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Oilboy George: The Lone Danger rides again!
Harold Hark
8 November 2002

"Slowly, the sleek shape of Air Force One is revealed, and suddenly there's the President, ascending the steps, reaching the top and turning for a final wave. The whole picture is framed perfectly: the lone leader and the silver bird, all bathed in morning sunlight."Jonathan Freedland, The Natural.

Can't you just picture Dubbya then calling out: "Hi-yo Silver! Away-y-y-y...!" as he mounts his trusty steed, Air Force One, for the next stage-managed bamboozle of the gullible galoots.

Well, it worked. Oilboy George got the last laugh. He knew Umeruhcans would be suckers for anyone pretending to wear a stetson and twirl a six-gun.

You've got to hand it to the right wing. They have mastered the art of huckstering the gullible. As there is little else on their plate, apart from amassing money at the cost of a flourishing civilisation, it's no wonder.

With the Democrats floundering in a policy-free no man's land, unable to represent any constituency effectively, it looks like two years is all the Republicans will need to turn the country into a tableau vivant of the Dick and Jane version of the Bible.

The parallels to Australia are positively chilling. Without September 11, George W. Bush would have been on his way to a one term debacle. Without Tampa, John Howard would have been enjoying his retirement as the worst PM in history.

Both regimes call upon simplified interpretations of Christianity to mould their worldlet views. Dubbya is born again, while John Ashcroft is right out of the Spanish Inquisition. The Howard Government takes ideological sustenance from the infamous Lyons Forum.

Both regimes are about to put into place repressive laws that will remove the right to dissent: Dubbya's Homeland Security bill and L'il Dubbya's ASIO terror bill.

The success of these two simple men can be attributed to one of humanity's most despicable traits: cunning. It's what people who rely on their animal brain do best. In fact, it's about all they can do. In movies they usually have leering grins, missing teeth, beard-approaching stubble, oily, messy hair, and so forth.

It is our misfortune that the Dubbya's are also equipped with impaired frontal lobes, which allow them to scheme and connive without the benefit of moral reasoning.

But they have been aided immeasurably by another parallel: weak opposition. In the United States the Democrats refused to stand for their traditionally liberal (human) values while offering washed up or ineffectual candidates. Australia's Labor party beat the Democrats to it last year.

It was precisely the weakness of opposition parties that led to Hitler's grip on power in 1933. Their capitulations were followed in short order by a majority of the German people. Those who had fought hard to prevent Hitler's ascension, caved in from hopelessness and despair almost overnight.

Dubbya will not be annexing the Sudetenland, but he'll sure as hell send the sons of his supporters to die in his bid to annex Iraq's oil reserves.

There is nothing now to stop Bush from waging his war on Iraq. He's already shooting Hellfire missiles on sovereign nations to take out suspected terrorists and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity. One of Umeruhca's mantras has always been that life comes cheap in Asia.

Howard will now join Bush in his January oil rustling expedition, and so will our sons. Hatred of Umeruhca will escalate; terrorism will become a multinational Jihad to the death. Retired head of Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, says 9/11 was the beginning of World War III, while Singapore's Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan, says it could last for 10 to 20 years.

Australia will become the pariah of Asia; hell, it already is. If there weren't any sleeper cells in Oz before now, there will be soon. Otherwise peaceful Muslims (and others) will heed the deeds of ASIO and the words of Mahathir and the Indonesian Government and decide that Australia is indeed not a safe place for them to be. As there is nowhere else for most of them to go, their anger and its consequences will ensure that the thugs in ASIO will to have a head-kicking good time in the future.

As far as Alaska is concerned, the Lone Danger already owns that big patch of beautiful wilderness covering enough oil to keep him and his rich for eternity. (Don't tell him, and especially the Tonto's who voted for him, but eternity is no longer open ended. It's been rolled back to a finite date, say around the time fossil fuel pollution closes down the world.)

He'll reduce taxes for the rich and lay the burden of the reduction on the poor, whom the Republicans normally regard as fit only to serve their interests. This after all, is the modern day Masters and Servants party.

The invasion of Iraq may have happened even if the Democrats had kept the Senate, but nothing will now save the Supreme Court. It will become a Christian-based conservative body and the toast of the nineteenth century. You can bet that abortion will once again be on the agenda, and attempts will be made to make it illegal. [See Rosemary Neill: Sneak attacks in war against women.] Born-again Christians don't like their doormats to be independent, preferring them obsequious and dressed in calico 'n' gingham. The upcoming conflagration has not been dubbed "The war of fundamentalisms" for nothing.

The rights of thinking Umeruhcans will be wound back to zip with Homeland Security. Like their counterparts in Germany in the 30s, they will either have to flee the country--because whatever they have said up to now will be used against them--or, if they have kept quiet all along, will have to eat their outrage and endure. The silent majority, who put the Republicans there in the first place, will have nothing to fear because they are the mindless swill that historically support demagogues and tyrants.

Australians will find themselves behind the same razor wire with L'il Dubbya's ASIO terror bill.

With this election, the trend towards global repression by global profiteers is clearly unstoppable in the foreseeable future. It will have to exhaust itself over time. What the world will be like then does not bear thinking about.

The only alternative would appear to be active resistance, because the free use of words in dissent will soon be prohibited. [See Hermann Goering quote at top of SCATT home page.] The terror laws of both countries, no doubt based on the successful experiences of the Soviet Union, the Nazis and their satellite states, will prevail. Articles like the one you are reading right now will be seen, not as examples of liberty, egalite, fraternite, but as unpatriotic treason. They will be suppressed. Commentators in Umeruhca have already been denounced as traitors for daring to question Dubbya's belligerence. In Australia, the effete Foreign Minister, Little Lord Downer, intimated months ago that the opposition leader, Simon Crean, was an appeaser of Saddam Hussein for Crean's policy of conducting any war through the United Nations, rather than the Howard Government's gung ho subservience to a US unilateral attack.

The trouble with active resistance is that modern technology has rendered it impossible. Gone are the days of resistance fighters like France's Jean Moulin. With us still, however, and stronger than ever, are the likes of Moulin's torturer and executioner, Klaus Barbie. Barbie's ideological descendants are being recruited by ASIO as we speak.

There is only one hope for mankind in all of this, and it's the stupid economy. A global depression will get the Silent Majority gibbering quick smart. (Although Dubbya is counting on a prolonged war to revitalise the economy.) Umeruhca's economy is going down the tubes; some say they are heading into the worst recession since 1929. Bush has overseen this. The corporate scandals will not end, and sooner or later, people are going to remember that he has been in the thick of it. Unemployment is rising. Up to now, those poor folk who have had to work two jobs at minimum wage just to be able to keep the car they call home, haven't had the time to complain. The Republicans are hoping most of them will commit suicide before it dawns on them to rebel. And they probably will.

But if the economy levels out, and if the war against Iraq doesn't blow the powder keg of international hate sky high, then the people who voted for Bush this time around may still reconsider in 2004. Because they are going to find the next two years ugly as hell. But for the Oilboy Emperor to be overthrown, the Democrats will have to find themselves again. As will Labor in Australia. At the moment, globalisation has rendered both parties irrelevant. They have become neither parties of the people nor parties of business. As such, thus represent no one. Until they understand that globalisation has to include the ability of all people to prosper and not just the business-run markets, there is no hope for them, or the rest of us.

Perhaps, come 2004, The Lone Danger will look around and see the mess he has made of the world. And when he says to the Tonto's who he hopes will re-elect him, "Well, Kimosabe's, it looks like we've got a hard fight ahead of us", let us pray that the Tonto's reply: "What's this 'we' shit, horse's ass."

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