"I want you to feel that Iraqi life is precious," he told them.

Well, that's not going to happen. Here, at the level of basic humanity, the occupation of Iraq -- indeed, the entire Bush administration -- begins to unravel. We can see this with excruciating clarity as requests for an apology waylay the smooth, legal cover-up (one in a series) of the latest spasm of panic and target practice by Blackwater thugs, which left 17 Iraqis dead in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September.

Even the embedded media, so valiant in their attempts to cast the American presence as well-intentioned and, you know, doing the best it can (under the circumstances), couldn't help but convey, as they reported on the investigation of the Blackwater killings, the humanity of the grieving Iraqis. In so doing, the coverage hinted, unavoidably, at the truth about the occupation: that we are, to put it mildly, the bad guys, that what we're doing there is barbaric, racist, insane.

Lurid headlines have been blooming in my fair city, Chicago, along with the daffodils. A dozen dead, 40 injured in less than a week. The mayor calls a gun summit. The police chief promises to send SWAT teams in full battle dress to troubled neighborhoods.

"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction." -- Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth"

Like the war on terror, violence in the 'hood is mostly a macabre abstraction. It's a game that others play, a spectator sport -- unless, until, we're affected personally.

Why, for God's sake, does nothing change? The war goes on, the money flows, the blood flows, the lies stay exactly the same. Have you noticed? Have you ever wondered, with a stab of transcendent confusion, why a self-correcting rationality hasn't kicked in by now, why a saner awareness hasn't made itself evident in the macro-affairs of the nation by now?

Folks, we have a seriously dysfunctional situation on our hands, more pervasive, I fear, than most of us realize. Deep into Bush II, our government appears to have taken on a crack house dysfunctionality. The institutional checks and balances that Americans are so proud of -- including, of course, the watchdog media -- have been so compromised by the war-junkie administration they've served and enabled they have almost no objectivity left with which to challenge or counter it. And thus the national war addiction permeates every facet of governance, and the media's coverage thereof.

If politics is the art of saying nothing, then Barack Obama is sure blowing it, isn't he?

His latest "gaffe," to proclaim at a private fundraiser in San Francisco (of all places) that small-town Americans are bitter and cling to guns and God in lieu of financial security -- these words purveyed to the American public by way of a scratchy, Osama-quality recording -- triggered such heartfelt hypocrisy from his opponents.

"It is hard to imagine," said John McCain, "someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."

I almost agree with this. Obama is definitely out of touch with something. However, it isn't "average Americans" -- who, it turns out, really are bitter in large numbers -- so much as what I would call "the tacit covenant of presidential politics."

The interests of war, which siphon off 40 percent of every dollar we pay in taxes, have no choice but to declare peace -- or at least truth -- anti-American, because the blood myth of national exceptionalism, and the perpetual insecurity it creates, is all they've got.

It's also all they need.

Did anyone, for instance, expect the Petraeus-Crocker testimony before Congress this week to affect or even address what we're actually doing in Iraq? The best we get is some mild criticism from the opposition party, stern words about our "missteps" in the waltz to victory, ineffective calls for a timetable for troop withdrawal that, sincere or wholly insincere, will not in fact lead to a timetable for troop withdrawal because nothing is on the line in this testimony; and, in any case, no congressperson dares trample on "the seeds of nascent democracy" our boys and girls have been planting over there for the last five years. And lo, "There has been growth," the general declared. And those baby democracies are so cute!

What could be more brittle than "Americanism"? What could be more tedious than the mass defense of the teary-eyed, ahistorical ignorance for which it stands?

We are still in the toddler stage of national awareness, apparently, too young to be told how we got here. Thus the fiery Rev. Jeremiah Wright, proclaiming the bitter truths of ghetto America -- skewering the ugly and cruel side of our righteousness, challenging the saintliness of our military might, railing about slavery and poverty and Nagasaki, committing the ultimate sacrilege of uttering "God damn America ... for killing innocent people" -- is just too, too much for the purveyors of genteel know-nothingism in the media who work so hard to make sure our presidential elections are intellectually stress-free and who have denounced him en masse with the all-purpose condemnation "anti-American."

