The president responded abruptly w hen a reporter suggested that war was inevitable.

"You said we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that," Bush said. "I'm the person who gets to decide, not you."

—CNN.com, reporting from Crawford, Texas, December 31, 2002.

Near the end of his latest bill of indictment, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Gore Vidal envisions a sad finish for the political fortunes of George W. Bush and his ministry of fear. "Mark my words. He will leave office the most unpopular president in history. The junta has done too much wreckage."

Gore, ever the cockeyed optimist. His faith in the slow-burn wrath of the American people is touching, considering how little we have done to earn it. Never before have so many put up with so much from so few. Despite corporate robbery, a trampling of civil liberties that makes the Red scare look like a dress rehearsal, a rapist urge to ram a paved road or oil pipeline through every nature preserve, a Tony Soprano foreign policy that fingers which dirtbag country we're going to whack next, an unaccountable vice president who pops out of his groundhog hole only to raise money for the Republican Party or play bad cop on Meet the Press, and the corny spectacle of the president himself imploring us to visit a shut-in and say, "I love you" (and they accused Clinton of being Empath in Chief!), despite all this, the huddled, befuddled masses have been as quiet as church mice. Those in power can't be accused of thwarting the will of the people, because the people seem to have lost their will, or traded it in for Powerball tickets. Most puzzling is the quiet resignation, the iceberg drift of collective apathy (apart from a few well-attended marches), which has marked the escalation of the prospect of war against Iraq.

This mass sleepwalk isn't confined to America. Suspended animation seems to have seized hold of our staunchest (only?) ally, England. "You might have imagined that the country would be riven by argument and debate," Jackie Ashley wrote in The Guardian of this pre-war lull. "So far, there's been a great national shrug." Perhaps England's indifference is based on the knowledge that it will be taking only a lesser role in the actual fighting, but what's our lame excuse? The U.S. will be shouldering the lion's share of blood and hardware, and our shrug has been even more pronounced.

'So where are the antiwarriors?" asked George Packer in the pages of The New York Times Magazine in December. The anti-war marches that caterpillared down the streets of a few major cities have underwhelmed Packer. "Speakers at the demonstrations voice unnuanced slogans like 'No Sanctions, No Bombing' and 'No Blood for Oil.' As for what should be done to keep this mass murderer and his weapons in check, they have nothing to say at all." (By "mass murderer," Packer is presumably referring to Saddam Hussein and not the current occupant of the Oval Office.) In The Washington Post, reporter David Montgomery previewed an anti-war rally and deemed the protesters an amusing menagerie of human flotsam that time forgot. "Don't forget the suburban seniors fixing to march on the White House in spite of arthritis and titanium kneecaps, women wearing pink keeping vigil in the cold, Quakers in the basement debating slogans that are too long and nuanced to fit on a bumper sticker ..." No, and let's not forget that a contingent of Quakers who were arrested during the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon refused to eat, drink, or wear prison uniforms, and were thrown into the Hole of the D.C. jail. "There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep," Norman Mailer wrote in The Armies of the Night, " ... —these naked Quakers on the cold floor of a dark isolation cell in D.C. jail, wandering down the hours in the fever of dehydration." In the current climate, however, Quakers are considered quaint.

So here we have two supposed liberal bastions, The New York Times and The Washington Post, chiming that (a) there is no peace movement, and (b) well, there is one, sorta, but it's a motley parade of fringe lefties, college kids, and historical retreads stretching their legs in an exercise in futility. Policy debate is best left to the manly professionals, such as the East Coast "liberal hawks" Packer cites for approval. Liberal doves should just stay in their cages and coo.

