Am I hallucinating on this season’s prolific psilocybin cubensis harvest or did the American public actually just hand over all the power resident in both chambers of the legislative branch of government to the squirreliest American administration in history and the shadowy hierarchy of industrialists, militarists, paymasters, and ideologically reactionary over-lords of its penumbral power base? Let’s see; they’ve got the executive and now the legislative branches of the most powerful nation ever to exist on this planet. They are smiling broadly about all the headway they can now expect in the rapid-fire confirmation of conservative nominations to the judiciary branch. That about wraps it up, now doesn’t it—executive, legislative, and judiciary—in a tri-cameral system of government?

What drug has the American people ingested from its water supply that has allowed it to fall asleep at the wheel of the most important vehicle ever to press down a global highway? What mass-frenzy are we in the midst of that has caused us to rubber stamp an inside-the-beltway groundswell of megalomaniacal madness? Invade Iraq!!!? Has the rhetoric of the leading party’s bully boys lobotomized the intelligentsia, mesmerized the masses, gathered up the gullible, terrified the frightened, and goaded the reactionary to all sally forth stoically into an untimely and ill-suited traipse down Government-Building Boulevard, Taxpayer Bailout Turnpike, Lemming’s Leap and that historically most treacherous of all transnational thoroughfares, Imperial Avenue?

Okay, America! You want a war with Iraq? Strap on your sons’ helmets tight, cause you’ve given a man scrapping for a fight his mandate. Not enough oil in Iraq for you, America? Don’t worry, we’ll open up the Arctic Wildlife Preserve now that the American public has declared itself squishy soft on the environment, and we’ll bring all the Texas tea the American roadway can consume and cheap, too, for awhile anyways, and Venezuela is looking a little rowdy these days, nothing a few Marines couldn’t sort out. . . And what a boundless platform of opportunity for all those enterprising American businessmen and women out there! Now American industry can boost profits like never before by simply throwing out all those pesky factory air pollution control devices with which pinkish American administrations of governments past have curtailed America’s greatness. Now, it will be years before they get back around to even the possibility of carbon dioxide limits, Kyoto Schmyoto. We can just keep sitting global environmental conferences out like we did Johannesburg and let the Developing World whine all it wants about the disproportionality of resource consumption. Hell, maybe soon, industry will be allowed again, perhaps encouraged, to clog the less-important waterways with refuse and poison to boost the all-important competitive edge, particularly if we can get a few wars playing in theatres near you and production cranking on overtime to meet our wartime needs.

The global conflict between western society and Islamic fundamentalism has touched Latin America very lightly if at all. Costa Rica is perhaps the last place on Earth that might give rise to a terrorist act. All these conflicts that America suddenly has, they’re not Costa Rica’s fights. Yet they shall permeate the international atmosphere of the planet for years to come. If America invades Iraq today because of (wink, wink) presumed WMDs, why won’t it invade Colombia tomorrow over revolutionaries and drugs? I prefer to hope that despite its militancy, the United States will prosecute its differences with Iraq through the United Nations and not through the unilateral application of force. While on a hoping jag, it would be nice for the world’s sole superpower to provide an enlightened global leadership through investiture of capabilities and potential rather than the casual threat of gradual, mutual annihilation. I’ll hold to the sidelines of Costa Rica until America sorts out this whole can of worms. But I might have to go back in 2006 to cast my vote. It’s pretty clear from the recent round of electoral mayhem that I can’t exactly leave this important responsibility to the questionable discretion of my apparently addled fellow Americans.