The ground feels a little soft, but we're going to stand it.

Premise one: Having a fair election -- all votes counted, all who are eligible and want to vote allowed to vote -- is far, far more important, even in 2008, than who wins.

Premise two: Fair elections are not a given. They never have been, but things are worse now than ever before because of a perfect storm, you might say, of factors that have converged in the new millennium: officialdom's seduction by unsafe, high-tech voting systems; the seizure of power by a party of ruthless true believers who feel entitled to rule and will do anything to win; a polite, confused opposition party that won't make a stink about raw injustice; and an arrogantly complacent media embedded in the political and economic status quo.

"I trained my weapon on him," Kristopher Goldsmith said. It was a little boy, 6 years old maybe, standing on a roof, menacing the soldiers with a stick. "I was thinking, I hate these Iraqis who throw rocks. I could kill this kid."

OK, America, let's look through the sights of Goldsmith's rifle for a long, long half-minute or so, draw a bead on the boy's heart, fondle the trigger -- what to do? The soldier's decision is our decision.

This is occupied Iraq: the uncensored version, presented to us with relentless, at times unbearable honesty over four intense days last week in a historic gathering outside Washington, D.C., of returning vets, many of them broken and bitter about what they were forced to do, and what's been done to them, in sometimes two, three, four tours of duty in the biggest mistake in American history.

It's 3 a.m. and your child is sleeping. A detainee groans at Guantanamo. On the campaign trail, the Clinton PR team is guzzling coffee, dreaming up new ways to milk votes out of fear.

Why, I wondered, is she going after these votes in the primary? Surely she doesn't imagine that the fear fundamentalists are part of her constituency: the ones who think a wall across our Southern border, and a macho preener in the White House, will make them safe. Then I thought, oh, maybe it's that Republican crossover thing. Rush Limbaugh loans the dittohead vote to Hillary so the GOP doesn't have to run against Obama in the fall, and she eases their journey across the party divide with a little shameless fear-mongering so they feel temporarily at home.

A certain reverence is required just to approach the book's title: "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict" by noted economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. I can see why they understated it.

The pulse of outrage beats behind the cold calculations in this concise volume, newly published by Norton. We're not just "losing" this tragic, arrogantly unplanned war in the conventional sense of failing to subdue our enemies -- we're committing slow socioeconomic suicide with its open-ended pursuit, losing, as we plunge recklessly into debt over it, our options, our ability to choose. We're losing the future.

Grab your flak jackets because there's "trench warfare" on the campaign trail, as would-be commanders-in-chief prove their mettle not merely by persuading people to vote for them but by "demolishing" their opponents -- because the leader of a country as powerful as the United States of America must, above all, be someone who's tough and ruthless, right? Like George W. Bush.

We may be a nation that goes shopping after the terrorists strike -- we may have more to fear from obesity than Osama bin Laden -- but suddenly it's an election year and we, or at least the media, are preoccupied with threats to our security that have the complexity of comic-book bad guys.

Oh, come on, do we need this? I know, I know, it’s cute. STAINLESS STEEL THIGHS! FEEL THE SQUEEZE!

Perhaps the fact that a major party is about to nominate either a female or an African-American male to be president of the United States is so lacking in controversy, so quietly ho-hum, that a little adolescent gender humor on the side is no big deal, either.

Enter — stage right? stage left? — the Hillary Nutcracker, a hot-selling novelty product of the 2008 political season that has gotten some fawning and even enthusiastic press, with right-wing MSNBC pundit Tucker Carlson so moved by the nutcracker he all but confessed his castration complex regarding Ms. Clinton, all in fun, of course. This is political discourse in America.

