offheads2

Fellow captive Heather Mercer said, �We never went hungry � they gave us the best they had � the Taliban always treated us well � there were Taliban who treated us as sisters.�

Right, Georgie. Awful demonic. Woman-haters. To my sensibility this appears like generosity and tolerance exhibited by an impoverished, betrayed, authentically spiritual people -- feeding their captives from their own meager plates.

If one scrabbles around ever further amongst the shredded steel and flesh in the Trade Center�s ruins, one will discover the remnants of the diseased, enervated male �leadership� that has been dragging the nation down for decades. (By this I mean no disrespect to the dead and injured, God bless them.)

Equally, the corrupt Democrats and their agendas of kultural terrorism are buried there beneath the rubble. The first Baby Boom Generation president, Bill Clinton, lies under that rubble, he who likewise betrayed the nation and, despite promises to the contrary, failed miserably to turn the country away from its state of denial, selfishness and wickedness.

Yet also amongst the ruins, spitting out cinders, stunned and blackened by his hellish ordeal, one can find the seeds of a new masculinity, an authentic masculinity, taking tenuous root -- an entirely new brand of man. As yet this homo noeticus has yet to dance the phoenix hop. But it�s early yet. He is breaking his shackles, one by one, and he promises a spiritual renewal for a nation fallen into abject materialism, hypocrisy, cannibalism and the most loathsome trappings of empire.

Americans, of course, believe they inhabit the summit of the spiritual heap, that their every action is approved by God. Yet as I walk through the cities and towns of the land, I see hordes of fat, snoozing people alongside hordes of misery. The parking lots of the churches are full of SUVs, while around the corner men freeze solid in the streets.

Long has America been blessed, kissed by the Queen of Heaven, sheltered by the broken bodies of the Host. But now, as Dylan recently warned, �things have changed.� In earthly power, in use of force, in economic leverage, America dominates. Ethically and spiritually, however, we are bereft.

Yes, the great phallic twins are leveled, but still we just don�t get it. It ain�t cowboys n� injuns anymore. John Wayne and his dualistic moral absolutism are stone dead. We�re not always the Good Guys. We never were.

We imagine ourselves an innocent people, an aggrieved people, whose just response is retaliation and extermination of the �evildoers,� as Junior Bush constantly reminds us. We don�t want justice, we want dead bodies. For those we choose not to kill, we will convene secret tribunals to administer revenge. Justice by secret tribunals. Yow.

For sound reason, vengeance is not given to human beings, much less to a shattered nation clinging to the comforts of empire, to denial of its own bi-polar psychosis, while descending into matriarchal madness and cannibalism of its own values and citizens.

There is so much in America worth preserving. But we have become a sham of ourselves, talking liberty and walking domestic totalitarianism. Abroad, we have reason to be hated � our hands unclean with guns, money, drugs, power, blood, and the insistence on pushing our cultural agendas � particularly feminism and Christianity � on other peoples.

I hate what America has become, but love what it still might be. The blessings of all Creation were showered upon her, and the sacrifices and achievements of all Creation are conserved in her. Sick as she is, I will not give up on her. She will rise again in glory.