The War on Errorism

by Joel Fluker

       errorism. \‘er-ur-‘iz-um\. noun. The belief that the pursuit of happiness
         is best achieved through the unhindered ability to think freely and clearly;
         those who do so make many errors but, thinking clearly, learn much from
         those errors. Compare free will. Antonym: totalitarianism (compare:
         neocon, republican). errorist \‘er-ur-‘ist\ adjective or noun.
         erroristic \‘er-ur-‘is-tik\ adjective.

The American Big Brother has carried the red-white-and-blue banner of its "war on terrorism" around the globe. Through his use of the big-lie technique, we all know what it is: good vs. evil, us against them, with us or against us. Etc. (The tragedy is that the terrorists really are bad guys, but American blustering and armed over-reaction has created enormous sympathy for the terrorists in the Muslim world.)

What’s gone little-noticed—or an least unlabeled—is Big Brother’s war at home. Thinking Americans are well-aware of the parameters of this domestic war:
spying,
rule-of-men-not-law,
corporate fealty above all,
rampant heckuva-job-Brownie incompetence,
arrogant anti-environmentalism,
one nation under a very narrowly defined Christian god,
watch what we say not what we do.

And so on.

So stunningly improvident is this domestic behavior that it’s hard, day to day, to get a grasp on what’s behind it, much less what it means.

One day the White House press secretary will be spinning reality way beyond anything Pinocchio imagined, the next day the Secretary of Defense will be making Iraq into a Potemkin village beyond the wildest dreams of the czar’s handlers, the next the majority leader of the senate will be tossing off a pathologically cruel and inept diagnosis of a brain-dead patient in Florida, and so on.

It’s harder and harder to get your thinking cap on at all in such a gale of lies and distortions, much less keep it on, and far far more difficult to keep it on straight.

In an increasingly rare moment of clarity, it occurred to me recently that yes, these guys really do have a war going on not only abroad but at home. They just haven’t named it.

Time then to introduce a new word into the language, "errorism" (see above), because this war at home is, when you think about it, a war on errorism.

Stay with me, please. The idea works like this:

Many have written articulately, often with brilliance, and sometimes even with scathing satirical humor (see many, many pages of Magellan’s Log), about the disjunct between reality and what Big Brother says reality is.

The American Big Brother wants the world to be—not as it is—but as Big Brother wishes it to be. Black and white. No grays.

You are either with us are against us. If you’re with us, you’re right. If you’re against us, you’re wrong.

What we are talking about here, put baldly, is the inerrancy of the American president.

He does not make mistakes. He does not even allow for the possibility of mistakes. And those who do, well, by definition, they are not only wrong, they are also ipso facto non-American. They are in fact un-American.

Homosexuals "choose" their "decadent" "lifestyle." Women "choose" to have an abortion. The poor "choose" to not work. Criminals "choose" their errant ways…

There’s no end to the list of American error-mongering once you start thinking about it the way Big Brother wants you to think about it: College professors "choose" to inculcate socialist ideas in their students. Artists "choose" to create disrespectful, pagan, obscene works of art. Dramatists "choose" to write horrific plays about the reality of marriage.

Yes, from Big Brother’s viewpoint, we inhabit a profound and dangerously errant America. And it’s up to Big Brother to set us ALL right, to either help us see—or force us to see—the error of our ways.

The domestic agenda of this government which has given us the global War on Terror is in fact a War on Error. A war on choice, a war on the freedom of belief. Why, they think, should we have such a choice since they have an agenda that explains everything, without error.

Anyone who disagrees with that agenda is, again by definition, an errorist, who—since in war-time civil rights go by the way—is fair game for any form of government intervention: spying, ignoring of habeas corpus, control of reproductive choice, denial of the right to love whomever you will.

The War on Errorism is the great undeclared war of the American government against its own people.

While we spend hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives allegedly to bring "freedom" to Iraq, the same government spends uncounted sums to narrowly define and limit the freedom of its citizens at home.

Errorists of the world, unite!

END

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