We life have been down this slope before. The drumbeat of war traditionally drowns out dissent. Patriotism is employed as a silencer, a cattle call to get the herd chugging in the same direction. "Once the war is on," wrote the progressive intellectual Randolph Bourne at the outbreak of World War I, "the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a cog in the great wheel. We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work." Big thinkers and ordinary citizens alike are urged to jettison their Jiminy Cricket consciences and get with the program. "Be with us, they call, or be negligible, irrelevant. Dissenters are ... excommunicated." Under this barrage, many of those harboring doubts cast them aside and persuade themselves that, war being inevitable, the wiser, more pragmatic course is to accept harsh reality. "The realist thinks he at least can control events by linking himself to the forces that are moving," Bourne observed, anticipating the rationale of those liberal Democrats who rubber-stamped a resolution for Bush to pursue war with Iraq rather than risk being called the party of weak knees and appeasement. But, as Bourne also warned, linking yourself to the forces in motion offers no guarantee of influence. War is a rogue elephant that may not whoa, whether you're riding its back or standing on the ground waving like a traffic cop. It took years before reluctant supporters acknowledged that the Vietnam War was a runaway nightmare.

PATRIOTISM IS EMPLOYED AS A SILENCER, A CATTLE CALL TO GET THE HERD CHUGGING IN THE SAME DIRECTION.

What's unique this time is the pro-war camp didn't wait for American troops to pour across the borders before it began stigmatizing and sidelining dissent at home and abroad. As befits a pre-emptive war, the hawks and their media pigeons launched a pre-emptive strike on the antiwar camp while it was taking its first baby steps. Opposition has been discounted in advance with a knowing sneer. According to the new rules of disengagement, the following are disqualified from having their opinions signify as America prepares to climb into the ring with the Axis of Evil.

A-list celebrities. In December of 2002, Sean Penn visited Baghdad. Earlier, the actor and director had paid for a full-page ad in The Washington Post to publish an open letter to the president, urging him to leash the dogs of war and rethink the consequences of invasion. The letter was stilted and ingenuous in parts, but was written in a respectful tone and reflected a serious moral concern; it wasn't a fiery salvo from a Hollywood hothead. Penn's visit to Baghdad demonstrated a similar brooding modesty. He toured hospitals, spoke to Iraqis, snapped photographs, and avoided posturing before the news cameras and microphones; in fact, he was so concerned about being used as a propaganda device by the Hussein regime that he immediately issued a disavowal after an Iraqi press report attributed quotes to him saying Iraq was squeaky-clean of weapons of mass destruction.

None of the pains Penn took spared him the inevitable sliming. He was branded a traitor and bracketed with Jane Fonda, "Baghdad Sean" to her "Hanoi Jane." In a column in The Wall Street Journal, Clifford D. May, a gratingly familiar cable-news guest and president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (one of those bogus-sounding right-wing think tanks where no one needs to think, because their minds have been made up ever since they first gazed upon Reagan resplendent), reached deep into the fish barrel:

Lenin, father of the Soviet Union, had a name for people like Mr. Penn: "Useful idiots." Lenin's successor, Stalin, was even able to dupe Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow whose Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting helped convince the world that no government-orchestrated famine was occurring in the Ukraine.

Similarly, during World War II, the Nazis took representatives of the Red Cross to the model concentration camp at Thereisenstadt, where they established to the Red Cross's satisfaction that those nasty rumors about Hitler's mistreatment of the Jews were unfounded and really quite outrageous.

In this amazing guilt-by-disassociation glissade, May managed to lump Penn, who has never uttered word one in favor of Saddam Hussein, with a long line of Commie sympathizers and Nazi apologists. Words were not enough to convey the contempt felt by some of May's brethren on the right. After mentioning Penn's shutterbug activities in Baghdad, The Weekly Standard mused, "We must admit, we were kind of hoping that some poor Iraqi citizen, mindful of his privacy, would make like stateside Sean Penn and punch him in the face."

B-list celebrities. Also in December, 100 lesser Hollywood celebrities lent their names to another quixotic open letter to Bush, publicized at a press conference attended by signatories Martin Sheen, Mike Farrell, and Tony Shalhoub among others. Unlike Penn, "the Hollywood 100"—a deliberate allusion to the blacklisted Hollywood 10?— weren't roasted as useful idiots, but derided as attention-hungry has-beens hoping for guest spots on a gala Love Boat reunion. Grilled by cable-news hosts doing their populist shtick— among them MSNBC's Jerry Nachman, whose anachronistic set is decorated like a dumpy newspaper editor's office out of a Mickey Spillane novel (he begins each show, "Let's go to press," as if magic elves were about to put out the next edition)—the hapless celebrity reps were barely able to defend their position, they were so busy being fitted for dunce caps. Nachman sneered to an unflappably cool Janeane Garofalo that most celebrities were dopes "whose knowledge of the subject seems to be informed by a bumper sticker and not much else." A-list or B-list, the message is the same: Clam up and leave the political discussion to the serious and well informed. You know, top-notch minds like Ollie North and Jerry Falwell.

