recently by a little-known Canadian lawyer, Paul Bigio.
Bigio emphasizes the role played by monopoly capitalism in every country where fascism has arisen. Indeed, it's not outlandish to say that in modern times fascism grows out of hyper-concentrated monopoly capitalism as surely as a dandelion grows from its root. It's the inevitable political manifestation of a specific set of economic conditions.
But how much of this does a person have to understand in order to realize what's happening to the U.S. today? Probably not much. How much do these little tykes protesting the Iraq war in Minnesota yesterday know about monopoly capitalism or the relationship between modern political tyrannies and mass media?
It doesn't matter. They're smart enough to know when they're being lied to, and their instincts are healthy enough to tell them when they're being manipulated. How sad it is to realize that as they begin to get ground down by life's vicissitudes, they'll change, like the people of all the generations before them.
Since I retired, I don't miss the classroom, but I sure miss the kids. I think I'll take a long walk, and maybe get re-acquainted with some of them.
And if I do -- when I do -- I'll explain to them what's happening in terms they'll understand, the way we framed things back during Vietnam. At that time, the conventional wisdom was that the life of the country, its government, commerce, and culture, were no longer controlled by human agency.
"It's a machine," we told each other, "and it's out of control."
You don't have to recognize that it's an analogy to see the truth in it.
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