The outrage of September 11 and the tragedy of September 14, 2001 - and the choice of 2008.

It sets my teeth on edge whenever some timid weasel speaks of the Al Queda attacks of September 11, 2001 as a "tragedy." It was not a tragedy - which would mean something that was not the perpetrators' design. It was a massacre, a crime, an outrage. It was followed by a second outrage on September 13, when Christianist sociopaths Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson broadcast their endorsement of the perpetrators' "reasons" for the massacre. The real tragedy came on September 14, when President George W. Bush sponsored a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance" at the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

I was born in Europe, where many a country has a thousand-year-old Established Church, and a solemn national memorial would have been held at its National Cathedral as a matter of course. The setting, hymns, and some perfunctory rituals would have been there to provide a link to national history and tradition - but the essential content was always secular, and addressed not to God but to all the citizens, whether atheist or devout, of the nation. This is what I expected - and got shocked. Bush's show, such as it was, was adressed not to Americans but to God - and it came across as a desperate attempt to convince Him and His believers across the world that America was not, contra bin Laden and Robertson and Falwell, a den of sinners deserving of additional Divine chastisment, but rather a nation of faithful believers in God, just as pious and self-sacrificing as the suicide terrorists who flew planes into buildings three days before; humbly begging God for forgiveness of whatever grievous sins had caused Him to withold His protection from America on that day.

There was a seemingly unending sequence of clerics of many different faiths, but their selection made it clear that this was not a memorial to all the Americans who had been murdered by the God-crazed killers. Religions that do not teach Man to shiver in fear of God - Humanists, Buddhists, Unitarians, Reconstructionist and Humanistic Jews - were not invited to speak, regardless of how many of their members had been murderd three days before. There was to be no dissent from a ritual of national abasement before the mystery of the Divine chastisement of His faithful, and from the promise that America was to be humble, self-sacrificing and God-fearing in the future, so as to avert a repetition of His wrath. One of the Islamic clerics invited to sermonize was a Wahabbi, of the religion (and the motivator) of the suicide fliers. This worthy cleric used the occasion to lecture Americans on the Sin of Pride.

There could have been no more total treason to America's Enlightenment foundations than this spectacle, directly out of the Dark Ages, of genuflexion to faith and self-sacrifice. Most of America's Founders believed in a God, having (in their time) no natural explanation for the apparent design of Man and of the world. But the intellectuals among them were Deists, believers in a God who created the world, and then set Nature to run its course without His further involvement. That "Men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights" was their way of saying, that every man had those rights by virtue of his nature as a man, and not by a grant or fiat from some religious book or political power. In 2001, it was America telling the world the opposite: that "liberty" (whatever that might mean, for it no longer meant individual rights) was not a matter of Man's nature, but a gift from a fickle God. And that Americans needed, and were going to, plead for this gift from God by abjuring reason and self-interest and by practicing self-sacrifice. And so this ceremony to erase, from Americans' minds and memory, the fact that what had been done to them on September 11 was done, by those 19 pious men, as an act of self-sacrifice to the God of their faith.

In the seven years since, the world learned that to our own religious gang - the one ruling an America that no longer recognizes individual rights as a matter of Man's nature - "liberty" now meant "democracy:" putting the people of each nation under the yoke of whatever regime that nation's majority (vox populi vox dei) would vote for. Even when that majority's choice was (as it predictably turned out to be in Iraq and Afghanistan) an Islamic Republic, where no human has any individual rights that the Shariah Police would need to recognize. And, to demonstrate to God that America was now a pious land of self-sacrifice for faith, the lives of American soldiers, of Americans, were sacrificed to set up and maintain the Islamic Republics that the local savages of Iraq and Afghanistan had voted into power. It was the new, pious government of America that had murdered these American soldiers, just as the dead of September 11 had been murdered by another religious gang, as a sacrifice to and for the rule of supernatural religion, and of its godly men, over the Earth.

Seven years after the tragedy of September 14 we live in a different America, a country made weaker and poorer by seven years of national self-sacrifice. Until this week, it looked like the next President, whoever he was, will be calling on Americans for more years of self-sacrifice; but neither of the two candidates would (and in this they both differ from the present occupant of the White House) actually and faithfully mean it. One of the candidates, John McCain, by legislation (especially McCain-Feingold) and by promising to appoint judges who will overturn Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, had appointed himself America's number-one enemy of the freedom of speech. So I planned to vote for the other, because doing so would count twice as much as not voting, against McCain and in defense of free speech. This week, McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate has given me, and all Americans who still live by reason, a reason to not even consider staying home on election day.

Sarah Palin is, to the Christianists and the Islamists of the world, an actual saint. In her last pregnancy, she learned that she was carrying a fetus with a genetic defect, one that will make the child, that this fetus could eventually become, forever incapable of fully human conceptual life. Sarah Palin, rejecting the option of abortion, decided to sacrifice a large fraction of the rest of her life to God's Will by completing that pregnancy, and deliberately giving birth to a genetically defective child. Even for George W. Bush, religious self-sacrifice is mainly something he orders and demands of others. For Sarah Palin, religous self-sacrifice is what she is - I was about to write "herself," but it is precisely her self that Sarah Palin, in total obedience to her faith, has sincerely done everything she could to strangle by her personal sacrifice to the Will of God.

John McCain is in his seventies, and in poor health. It is possible, and not altogether unlikely, that, if he were elected, his deteriorating health will prevent him from completing his full four years is office. And then the Presidency would fall into the hands of Sarah Palin, who will sacrifice America, just as she has deliberately sacrificed her own personal life, to the Will of God. This would be the end of Enlightenment America, at the hand of America's first fully theocratic head of government and state.

During my first years in America I was often asked why several European nations, allied with America against the spread of Communism, were ruled by nominally Socialist political parties. I explained that the European voter, given the choice between the Communist who sincerely believes in total redistribution, and a Socialist who tries to believe in it, but is actually sane enough to fail in his attempt to believe, no rational man would vote for the true believer, nor abstain and thus allow the true believer to win. Communism took seven decades to fizzle. The last time around, the Dark Age of godly self-sacrifice lasted seven centuries. Those who would bring it back must be stopped.