Nationalizing Private Property. Recruiting a Private Civilian Force. Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.

I just dropped at least sixty bucks on photocopying and mailing my Cap-and-Trade and Kellogg’s petitions. Damn.

That is, IF they got mailed. I Fedexed the Cap-and-Trade letters to “that Jew” and his fat blonde shiksa- well, she’s half-Jewish, but if that doesn’t poll well, she’ll change that too.

Fedex informed me they can’t deliver to p.o. boxes, so I had to mail the Kellogg’s petitions at the nearest post office, which runs like a fine oiled machine, assuming that the fine oiled machine you’re talking about is a Brazilian prison.

I needed a dozen Priority mail envelopes. I was in luck. There were exactly twelve there, and I grabbed them. “Miss, Miss, Miss,” I heard behind me. The nitwit-in-charge. With the immense dignity characteristic of the genre he tells me, “You can’t take all of them. What if other people’s gots to use them?”

Apparently, at this post office in Manhattan, twelve Priority envelopes are ceremoniously released each morning, like doves, as sufficient unto the day. And woe unto those of us who have the temerity to need more than the lowland tribal chieftains of the post office have allotted to those who dare enter their underworld realm of territorial pissings. Either that or somebody can’t get off their lazy nitwit ass and go and get more envelopes. One or the other. I am well-versed in dealing with nitwits. It’s an art. In this situation, I could see that it would be a waste of time to reason or argue. Welcome to the future, everybody. It looks a lot like what we used to call in better times “The Third World.”

“So, how many can I take?” I asked, thinking of Oliver asking for more gruel. “Five… uh… no, six, you can take six of ‘em,” the nitwit chieftain replied. “Thank you,” I said. “You can take take some more,” he went on slyly with the nitwit humor I know so well and am so tired of, “if you wanna leave and go out and change your clothes and come back in.” He cackled. He began thinking aloud of other disguises I could don.

I will mail the Kellogg’s petitions to CBS from Central New York. There, if they run out of envelopes, somebody actually gets up and goes into the stock room to get some more. It’s a novel approach- the very latest cutting edge in office management.

Sixty dollars. But I still want to send copies of the Cap-and-Trade letter anyway to Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Those two old birds need a good kick up the arse in time for the vote. If we had an actual Republican Chairman of an actual Republican party, maybe some fatwahs could have been issued on those two. The Republican party just sent me a letter asking me for money, and I sent it back with a pretty little note informing them that I’d think about it once they shitcanned Michael “They’re all a bunch of bigots” Steele.

Or do I even care. That’s right. Do I even care. I do care. I’m haunted by the signatures of the doughty old people, the last American generation to be decent and to know anything, lined up under the noonday sun.

My uncle was in Vietnam and was awarded a purple heart. My mother says he refused it, in a macho display of nihilism, but my cousin tells me it’s there among his things. Was it bravery, or was it just not putting that much value on life. When my uncle was in Vietnam, he was made “Soldier of the Week,” I think it was, once. A radio station interviewed him. He said it felt like an out-of-body experience. He heard himself saying, as though from somewhere far off, “I am thrilled and delighted….” I felt like that on the Fourth of July. I found myself marching in a parade with people I’d just met, holding a banner which I had just seen, getting a wicked sunburn, smiling frozenly. Maybe totalitarianism won’t be as bad as I think, I thought.

After the parade somebody said, “There’s nothing better than a small town parade.” Well, I guess I should be taken out back and shot, because I can think of about 8 million things better than a small town parade. Snorting cocaine off a hooker’s tits, for one. I guess this guy maybe was from the New York City area and it was like exotic to him. But, as the ex-denizen of a small town, I know that small town parades are usually (1) pathetic; and (2) if you are still a minor, a good pretext for getting out of the house to go smoke cigarettes behind the supermarket.

This small-town parade was not pathetic at all, however, because it was at West Point and because it featured wounded veterans, and a whole battalion (I think it was a batallion? do they have batallions anymore?) of handsome trained killers. Handsome trained killers, who, I couldn’t forget, were standing between me and Obama’s brownshirts.

Before the parade, I had been rattled by the story of a woman I was with. She was from Hungary. I told her I had a new respect for our troops because I trusted them not to follow any orders to repress the populace. She told me that people were getting stopped by the police for their bumper stickers. I had heard of that. She told me that people were having their guns taken away by the authorities. I hadn’t heard of that, and she offered to email me. I told her that I trusted our troops and our police not to follow illegal orders. For that, of course, Obama has “Americorps.” She told me that during World War II, the brownshirts (of which a teenage George Soros was one, she told me), Hitler’s form of “Americorps,” had confiscated her family’s property. She and her mother and brothers escaped to Germany where American troops took care of them. I will never forget her story.

PEOPLE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED TOTALITARIAN REGIMES ARE WARNING US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hungary, Cuba, Slovenia, Russia, China- I’ve seen the warnings. At the tea party there was an old woman who had immigrated from Russia. She almost cried out, “Why aren’t there more people here?”

After the parade, standing near the troops, I asked the guy who likes small town parades, “So what percentage of these troops here, if Obama ordered them to kill dissenters, like you and me for example, what percentage of these guys here do you think would do it? Fifteen percent maybe?” He immediately took the question very seriously, as anyone does who gets it. “Very few,” he said. But I wanted a number. “As much as twenty percent? As little as ten?” I had an unseemly urge (natch) to sidle up to the lads in uniform and conduct a little informal poll, “So say Obama wanted you to shoot me, as like an enemy of the state, like, what do you think you’d do? Say he needed you to enforce some property seizures?”

These are not idle questions. On the Election Day that ushered in the era of Barack “We won” Obama, Black Panthers stood outside a Philadelphia polling location dressed in military gear and threatening voters with billy clubs. Charges against them were dropped. By the Department of Justice. These guys were probably recruited into Americorps.

This is why people are stocking up on guns.