Inside the Enemy

Seth pointed me to an interesting Rolling Stone article about a guy who volunteered for Dubya's campaign earlier this year. It's decent - Seth's right that he makes a pretty gross generalization that seems somewhat unwarrented based on the evidence presented in the article - but it's one that I've often thought about. He says, basically, that conservatives are happy so long as they have an enemy to fight. For them, it's not about winning a battle, it's about fighting the enemy, no matter if that enemy is liberals, gays, communists, Islamofascists (whatever they are), pro-choicers, rock music, civil rights leaders, whatever. This was going to be one of the underlying premises of my next novel (the one I started before 9/11 and I'm just now coming back to), and it's certainly something I've observed before. I think the idea has quite a bit of merit, and is especially chilling when you take into account the last lines of Orwell's 1984: it doesn't matter whether the enemy is Oceana, or East Eurasia, so long as the enemy is out there somewhere.

The problem is, I'm not sure if the freedom we've had/have in the country has never existed, and it's always been an illusion, or if we really have lost it.