I went to an antiwar "honk for peace" rally yesterday. Most of the passing drivers honked. Will more than a handful in Washington care? No. There are very few Dennis Kuciniches, Barbara Lees and Chuck Hagels in either party.

What about those who didn't honk for peace? The founders would weep to see our hypnotized sheep-like population, not just the ill-informed who support or don't notice our foreign wars, but well-meaning optimists, mostly Democrats and Greens, who yearn passionately to be reformers and end up supporting parties and candidates who promise hope but deceive and cheat.

I've been there, done that, but we can no longer afford the old Trumanesque imperialist and anti-worker propaganda that's prevailed since undereducated, unprepared Harry Truman assumed the Atomic Age, oil-slicked throne. All subsequent wannabe-liberal presidents, Republican AND Democrat, have followed the late forties' hopeless program of imperialism abroad and domestic suppression of dissent. Ike, LBJ and Carter tried to knuckle down and make some decent changes, but for various reasons they too got sucked in. It's the nature of the real Truman Doctrine--imperialism.

Always a concerned citizen, I began voting at age 21 in 1957. I've campaigned for many who promised liberal change and voted for them only because they were "not as bad as the opponent". Very likely that was true, at least marginally. Things have gotten worse anyhow--plungingly worse since Nixon and especially Reagan. (A dear friend said in the mid-1980s that America had become a "surrealist's nightmare." True then, hellish now!)

I'll vote for Obama because the alternative is disaster, but won't lift a finger to campaign for him unless he chooses to abide by the Constitution rather than anticipate his own Imperial fiats. Surely he must realize that the nation's and the world's problems are overwhelming, and that even in Utopia--which no country on earth has ever been close to becoming--change is always inevitable. The reasonable alternative is to change in the direction of the greatest good. To evolve, not devolve.

The Democratic leaders for years have been blinded and deafened by the money and cash-drawer noise from their Beltway lobbyists. This campaign season would be laughable, if not so tragic. Once again the Democrats been manipulated into ending up with front runners like Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama, the LEAST likely 2008 candidates to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters, and a winner, Obama, who puts forward few ideas except treading the Imperialist gristmill and playing to the healthcare industry, the "Market", and now NAFTA.

Meanwhile the GOP is even more hagridden by special interests, not just the rich and powerful but a rabbit-warren of kooks. The Republican leaders encouraged their own goofuses and idiots into the public arena until the screaming extremism caused their flaming wreckage on the altar of the Wall Street-mouthpiece mass media. That was how the real Wall Street candidate, lobbyist-lover McPain / McSuperRichGain, could take over and pretend to be a "moderate" just as Dubya did, with the help of the eager Right-Wing media. The Rovites are smart like Machiavelli, but people like Machiavelli are the creatures of demons. America can't exist being run by demons, or even by Machiavelli's crackpot realist Princes.

I've been a hopeful, if pessimistic, realist, but the land I grew up in, the nation I served as a Naval officer, energy conservationist and historian of dissent for more than 30 years, does not exist any more. I now seriously doubt it can be restored. I hope otherwise, but fear the Great Experiment has run its course.

Others will do as they choose, but unless there are major improvements I won't campaign. I'm tired of being Cassandra and Jeremiah, watching the high hopes of the 60s die in Vietnam, screaming loudly when Equal Time was replaced by Media Monopoly and public interest by privateering greed, seeing 40 years of pessimistic predictions gradually, sneakily, greedily come true in every administration despite a few temporary resuscitations of democracy like the Watergate Congress. I'm exhausted from the time and effort I've put in to hold back a flood that now drowns us.

Information--or, rather, lack of truthful information and an inundation of falsehood--controls America. As long as the mass media is owned lock-stock-and-barrel by the Far Right, as long as they are permitted to lie without challenge, then truth, ethics and democracy have no chance. Even if honest dialogue can be restored publicly, we've arrived at one minute to midnight and the chances of turnaround are slim. I recall some of Robert Heinlein's words, which went something like this: "Human beings are rationalizing, not rational, animals."