Speak softly and carry a big dictum.

"The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool.”

—H.L. Mencken

It is a fait accompli — the cat can no longer look at the king. It was dusk, the sun a dull socket in the overcast sky, as I pruned the concertina wire lining the contours of my country estate. While an effective deterrent against disreputables, my razor-sharp abatis continues to offer a hearty invitation to suicidal woodland creatures, desperate to snag and tear themselves, screeching and sagging, on the barbs. I must spend a half day each week yanking the unfortunate creatures off the wire, or risk breaching my warranty. But this evening, I could not help but notice a new and heretofore-unremarked attribute shared by the expired voles, wrens and corncrakes whose remains I was transmitting into my wheelbarrow. These birds on a wire were wires.

The little men had finally run me in, the dogs. Oh piteous Christ! There is no depth of ingenuity to which the military-industrial Moloch will not sink. I gently splayed a dead goldfinch in my palm, his breast the lovely color of buffed brass. But his little beak but barely concealed the dimpled surface of a microphone, set into his throat. The iris of his left eye intermittently blinked red, like the timer on a coffee machine. The wings, when manipulated, sounded like a wind-up toy wound backwards.

I have already revealed far too much of the methodology afoot here. This, I have seen in the news this week, is not a pastime for which many allowances are made by our grand high mucky-mucks. A ridiculously successful young defense contractor with an Oahu villa and all the trappings of a spiritually fulfilling American life fled to Hong Kong, taking with him a treasure trove of evidence indicating the Stasi of East Germany never collapsed. Rather, it shaved off its mustache, hopped the Concorde, and slipped into the crowd somewhere around Fort Meade, Maryland.

Like that of a necromancer, the NSA’s black magic is best practiced on a moonless night, upon a desolate wasteland, and preferably against the walking dead. James Clapper, a gray, rumpled, dwarven creature in a position of some responsibility, respects the zombified data golems otherwise known as the American public enough to shield them from this truth. Having spent the last year lying to Congress, Clapper is doing his best to fill the NSA’s Brobdingnagian Utah compound with a minimum of fuss – you wouldn’t bother yourself with how your cat fills his litter box, would you?

Clapper is only one little man of many in this rainbow coalition, assisted by a supine, warmongering media obsessed only with discrediting Snowden, by a bloodthirsty class of senators obsessed with dark, faceless enemies, by the well-scrubbed, grinning robber barons of Silicon Valley, by an entire class of born-again liberal police statists, and by an America that simply doesn’t have the energy to stop its collapse into a heap of bloody rags and greasy garbage.

I most assuredly don’t. I dumped that wheelbarrow right over, told myself I never had a wheelbarrow, and walked home whistling a tune I didn’t know.

General Gandhi

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