Several years ago, when the summer blockbuster Independence Day came out, I was told that audiences cheered the part where alien spacecraft destroyed such Washington, D.C., landmarks as the U.S. Capitol and the White House.  At least some Americans know who the real enemy is and are willing to cheer publicly at cinematic depictions of their demise (at least in the dark of a theater), despite the threat of being labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

The recent circus caused by the innocent mistake of a Cessna pilot violating the airspace of official Washington, along with one of Jorge Bush’s many hypocritical utterances, made me realize just how wide the gulf is between the Official Ruling Class and the rest of us and why a healthy suspicion of the current regime and its motives is a good thing.

El Presidenté Bush, who never met a Mexican immigrant he didn’t like, told the paranoid xenophobes in Red State Land who oppose his post-September 11, wide-open-borders policy that confident nations do not build fences to keep others out: Only fearful nations do that.  Been near the White House lately?  Talk about fences!  But again, Jorge and his entourage are important people, and the normal rules do not apply to them.  We don’t need no stinking fences from Brownsville to San Diego to keep out Al Qaeda, as long as official Washington is bomb proofed.  To hell with the yokels!  Let them fend for themselves—just as long as they don’t become gun-totin’ vigilantes, like the Minutemen, in the process.  Fill them with their daily ration of fear and instill in them dependence on government to “protect” them with the USA PATRIOT Act and such.  But never mind the fact that government is really interested only in protecting its own.

George Washington reminded his countrymen that the essence of government is force.  To go a bit further, the handmaid of force is fear.  Government normally thrives on making its subjects fear the consequences of disobedience.  But the current government in D.C. wants you to see it as your benevolent and brave Big Brother who stands between you and Islamic terrorists; between you and a steady diet of Alpo in your old age; between you and your demise from asteroids striking Planet Earth.  Just think of Jorge Bush in his flight suit on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” and you’ll get the picture.  And of course, government says that it is the only savior available in the post-Christian era to thwart these external threats.  Thus, many Americans think that it is meet and right and their patriotic duty to let government take care of them.

But how much love and respect—not to mention fear—can a government generate in its subjects when it is the living embodiment of the Cowardly Lion?

When my wife and I turned on the Fox News Channel the day that the single-engine Cessna strayed into restricted D.C. airspace, we thought, at first, that something really big had happened.  Then the announcer—with proper gravitas, of course—informed us of the developing situation.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but we laughed out loud at the spectacle of grown men running panic-stricken from their temples of power because of a little Cessna.  Hell, we have mosquitoes nearly that big in Alabama.  Perhaps my wife and I could do with some sensitivity training by the airport-security Nazis.  But think about this: The nerve center of the most powerful empire in the history of the world was rendered absolutely incontinent by little more than a toy airplane.  As Liam Neeson proclaimed of the British in the movie Michael Collins, “How did these people ever come to run an empire?”

Though I always enjoy laughing at those people, I take no pleasure in the fact that this regime exists, in large part, because of the gullibility or mistaken self-interests of my Alabama neighbors.  In fact, we might put much of the blame on Christian Southerners in general.  One thing I learned about my fellow hillbillies, crackers, and rednecks when I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that, though they may lack formal education, they did have plain old horse sense.  And just a little bit of old-fashioned horse sense applied to the situation today should tell Southerners that they have been played for fools by Bush and his neocon buddies.  How much longer will folks in Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile, Huntsville, and Tuscaloosa cheerfully and patriotically send their boys off to die in prolonged wars for “democracy” and “national security” in the faraway deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan (and God only knows where else) while our border remains open to anyone who wishes to cross it?  How much longer will they tolerate the unconstitutional lock-down of their society under the ministry of Homeland Security?  How much longer will my good people allow themselves to be fooled into thinking that their own interests and security concerns are the same as those of the Ruling Class?  A shutdown of Washington, D.C., for whatever reason, would mean more freedom for the rest of us.  Humorist Will Rogers understood that when he proclaimed that we are never so secure as when Congress is out of session.

The only security at stake here is the security of the Ruling Class that has destroyed our republic and lied about it.  Frankly, they don’t give a damn about common folks like you and me.  We are just cannon fodder, taxpayers, and consumers.  We are interchangeable and expendable.  People serious about preserving their freedom would not hesitate to call them traitors and then take the appropriate action to be rid of them.  But to prevent us from seeing the truth of their treason, they must keep us in constant fear of everything under the sun but themselves.  Their constant fear is that we will finally awaken and see just how insecure and fearful they have become.  Once that happens, the bloom is off the rose.

More and more of my fellow Alabamians (and all Southerners and other Americans) are, I pray, beginning to notice that the emperor is “nekkid.”  The Cessna incident and the barricading of official Washington should, if nothing else, demonstrate that our imperial rulers take their own security seriously.  It also demonstrates that, if you say “Boo,” they will jump like terrified children.  At the very least, it is fun to watch.