Swastika Season in Washington

It's spring, so it must be time to start slinging the swastikas again.

First up, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who compared some European witnesses who were testifying against the supposed value of extreme rendition...to Adolf Eichmann. That jackboot may be on the other foot, don't you think?

Next, our own beloved New York Post, for labeling an Iranian religious leader a "dresstapo" for his punishment of unveiled women. Presumably, this means we can now nuke the bastards. And I bet you didn't know the Post was a feminist rag, did you?

Next in line is Michael Savage, who compared Hillary with Goebbels. Why? Because she dared to question where the Roberts neocon-5 of the Supreme Court might have gotten their medical degrees.

Brownie's former boss steps up to warn us that Iraq and al-Qaeda are as powerful a force as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and assorted totalitarian regimes.

Finally, a well-known lefty news source is being threatened with a law suit from the Vatican for creating a photo-montage of the Pope as a Nazi. The only problem with that one is that...um...he was.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: and that's just the tip of the swastika—an ancient Sanskrit symbol, by the way, of good fortune, now degraded into the mud of hatred, slung at random by anyone who wishes to kill with words. If you question the reality haze of someone like Rep. Rohrabacher (hmmm....that's an awfully German sounding name you have there, Ms. R), you are a traitor.

In fact, we live in a culture where questions are not permitted. Is it any wonder, then, that science is suppressed or ignored?

The government says, "to question is treason;" the corporation says, "to question is insubordination;" the media tell us, "questions make a bad circus—only conflict delivers profit."

So science—an activity of the human mind based on questioning experience—is moribund today. It is stagnant in our schools, distorted in our think tanks, twisted or suppressed in our research facilities, cherry-picked by our corporations, and blithely ignored in our personal lives, where we most desperately need its guiding hand.

But these are choices that have been made for us, not by us. If we can remember that, and demand of our leaders that we recover the capacity for science, the ability to ask questions of experience, then we have a chance at recovering our democracy.

For once we stop asking questions, we start dying.