When fighting a large and dangerous animal, you don't attack the hard parts, like the teeth and claws. Hit it where it's soft and stupid.
HEY! Guess what? We're still here! I know I am, at least for the moment, and if you're reading this, then you are too! That's just fine and fancy. These are very exciting times to be alive. The forces of reaction are on the run, looking for a place to hole up and hide, and GWB, the Great White Beast is covering their retreat.
The current dominant clique will be to the US what Hitler was to Germany: the last gasp of outmoded 19th century thinking. It's sad that Germany got its collective mentality out of the 19th century a full 60 years before the slow learners in the US could catch up, but there it is. Seriously, there is not a single idea in any head in the current regime that did not come from the 19th century: 'free' trade with war ships to assure things are 'free' our way; 'realpolitic,' a new nationalism based on some hazy racial or tribal identity, strengthened by scapegoating members of 'out' groups; jack-booted foreign and domestic policies, and the continued pathetic experiment of trying to get people to work together by brute force and blunt, terroristic threat.
Bush represents a head-in-the-sand mentality: asshole first to the future. He thinks in terms of 19th century geo-politics, 19th century fuels and industry, 19th century economics, 19th century notions of how to limit the power of individuals to resist, and his idea of 'information' is strictly pen-and-ink. So in the Great Game of international one-upmanship how long will it take this utter incompetent to squander every advantage America has in this world? Not long. The world simply cannot afford to put up with the sort of America Bush is trying to build. Americans can't put up with it either, but most Americans are too doped up on prozak, steroids, and viagra to resist anything. That's OK. If Americans can't handle the responsibilities of self-government, there are others who can. Americans in the next 100 years will be re-educated. It will be either re-education in the Bush/Chinese model of "One Planet, One People, One Pay-Scale, or it will be re-education in the model of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Jesus, King, and Ghandi, the model of standing up against oppression and turning their power against them into righteous rage, and kicking the legs out of the sodden structure that they mount to imagine themselves as big.
The fear of death is the beginning of slavery. But the slavery that Bush has in mind for us is manifestly worse than death. So if dying were the best way to oppose the Tyrant, then tens of thousands would happily give themselves in a river of blood. But dying is not the best way to oppose the tyrant. The best way is to stay alive and keep resisting, in little ways, waiting for the opportunity of the Blissful Counterstroke.
When we resist in little ways, we aim to kill the Beast by a thousand small cuts. When we resist in little ways, everyone, even the most robotic, is an ally. Everyone has a subconscious saboteur, and they become allies with a well-timed wink and giggle.
We are at war, and we face an enemy. The enemy is strong in some places, weak in others. There are places along the enemy's line where any hint of an attack is met almost willy nilly with an overwhelming reprisal. There are other places where you can just walk right in. The sensible tactic is to avoid the areas where the enemy is strongest and attack it where it is weakest.
The military/police industrial/informational complex is strongest in areas of brute force and of control of huge blocks of information. What it lacks is a way to think and respond quickly on its feet in an unpredictable way, or the ability to think 'outside the box.' Government, after all, is the business of building boxes, creating categories, executing procedures, separating people from each other and themselves in the idiot gaze of pointless abstraction. Their operatives cannot think outside their abstractions, nor even admit there's a world their abstractions do not encompass. We can try to educate them to the other side of things (to little effect,) or we can use the places they don't acknowledge as the places to attack them from, to all appearances 'out of the dark.'
What we have is creative chaos. That's our main weapon: we understand them, but they don't understand us; we can predict their responses, but they cannot predict ours; and we have access to tools like the internet that they do not understand and cannot control. What they have is destructive order. Their main weapon is to insist that that we line up according to their little blueprints or else they will have an organizational temper tantrum and make examples of us. It's sheer bullying and nothing else, elevated to the highest principle of governance. Well, fuck them. They can exact fake subservience from us for 100 years, and as long as there remains one free-thinker even in secret, they will not have won. As long as someone, ANYONE dares to laugh out loud in the face of power, the oppressors do not win. We should not see their violence as evidence of their power, but rather as evidence of their weakness, their utter desperation to control, their terror of the future, of democracy, and most of all, of Justice.
Let them make their Lists. We'll make ours.