I know I've been offline for a while, but Office of Homeland Security for crissakes? 

An American blogger in Sweden, somewhat more alert than I, astutely asked, "why ever did they pick such an Orwellian name?".  Why indeed.  George Orwell's 1984 was fiction, but Rumsfeld and his boys are as non-fiction as good ol' American beef on the hoof -- and as morally dumb.  Problem is, they've taken over the abbatoir, and they've been running it for quite a few years now. 

I certainly do not want to sound un-American (the Committee on Un-American Activities may be revived any moment), nor un-patriotic; and I certainly do not want to allow any passion -- no matter how righteous it may feel to me -- to dissuade me from the only motivation I will ever want -- love.  Therefore, it is love for that man (whose image appears on the right) that makes me bring up a tacky topic like assassination at the awkward moment of a nation's self-vindication.  He was my hero.  I was five when he was assassinated. 

I don't like this topic; it gives me a headache.  It makes me cry.  I tell myself John F. Kennedy was probably just as crooked as the people who killed him; I mean there was the Illinois votes scandal, and there was his rum-running father -- or so the story goes.  And I use cliches like, 'you live by the sword, you die by it,' or 'you play with fire you get burned.'  Ugh.  Eventually, I do admit that I'm just trying to minimize the loss, to impose on the Fates some balance which makes them less unfair.  It is a touching effort but fruitless, and I cry. 

Or maybe the fruit of rehashing these emotions is the tears.  They uncover me; it is how I know who I really am.  Yes, even after 38 years, there are waves of saddness yet to spend themselves in sobs and blurred vision... 

He was ours, he belonged to us here in New England and, more specifically, here in Massachusetts.  He talked like us; they made fun of him for it.  And he was Catholic like me and my family.  He came from that heritage of veils and genuflections, of candles, rosary beads, and sad-faced statues, and he came from an era of Friday afternoon confessions that was emblematic of being Catholic in the Sixties.  Yet he lived playfully.  He lived on the beach, on Cape Cod, a place I have loved since before I was five -- it may be that I love the Cape simply because the Kennedys lived there. 

In the world I knew, President Kennedy was my remarkable incongruity, a saving grace.  My world was one in which everybody like me was defined by saddness and unfair suffering; by the age of five I had already spent two years in hell, but that is another story.  He was like me, except he was happy, always having fun, laughing, and never suffering.  Even when I was five, I knew, because of Jack Kennedy, that life didn't have to be the way I had known it, he was my proof that life really was better than I knew.  His assassination, the way it happened, and the lies surrounding it all, created in me that cynical little man you see in all these words.  The death of my President re-crushed my hope. 

The black operations conducted to assassinate John F. Kennedy were not the beginning of such activity inside the US government, but they certainly were the most ambitious up to that time.  That activity is continuing, which brings me back to the topic at hand; the trust of government. 

The plain logic, obvious to anyone who has ears is that Osama bin Laden is the best thing to ever happen to American domestic intelligence -- it frankly terrifies me.  The terrorist Osama, the homeless rabble-rousing waif, cannot terrorize me one tenth as much as the American government can, in its crimes and its espionage against its own citizens, set now to begin a new era of expansion, and folks like Rumsfeld will, despicably, use the September 11 atrocities to justify their excesses.  They can't let pass unexploited such a profitible opportunity to gain unreasonable power and centralize authority. 

Their eagerness is nauseating.  Instead of dashing to the fore to take their places in a new lineup of power-grubbing haters of civil liberties, it would be more appropriate to the realities of the day for them to at least appear reluctant as they advance, jack-booted, over the Constitution.  Come now, it is not as though our very existence as a nation were threatened, and forgive me if I think that a threat to our existence is the only justification for trashing the US Constitution.  So I would have thought these image conscious power-mongers would be more concerned about their appearance.  But why should they?  None of us are paying much attention anyway.  As long as they keep the gas flowing to our SUV's, and as long as they preserve 'our American way of life', whatever that is besides irrelevant, then we don't much care what they do, do we.  We just don't want to know. 

Have you ever seen Three Days of the Condor?  Quite dated, but relevant today, perhaps even moreso than when it was released. 

I go to the British very much in these last several weeks -- to those who survived Blitzkrieg, who emerged victorious from the Battle of Britain; to that nation of whom the world might one day say (using the words of Churchill), never have so few given so much for so many; to the historical parent of my own nation -- for reassurance and comfort in a time of impossible and gravely consequential choices.  And I go to them for nothing so much as the simple knowledge that I am not alone.  That is the cure for terror.  Whether we are right or wrong -- and I think we are both -- I thank you Britain; I daresay I love you. 

Here is Tony Blair's announcement of British support and participation in US-led attacks on Afghanistan.  In case that doesn't work, try this.