Yes, I have at last returned from my travels. It was all fun, though it was a little scary to see the pro-Bush billboards on my travels, saying things like 'Freedom isn't free'.

I guess I missed that at the local lefty meeting, the decision that freedom wasn't free. I don't know anyone who has ever considered that America would be better off as an isolationist country, ostriching and hoping that bad things will pass us by. Ibdeed the only people I've heard suggesting such things are the Republicans, who doggedly attribute such ideas to the left, to the 'liberal' straw man.

It's a little scary to think that a sizable number of Americans truly believe this line of thought.

This sermon from Davidson Loehr is a little scary, too.

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word 'fascism' in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don't mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That's what I am about here. And even if I don't persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.

But I don't mean to bring a total bummer to the table. Whit & Lynn & I had a great Thanksgiving at the house & pottery of our pals in lovely Long Siding, MN, and then I scurried down to MO to move another pal to Milwaukee (next door to my house, sitcom-stylee). I got back to all sorts of positiveness on the jobhunt front, too.

So - maybe, just maybe - 2005 will be a better year than its predcessor.

(...oh, and I was hipped to the Loehr sermon by a user diary on DailyKos.)