The snowmobilers stopped and talked to the truck driver who'd been sitting behind me for the past eight hours, then they sped off and I watched as his truck came back to life, the headlights suddenly filling my car, the engine revving. I could scarcely believe that the ordeal was ending.

"People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle," says Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh. "But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth."

I would add, to move at all is a miracle, at 2 mph, over a precarious moonscape of ice, forever if necessary. After eight hours of utter motionlessness on the highway last week, and several more hour-plus waits, that was miracle enough: to crunch along Interstate 90 in precarious slow motion in the surreal pre-dawn somewhere south of Madison, Wis., with jackknifed and overturned semis everywhere.

"Many in this chamber understand that America must not fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching . . ."

There it is again, that choking lie, so smoothly administered -- with just enough fear to help America gag down all that righteousness.

President Bush told it again in his final State of the Union address the other night, of course. What choice did he have? The truth, coming from him at this point, would be . . . too weird, too offensive, impossible to comprehend.

But the truth is that we've already failed in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East and Central Asia -- failed with consequences beyond reckoning. God knows someone will have to take a swig of political courage and acknowledge it one of these days, simply to stop the lie -- the lies, a governmental cluster bomb of them -- from doing further harm.

"We should at least get votes back on paper and get people counting them by hand."

As innocuous as these words may sound, they make me feel like I'm on I-35 in Minneapolis, headed toward the Mississippi bridge. Ankle-deep in a presidential election year, I find myself without faith in the infrastructure of American civilization.

This is not what I'd like to be writing about. Our nation's soul is bleeding, its future up for grabs. The candidates jockey for a mandate -- our mandate -- and they'll define it as narrowly as possible unless we define it for them. How thoroughly and courageously do we repudiate the Cheney-Bush legacy? How resolutely do we move toward peace and global oneness? That's what 2008 is all about, right?

"I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes."

Ladies and gentlemen, it's none other than "the Filipino Monkey," now doing voiceovers for the Pentagon!

More bad melodrama in the Gulf, I'm afraid. And war with Iran is still a no-go, but the bellicose among us keep trying. It's nothing new. The recent bizarre non-incident between U.S. warships and Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz — apparently Pentagon-edited for media consumption to create the illusion of provocation — has been justifiably compared to the bogus 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, which became the pretext for 10 years of war in Vietnam, but it evokes historical patterns that run deeper than four decades.

As the breathless sports coverage of the presidential primaries bursts around me this morning, I’m doing my best to resist surrendering to the contrived drama about “comeback kids” and the flying shrapnel of numbers and hold onto my troubled skepticism about the electoral process, or at least most of it.

First of all, before we get too enthusiastic about feminist solidarity or wax knowingly about New Hampshire Democrats’ traditional soft-heartedness toward the Clinton family, let’s ponder yet again the possibility of tainted results, which is such an unfun prospect most of the media can’t bear to remember that all the problems we’ve had with electronic voting machines — and Diebold machines in particular, which dominate New Hampshire polling places — remain unsolved.

Many U.S. media outlets were quick to give us a primer on Islamic terrorism in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last week, even though actual evidence points the finger far more at our ally in the war on terror, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, than it does at the Taliban or al-Qaida.

Indeed, McClatchy Newspapers recently reported that Bhutto, at the time of her murder, was in possession of evidence that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency was planning to rig the upcoming election (then scheduled for Jan. 8) in Musharraf’s favor, supplying, as if it were needed, an obvious motive for getting rid of her.

More and more, I'm softening to the idea of being a beginner and finding joy in doing something I've never done before, to the point where I'm on the stump for a shift in the vocabulary of beginning.

"Clumsy," "crude," "awkward" — aren't these the terms we use to characterize the efforts of beginners, including our own? The prejudice locked in such words is that the state of beginning is a tedious one, a sheer linear necessity, to be borne stoically and apologetically until others come along who are newer, and worse, than we are.

