the following is from the February '02 issue of Esquire, Mel Gibson's
on the cover (not really one of our favorite actortypes) and the piece
I've lifted comes from a story on M.G. and this new film of his about to
be released. I found the excerpt below exceedingly timely, and an example
of some well crafted language, certainly inspiring thoughtful consideration.

      Are we, our nation, in a similiar position now? Winning the
days only to lose the nights? Does it matter how many flags we
plant, and where, if the enemy is everywhere and nowhere at
once, as we are put on high alert and then told to go to the
mall? After all, it was only about eight blocks from this little
booth in the hotel pub in which Mel Gibson is now lighting his
fifth cigarette of the hour where, in 1776, a group of men first
asked the only question ever worth asking about America.

      Do we govern, or are we governed? In dangerous times,
are we -- We, the People, as it were --
subject or object in the national syntax?

      It was later asked by Dred Scott. It was disputed energeti-
cally at Cold Harbor and Gettysburg, in Little Rock and on the
Edmund Pettus Bridge. It even popped up briefly in Florida,
during the extended exercises after the 2000 presidential
election, until it became such a nuisance that the cool kids in
Washington stopped asking it. It was the question over which
the Vietnam War broke the homefront -- when we were
governed into complicity in a murderous enterprise by men
who didn't trust us to govern ourselves.

     And it is the primary question today, snapping and illumi-
nating the context into which Mel Gibson will launch his
latest war movie. A war in which we are not merely bystanders
but combatants, targets of opportunity, ordinary people
to whom something extraordinary happened, the way it did to
Joe Galloway in the Ia Drang. After all, on September 11,
American citizens -- We the People -- sustained more than ten
times as many casualties as Hal Moore and his fellow
commanders did, and almost three thousand more than did the
combined armed forces of the United States during the entire
Spanish American War. It is entirely possible that a war movie
about a distant war -- any distant war -- will seem as remote
today as Ivanhoe did in the 1950s.

      The ground is still smoking here. We are at war, all of us.
We are fighting on internal terrain -- both within our country and
within ourselves, in the dark, authoritarian side of our national
character that tells us we are targets and we should leave
the fighting of our war to the other people, to the Great Men,
now fashionable once again. (Rummy, what is a war?)
They will keep us safe, the economic, political, and emotional
profiteers who seem to know that terrain better than we know
it within ourselves. Be governed, they say. The enemy is evil and
you are good. Leave to us the right to decide what fundamental
intelligence gets out there to you, the troops in the field.

      That's not good enough. We are combatants, not merely
targets. We have sustained casualties. We are told that we might
sustain more. We are told to leave the war -- the entire war,
even the part here at home, even the part within ourselves -- to
the experts. Wave the flag, we are told, Shop. Go to the movies.

      We are asked to be automatons in a way that never would
have occured to Hal Moore, who trusted the training and
initiative of his soldiers because his soldiers had been raised
as free men, and who didn't want automatons because
automatons are timid things, afraid always because they know
they're not really alive. No, it's hardly good enough now. Our
leaders tell us, under fire, not to trust the weapons we have
to fight the war, to govern ourselves. They want us to watch
the war in which we're fighting, to be spectator and combatant,
like the picnic crowds that fled at Bull Run,
to be Gary Cooper and Sargeant York.

Do we govern ourselves, or are we governed?

      That is the terrain -- "the ground," -- as the old soldiers said --
onto which Mel Gibson release his new film. We are all
guerillas now, fighting in the deep shadows of who we are,
as individuals and as a people. And when we capture the field
and win the day, when we plant the flag in the noonday sun,
what happens when night falls? What moves, everywhere and nowhere,
across the darkening face of the valley that we thought we'd won?

also in that issue is an article re the long-lived relationship between
Mssrs Cheney and Rumsfield, which we'll get around to examining later..