President Bush is in the Czech Republic as I write this, trying to get allies in the EU lined up for the impending war on Iraq. In the midst of this, a bomb goes off on a bus in Jerusalem killing 11 people. The President of the United States, the same man who is in Europe cheerleading for his upcoming war, states that he's "greatly disturbed" by the violence.

 

"The Soviet Union is gone, but freedom still has enemies," he's quoted as saying in the New York Times. Indeed he's right, and to me the enemy looks an awful lot like us.

 

The other night on the news I heard that some intelligence organization (how many are there now?)  had stepped up its monitoring of Iraqi Americans. Now, if I recall correctly, our arch-enemy, Osama bin Laden, is Saudi. Zacharrias Moussaui, born in Morroco, a citizen of France. Mohammed Atta, born in Cairo. Shoe bomber Richard Reid, English and Jamaican parents. James Ujaama, born in Denver.  Let's not get started on Timothy McVeigh and John Walker. Iraqi Americans, huh? Let's round them up, okay?

 

Combine this with the Pentagon's new Total Information Awareness initiative, an Orwellian plan to grant government access to "all of our communications (phone calls, emails and web searches), financial records, purchases, prescriptions, school records, medical records and travel history."

 

Freedom has its enemies, all right.

 

Meanwhile, off the coast of Spain, an environmental disaster is taking place. Spilled oil coats the beaches Northern Spain. No one knows what will happen to the remainder of the 20 million gallons of fuel oil, which sits on the bottom of the Atlantic. The Portuguese and the Spaniards couldn't agree on who was responsible for the clean up. "I didn't spill it, I'm not cleaning it up," is how I imagine the conversation went.

 

I would like to take a moment to remind you that Iraq sits on top of one of the world's richest oil stores. I would like to also remind you that they pump that stuff out of the ground and put it on tankers so that we can drive to the  Safeway to get milk.

 

And, to top things off, People Magazine has voted Donald Rumsfeld the "sexiest man in the Bush Administration."

 

For the past week or so, I've spent a lot of time going to community meetings about the Walgreen's that's going in on the corner near my house. The local press doesn't seem too interested in the story, so you might wonder why I've bothered. If you take a look at the news - and you needn't go in to a lot of detail, just check out the front page of any decent nationally focused paper - the New York Times, the Washington Post, are my usual picks, you might have others - you'll see why I've chosen to spend my mental energy on local events.

 

Bush is for peace in the Middle East and war in the Gulf. We need more oil so we're letting it leach in to the Atlantic Ocean. Iraqis are dangerous but Americans might be dangerous too, so we should get in everyone's business just to be safe.  And, oh look. Rumsfeld is sexy.

 

In contrast to that, my neighbors are all hopped up about a Walgreen's because it's ugly and is probably going to be noisy, what with trucks coming and go to bring Band-Aids and cleaning fluids and products that will make hair more manageable to the neighborhood. I think I am starting to understand why they are so angry.

 

They're angry about the Walgreen's, sure. But we're all angry about all kinds of things right now. This subset of neighbors has developed a way to distill all their frustration and angst about the world as a whole and focus it, with laser sharp intensity, upon a chain drug store.  Take a minute to look away from the mall architecture. What do you see? War and oil spills and Rumsfeld in, may the gods protect us, a Full Monty gold lame g-string. I don't know about you, but I'll take the Walgreen's over that any day.