Our civil libertarians have a lot to complain about, and theirs is a righteous struggle.  But, candidly, there is very little that is forbidden in America.  And yet...

There are things that, while not exactly forbidden, are nonetheless very effectively prevented from happening.  There are many things that simply... fail to occur.  People are not exactly robots; and they are not exactly not robots.  Predictable results arise from a steady diet of the right stimuli in the right context, buttressed by lightly applied rewards and punishments.  Politics is only an afterthought to the real motive forces of our collective life - culture and mass psychology.  Put your hand on the throttle of culture, and you can let the guns - and the dollars - take care of themselves.

We do not have anti-war anthems of the Phil Ochs or Bob Dylan type - at least not in the top 40.  There was a time when an effectively couched political sentiment could penetrate popular culture to the extent that it would shape public opinion and discourse.  Not any more.  Song was not exactly legislated out of existence.  It just - stopped happening.

We do not have mass protests.  What's that?  Oh - you were at one?  Well, it doesn't matter if you and a hundred - or ten thousand - of your scruffy pals marched around all day making the scene.  If it wasn't on TV, it doesn't count.  I'm sure it was gratifying, even exhilirating, but what result is going to follow from a protest, exactly?  Unless you get the whole town shut down,  you're not making it onto TV, Clyde.  And Mr. Man is not exactly shaking in his cowboy boots over traffic getting disrupted for a day or two.

The most visible protests of late around the Pacific Northwest have been the puerile Critical Mass rides - and while I agree that ecology is the greatest single issue facing the world, and I agree further that more bicycling and less driving would be a good response to this - well, at the end of the day, a bunch of penii on bicycles is a fart in the wind.

Of course, there are the Anonymous-driven protests against Scientology to consider - which I am on record as admitting to be just swell, thanks.  And yes, I am well aware that Anonymous is not my personal army.  But shit,  kids - have you no opinion about the war at all?  Or torture, domestic spying, violation of the Constitution, war profiteering in the White House, impeachable offenses galore, and the erosion of our freedoms?  No opinion?  None?  It's no skin off my back - when the draft hits, it's your ass that's next, not mine.  And it will serve you right.

But, really, none of us had a chance - the machine was tuned up decades ago, and it just keeps getting better.  Free will is real, insofar as our actions are internally determined by our motives - but those motives have their own histories, as do our habits.  And those histories are shaped by every event, and every signal, that has touched us.  After a culturally-prescribed upbringing, a government-sponsored education, and the 100,000th hour of TV, there's nothing really left inside us but a sense of tedium that can only be relieved by the intoxicants and distractions sold to us by the same people who sold us the culture, the government, and the TV in the first place.  A vague hankering for novelty, for sex, and for self-assertion through periodic increases in status and income are all that remain of your original desire to make your true will actual.  It's pitiful, in all senses.

Americans are sitting down in the basement of a house that's burning down, reassuring each other, "It's okay - we're safe down here."  Now and again, one of them sends a can of gasoline upstairs.

Or, as they used to say in the Sixties:  Don't you know there's a war going on?