Since WWII we’ve become the strongest, greatest national security state in the history of the world. We have fulfilled Orwell’s definition of “perennial war,” and paranoia.
So how did we get here? It wasn’t the world I knew as a young man. My father was a Republican. Conservative. He served under Eisenhower in Europe. I just remember this feeling that drove me to Vietnam: that we had to respond to communism because it was seeking to dominate the world. I think that’s a very important thing to overcome.
Once you can recognize fear and paranoia then you begin to have the methods and the instruments by which you can pick up on it… as it is evoked over and over again in our culture. When George Bush talks about the terrorists as being the end of the world, he’s going to eradicate evil, you’ve reached an extreme of paranoia and, frankly, insanity.