Remember in Rosemary's Baby when she realizes that by dumping a bag of Scrabble tiles onto the floor and rearranging the letters of the name of her elderly, sweet neighbor it turns out he was really a pawn of Satan who conjures the Evil One to impregnate a human and otherwise herald the End of Times? It might be a little like that. Only far more more terrible. Because it's real.
And I know I sound, oh, alarmist and my right wing friends will snort derisively at the sight of my white knees knocking together accompanied by the sounds of a cartoon xylophone, but it really appears that quite soon this country will be very different from the one our parents grew up in. In fact, very different from what was envisioned by those who founded it.
And that change won't come in a blur of brown shirts. It will come with tiny American flags pinned to lapels. It will come with the stern glare of a caring, protective Father and the vacant, soothing touch of a passive, cowed Mother.
It will come while we dither and dote on idols, models and morals. It will come because those that endorse its coming are everything George Orwell said they are and everything the Bible says they are: sheep who make way for the rise of the big brothers, the false prophets and the anti-Christs.
And the assembled facts say the infrastructure for this change has already been laid right in front of our chewing mouths and glassy eyes and "oh-you're-just-another-mincing-liberal-it-could-never-happen-here!!" attitudes, its crystalline structure expanding---doubling and doubling again---to create the perfect environment for a capitalist/fascist regime to thrive and that's not being alarmist and here are the pieces. Let's spill them onto the floor:
a wall to keep out "immigrants and terrorists";
surveillance cameras on every corner;
an ideologically aligned Supreme Court;
a president who signs statements nullifying the legislation that has just passed;
a television-dependent, consumer-obsessed population;
the concentration of information outlets under a single authority;
the marginalization of the middle class and the busting of unions;
the suspension of habeas corpus;
denying the people access to information about government activity by asserting "executive privilege";
the blurring of the lines between science and religion;
a faceless, terrifying enemy;
a unilaterally prosecuted War Without End.
Taken at their face, these are disparate elements, each one of them brought into being through reasonably articulate agents, trumpeted within hallowed and respected institutions. And each of them has come under fire as deeply flawed, inefficient or plain weird.
But spill those tiles onto the floor. Put them all together. See what they spell.