Un-Americans. The quickest way to dismiss a dissenter is to label him un-American, a worm-from-within who stresses what's wrong with the U.S.A. instead of what's right, or plays a devious game of "moral equivalence." Typical of this tack is the recent George Will column in which he chides, "The left, its anti-capitalism transmogrified into antiAmericanism expressed in the argot of anti-globalization, will repeat that of course Iraq and North Korea are dangerous, but so are McDonald's and Microsoft." Those vegetarian, open-code bastards! Combating such nattering nabobs of negativism has become a cottage industry for busy beavers like William J. Bennett (Why We Fight) and Dinesh D'Souza (What's So Great About America). Also flying the red, white, and blue are cable-news hosts Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews, whose inspirational books (Let Freedom Ring and American, respectively) plaster the grinning author on the cover posed with an American flag. Apple-pie pride beams from every airbrushed pore. As long as such patriots strut the ramparts, the best-seller list will be safe for democracy.

SEAN PENN WAS LUMPED WITH A LONG LINE OF COMMIE SYMPATHIZERS AND NAZI APOLOGISTS.

The greatest hotbeds of anti-American bad-mouthing are sheltered behind the ivy walls of our over-endowed universities. According to legend, former 60s radicals—now affluent, middle-aged, saggy NPR listeners whose gray ponytails flop limp against their wattled necks—remain nostalgic for the revolutionaries they might have been, and have indoctrinated a new generation of misguided idealists and snot-nosed brats to loathe corporate logos and make excuses for Osama bin Laden. Why, if they had their druthers, these tenured Pied Pipers would hand out a Molotov cocktail with each diploma. Happily, help is on the way. Classroom gurus who formerly polluted the dim skulls of students by slandering their own country are being put under hairy surveillance. Daniel Pipes, the Mideast expert with a sardonic beard like Rex Harrison's in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, presides over something called Campus Watch, which keeps tabs on college professors antagonistic to Israel and the U.S. (or, as he called them in a New York Post op-ed piece, "Profs Who Hate America"). Pipes's ideological bunkmate David Horowitz, another fiery, bearded prophet who has never found a burning issue he couldn't bugger senseless, fronts the Take Back Our Campuses campaign, which, like Pipes's operation, lists and excoriates left-wing hypnotists in the college classrooms. (A donation at Horowitz's Web site will "Help David Expose The Leftist Plot to Control America's Young Minds.") And then there is a blandly titled organization, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, co-founded by Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman through some satanic pact, which issued a post-9/11 report criticizing educators and other chrome domes for failing to prop up Western civ. "When a nation's intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries," the report stated, listing more than 100 examples of unpatriotic utterances by academics. Giving comfort to the enemy is one of the rough definitions of what constitutes treason. Raising that McCarthyite specter is one way of putting the fear of the state into the faculty. What's next, loyalty oaths?

Arab-Americans. Judging from the media, they don't exist. Apart from a few public-service spots, we never see any on TV, either in prime-time entertainment or cable news, and the op-ed pages seldom blaze with their views. The threat of detention and deportation that hangs over Arab communities (not idle threats, either: hundreds of Muslims were arrested in Los Angeles after voluntarily registering with the Immigration and Naturalization Service) has put them on probation for the endless duration of the War on Terror. If they achieve any visibility in the months ahead, it will be as a painted backdrop, bearing mute witness to the unfolding drama.

