To your long list of paranoid fears (alien mind-control, chemtrails, Roswell cover-ups, mad cow disease, David Duchovny, Falun Gong, GM food), you can now add another: Direct government interference with the space-time continuum of the whole effing Universe!!!

You doubt us?

Has no one else noticed that since January 20, 2001, TIME HAS SLOWED DOWN DISASTROUSLY???

Just do this little thought experiment: THINK ABOUT HOW LONG IT SEEMS UNTIL JANUARY 20, 2005…

Are you thinking?

How much "time" do you PERCEIVE between now and George W. Bush’s last day in office? Huh? Does it not seem a near-eternity? So vast that it’s hard actually to imagine living through the remaining "years".

"Years"? What a joke!

Before January 20, 2001, we were all zipping around happily in our lives, one day melding smoothly and rapidly with the next. Work, work, work. Play, play, play. Worry, worry, worry. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Oh sure there were problems (there are always problems). The market, layoffs, slowdowns, melting ice caps. But nothing we wouldn’t be able to hand in the fullness of, well, t-I-m-e.

"Plan ahead": that lesson that we all learn was being put to good steady use. We all had our little to-do lists on our Palm Pilots for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next week, even perhaps next month. "Ahead" was something manageable and PREDICTABLE because we knew that TIME is the one great constant.

Now look what’s happened.

The Republicans, heretofore only master exploiters of the poor, the weak, and the underprivileged, have now accomplished something without precedent: They have WARPED the very space0time continuum.

A "day" with Dubya is like a year with Bill Clinton. Remember how carefreely we glided through the 90s? Remember how Bill kept us constantly entertained as the big bucks continued to roll in? How eagerly we kept waiting for the next "that Bill" moment as we happily accumulated and divested stock options? Remember?

Now, one simple "day" is fraught with error and terror and fear. What will Dubya do next? What will he say next? Which nation of 1.2 billion people will he alienate by one of his little speech bloopers?

The Coming Age of Chronophobia
Pretty soon we’re going to be afraid to tune in CNBC, much less the Nightly News. Even the oh-so-smooth pabulum of Jim Lehrer won’t be able to hide the growing wave of (sorry, but we’ve got to call it as we see it) CHRONOPHOBIA!

Yes, faced with a veritable ETERNITY of George W. Bush, we’ve all become knee-jerk CHRONOPHOBES!

Dubya and his carefully chosen lackeys of the corporate-financial-technology complex have somehow figured out a way to monkey with the very fabric of reality. It’s like they found the knob controlling time, labeled DON’T TURN ME, and they’ve turned it down, way, way down.

Result: every day, filled with hopeless fear of "what next?", d-r-a-g-s out, to be succeeded by another even slower, fear-filled day.

A nation of sheep has become a nation of chronophobes. No wonder that in our winter of disconnect the drug of choice has become "lean" (codeine syrup), the ultimate downer.

Why, you may ask, are they doing this?

Don’t you GET it? So they’ll have plenty of TIME to transfer the few remaining areas of global wealth into their own pockets, dummy!

What’s more, in the near-eternity they’ve created for themselves, they’ll have plenty of "time" to work their will on the world, which means of course that (take a deep breath) they will figure out a way to guarantee that (ready?) Dubya will be RE-ELECTED, which means we’re actually talking NOT January 20, 2005, but January 20, two thousand and NINE!

2009??? Suddenly the near-eternity becomes… a life-sentence. The future, once bright with the hope of endless dot-comness and full of White House good times, now is simply INCONCEIVABLE.