The cost of 'no government'

By Julian Delasantellis

In the inky blackness of the night, I hear them. Here in the US Pacific Northwest, with the sun no longer ionizing the upper levels of the atmosphere, I can hear AM radio signals from stations up to 3,000 kilometers away, all the way to Chicago and beyond. For the most part they carry the buzz of call-in political talk shows, and it all sounds pretty much the same from one end of the radio spectrum to the other - when it comes to the financial system bailout bill that went down to defeat on Monday in the US House of Representatives, a violent, vitriolic, passionate, deeply visceral opposition to events transpiring in Washington, DC, can be heard.

If I didn't know better, I might have thought that I was listening to voices being broadcast from behind the borders of some oppressive dictatorship; it's citizens, like resistance fighters in World War II Europe, desperately calling out for help from the free world. So great is the alienation of the government from its people on this issue, you might have thought that the callers were making one final testament of the truth, for surely they believed that come the next dawn would also come the trucks to carry them off to the re-education camps.