Non-Americans. After expressing sympathy and solidarity with America post-9/11, foreigners seem to have gotten uppity again. How dare they criticize the policies of this country? Especially those pampered, effete, ungrateful, deodorant-averse European wussies. Don't they remember how we bailed them out of two World Wars? God knows we remind them of it often enough. We drag it out of the trunk every time they make a minor objection to, oh, say, plans to orbit a Death Star satellite. "Europeans are the ultimate free-riders on American power," Charles Krauthammer snipped in The Washington Post, and hawks like him have had it with their backseat driving. After German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said, Include me out of a pre-emptive whack at Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld not only snubbed Germany's defense minister at a NATO meeting but taped a nasty note to his hall locker. What was different this time was that the hostility in conservative journals and Web sites wasn't limited to German officials but was lavished on Germany and the Germans themselves, who were scolded for being whiners and ingrates harboring a snake pit of renascent anti-Semitism. Entire nations were now being written off as unworthy—as bad as France! Even our geographically closest ally wasn't spared. Jonah Goldberg, trying too hard to be the new P. J. O'Rourke, ventured north to do a cover story for National Review, which branded the word WIMPS! across a photograph of Royal Canadian Mounties. The article itself, cheekily titled "Bomb Canada: The Case for War," argued that carpet bombing might be the best thing for this socialistic, soft-on-terrorism, politically correct snowland. It would shake them out of their smug lethargy and learn 'em not to lecture the U.S. and call our president a "moron." Even as a Swiftian modest proposal, "Bomb Canada" makes for unhappy irony, given that four Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in a "friendly fire" incident when American pilots, allegedly cranked up on amphetamine, fired a laser-guided missile at their position. Many Canadians were already understandably sore with the U.S. over the government's weak apology for the incident, and then Goldberg opens his big trap.

The backlash didn't deter Goldberg's colleague John Derbyshire from daydreaming about how much good a few kabooms might do another of our wayward allies, South Korea. Derbyshire, the journalistic charmer who once wished for the murder of Chelsea Clinton (otherwise, "the vile genetic inheritance of Bill and Hillary Clinton may live on to plague us in the future"), said that, since the longtime ally had tilted anti-U.S., perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad thing if a hard rain fell below the 48th parallel. "It would be a shame, of course, if a few dozen of those glittering malls, luxury apartment blocks, fast-food franchises, Hyundai showrooms, and Ikea outlets were to be smashed up by North Korean missiles." However, "given that the South Korean people keep electing leaders who sound like Walter Mondale, and register positively Parisian levels of anti-Americanism when polled, it's hard to see why we Americans [Derbyshire, an Englishman, received his citizenship in 2002] should mind if their nice prosperous little country gets knocked about a bit." That there would be thousands of human beings who would perish during this upscale property damage was a pesky detail he skirted.

IT TOOK YEARS BEFORE RELUCTANT SUPPORTERS ACKNOWLEDGED THAT THE VIETNAM WAR WAS A RUNAWAY NIGHTMARE.

This is more than a matter of funning. The cartoon devastation advocated by Goldberg, Derbyshire, and cohorts is a trickle-down expression of the deadly serious might-makes-right policies of the neo-imperialists inside the administration— Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, et al. In the 60s and 70s militant lefties (parroting Mao) would spout, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." What pikers they were. For righties, geopolitical power flows out of the bomb-bay doors: Seoul or Baghdad, friend or foe, wherever the payload hits the road.

Liberals. I know, I know: what liberals? Way back in 1973, Wilfrid Sheed wrote, "Although I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties ... , hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the 'typical liberal'—as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns." To suspicious minds, liberals still remain dangerously at large, Out There somewhere gnawing on the social fabric, undermining our moral defenses. Conservative viper vixen Ann Coulter is publishing a five-alarm wake-up call this summer titled Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, unmasking the traitors and no-goodniks in our midst. Even a bold exaggerator like Coulter may have bitten off more than she could vomit. If liberalism translates as treason and Democrats are overwhelmingly liberal, then a lot of Al Gore voters have some explaining to do, and even Attorney General John Ashcroft might have a tough time rounding up that many suspects. (It would be like the episode of The Andy Griffith Show where Sheriff Andy returned to a deserted Mayberry—in his absence, Barney Fife had jailed the entire town.)

Lastly, smokers. I include them among the dispossessed because they are the guinea pigs for every new social experiment in group ostracism, harassment, and regulation. The fearless journalist Oriana Fallaci told the Financial Times that "persecution of the people who smoke is fascist." Fallaci currently lives in New York, whose mayor has taken a page out of the Bush playbook. He orders; we obey. He's the one who gets to decide.