These are relative terms, measuring the neophyte against the established master, but they have the ring of absolute judgment — and discourage many old dogs from learning new tricks. Who wants to be a klutz? Who needs the humiliation? As a result, we stick to what we know, and slowly stagnate.

Whereas there are approximately 300 million apple pie lovers in the United States, making apple pie the dessert of choice of 99 percent of the American population;

Whereas the holiday season (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa) is a festive occasion in which pigging out is not only permissible but de rigueur, and no pie (with the possible exception of pumpkin or, in some regions, Key lime) is quite as "go to" for Americans, in their joyous surrender to weight gain at this time of year;

Whereas no pie says America like apple pie . . .

Sarcasm in progress! Stop me, please, before life imitates art, before Congress passes a resolution recognizing the importance of oxygen or, I dunno, leisure suits.

America's suicide bombers don't use bombs and don't seem to have a cause larger than their own angst, but they're as lethal as any misguided political fanatic and they beg a question as urgent as any the human race has faced.

Yet it's the same old -- indeed, Paleolithic -- question we've always faced. Are we the hunter or are we the prey? Or are we something else, some preposterous and divine mixture of the two, holy terrors, flawed creators who keep failing to get it right? As Immanuel Kant put it: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made."

Even the glory that is the 21st century U.S. of A. is a construction of crooked timber, psychologically and spiritually speaking, at least, and a sad kid named Robert Hawkins, a "lost puppy" (so a friend's mother described him), gave the umpteenth demonstration of this fact at an Omaha shopping mall last week.

In the Fantasy Middle East, the troop surge is helping plucky Iraq get its act together; and Iran, as serious a threat as ever and still lusting to start World War III, awaits liberation by the superpower known as "Johnny Democracy."

In the reality version, our legacy is bad water, cancer and social chaos. Iraq has, by one scientific extrapolation, surpassed the million mark in war dead and continues to rack up other numbers (4 million internal and external refugees, for instance, but not to worry, only 133 of them got into the U.S. this year) that . . . I dunno, maybe it's just me . . . seem antithetical to the idea of democracy. And of course, as the latest National Intelligence Estimate has just embarrassingly informed the world, Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program four years ago.

"This is America, get used to it."

A generation ago -- well, two, perhaps -- such a comment, surfacing with malicious anonymity at a Deep South high school, along with Confederate flags, swastikas and scrawled references to "white power," would have been meant as friendly advice to uppity integrationists and racial harmony types to shut up and wise up.

In the 1950s and '60s, civil rights activists endured their trial by fire hose -- and, of course, far worse -- before they altered history and made an indelible point or two about justice. They were, in the main, nonviolent, but that doesn't mean they were nice, or that they won a nation over with sincerity and loving smiles. They stood their ground and paid the price.

"I asked Sgt. Gaskins about his hopes for the future. He replied that he has no future." -- psychotherapist Rosemary Masters

This is the cost of our wars, and sooner or later we need to begin paying down the debt. But it is only payable in the devalued currency of the truth. For now, Soldier, we're still in denial and you're under arrest.

Welcome to PTSD Nation.

We don't have a draft because in Vietnam our draftee army mutinied and refused, finally, to continue pursuing a hellish, unwinnable war. Today, as we pursue an equally hellish, equally unwinnable war, we are in the process of destroying our all-volunteer, gung-ho army, one GI at a time.

Honoring vets means nothing at all unless it means honoring the deeply gouged personal truths each experienced during deployment. But the dismissal of such truths is as much a part of war, and its aftermath, as the propaganda and geopolitical whoppers necessary to launch it.

The problem with these individual truths is that they seldom smack of glory. More often, they're simply mundane and hellish, and slowly eat the vet's soul. The clinical name for this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and it's the phrase I heard most frequently and most distinctly this past weekend, during the grim, pained acknowledgement -- I can hardly call it celebration -- of Veterans Day.