An Associated Press report from Baghdad quoted the thoughts of an Iraqi artist on the day the American occupation granted his country its frail sovereignty in the midst of the carnage left by its liberation.

The Iraqi citizen, Qassim al-Sabti, did not sound enraged by events of the last 15 months. He did sound resigned. To what?

“Iraqis,” he said, “are happy inside, but their happiness is marred by fear and melancholy. Of course I feel still occupied. You can’t find anywhere in the world people who would accept occupation.”

None of this was inflammatory or arguable or especially arresting. And then he said: “America, these days, is like death. You can’t escape from it.”

America, he seemed to be saying, was engulfing his world, controlling it. America and its aims and behavior were a condition of his life and the lives of billions of others in the world.

America was and is everywhere. Its military bases, its outposts of surveillance, straddle the continents and stretch beyond Europe and the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. They spread to the borders of Russia and China, from Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, to Korea, the Pacific Islands, into countries so small and obscure that only geopolitical scholars and war room generals can pronounce their names. They are significant not so much because they need our protection but because they are designated launching pads. For what? “For the protection of America,” today’s American government tells its people. Against what?

Today’s American government gives us the candid answer: Against anybody who wants to be what we are.

Which is?

We are the overlord of the world. We give small countries offers they can’t refuse. We give the larger ones scorn and humiliation if they refuse to buy the Bush government’s new commandments. The first of these is that we want to share America’s God-anointed values with the world, at the point of a Patriot missile.

This is the America the Iraqi citizen was picturing.

America, he was saying, makes decisions that can mean life or death for multitudes on earth. What he certainly was thinking, but did not say, was that it has meant death for more than 10,000 of his countrymen, most of them slain in the bombardments that brought our God-anointed values to Baghdad.

It was over their bodies that George Bush was able to declare, in what must now be indicted as one of the ugliest moments in the history of international braggadocio and political grandstanding, “Mission Accomplished.”

There has to be something disturbing for the American citizen reading the Iraqi citizen’s lament, apart from the jolt that is delivered by that chilling image of what America has become for him.

“America is death.”

What it means for this man is that America is the American government. The White House. I want to tell him that it is not.

America is not an administration. It is not an ideology. It is not a self-serving roadmap to reshape the world in the interest of American corporate power and political dominance. It is not a militant congregation singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” America is a country that has grown strong and rich because it was first gifted with enormous natural wealth. It was gifted later by the fusion of immigrants from all over the world. Somehow, despite its conflicts and its own internal bloodshed, it was able to mesh the dreams and yearnings of those immigrants with a growing nation’s restless search for place and fulfillment.

Above all, it was gifted with the extraordinary vision of leaders 230 years ago who understood the beauty and power of a people responding to and inspired by freedom of choice. They understood the indispensable hallmark of good government, one that functions in the clear air of political daylight, guarding its public against the impulse for secrecy that eventually tempts all government and ultimately can destroy even the most robust and committed democracy, as it is doing in America today.

The people who wrote the Constitution and its subsequent Bill of Rights understood this far better than we seem to understand it today.

So they built into the framework of American government safeguards against these secret agendas and corporate manipulation that can destroy democracy. These are being evaded or perverted today under the smokescreen created by a glib and relentlessly marketed double talk that reached dizzying new levels of hypocrisy this week in the White House and its imitators. The Bush government proposed a rule that would expose to timber-cutting 58 million more acres of roadless national forest land, and turn over to state governors the decision on whether to cut. These are people, it need hardly be said, who are more susceptible to pressure from local commercial interests and corporate power than, presumably, the U.S. Forest Service.

I live in the state of Minnesota. I grew up in the midst of the Superior National Forest. It is a part of Minnesota once in danger of being stripped clean by unrestricted logging. Voices of resistance rose and the forest and its waters can now be enjoyed by millions of Americans as well as those who live there.

Within the Superior National Forest are 60,000 acres of woodland that would be open to timber cutting if the rule is adopted, reversing the protections written by the Clinton administration. This in part was the response this week of the spokesman for the governor of Minnesota: The governor, he said, sees the rule change as good news. It “protects the environment…”

Yes, and locust swarms protect the crops by thinning them. Timber-cutting rules in America produce scant anxiety for the Iraqi citizen who is not sure what lies ahead in his mixed emotions about the colossus America. But magnetically today my thoughts kept returning to his image of us, the America he sees in its thunderous assertions of the will of its rulers. Part of what he sees and feels is the shadow and the scent of death. The America he was talking about—what the American government does—is not the America I know, or the one I knew. For all of its frailties and mood swings, and the notional corruptions and distortions of its principles, the America I knew was satisfied that its people lived in a land where democracy more or less governed. It was a land in which the public good was usually accorded a relatively sanctified place. When America was generous and at its best, it did not link its generosity to conditions that forced its foreign recipients into a vassalage for American political agendas.

The idea that America is faithful to its democratic principles and citizens is still the rhetoric.

The reality has changed. What we have in government today is less a democracy than a secretive, manipulating oligarchy that welds government to corporate power and to an arrogant religious cult, all of these feeding from each others zeals and their need to keep the country headed in the direction they scripted. It began with an outright theft of the presidency three years ago in what was called open court. The essential meaning of government by law vanished right about there. Deceit was easy after that. The assault on the democratic ideal was advanced with the unveiling of a doctrine of war anytime the president of America damned well pleases. This was followed by the duping of the public and the Congress about the provocations for war. It was followed by distortion of presidential power to smother the right of the public to know what was happening and who was making it happen. It was followed by the bullying and imbedding of much of the country’s news industry. And now it has reached a higher level of refinement when the Supreme Court allows state legislatures, lubricated with corporate money, to mock some of the most profound principles of democracy by carving up electoral districts to insure one-party control in perpetuity.

To guarantee the allegiance of that segment of the country that feels honor-bound to glorify all military acts of the government, the White House has maneuvered much of the country into complying with its bedrock construct that we are now in a perpetual state of war. George Bush and his handlers have thus created the platform Bush cherishes and evidently craves psychologically above others, going before the voters in November as A Wartime President.

In the meantime, the one war America should have fought, to uproot the terrorists that existed three years ago, has been left to wither via Iraq and to produce even more terrorists.

The Iraqi citizen said he felt America everywhere. Politically and militarily that may be correct. But there are times when the America he is talking about, the government now running Washington and the world, is nowhere. It is nowhere to be seen when the American public school system morphs toward chaos because of the spending on war-forever and because of the vast budget deficit created by the tax cuts benefiting primarily the wealthy and corporate. It is nowhere when 34 million Americans are struggling to feed and house themselves in the midst of all this world dominance. It is nowhere when old people and poor people, worried about health care, try to understand the newest federal gobbledygook that promises sunshine but delivers fog.

If America in November of 2004 can stomach all of that, or look at it and deny it, than the Bush crowd will have succeeded in its ultimate triumph, the Dumbing-Down of America.

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar