I am embarrassed to be an American now.

Had Hitler been the cause celebre, matters would have been different. Much different, because corporate leaders from all four corners of the globe would have been pining for his life.

Instead a CIA-installed stooge, by definition a bumb with nothing to lose, gets put to sleep by the mongriel horde that brought him to power in the first place. The media and its hand-picked apologists smoke cigars and cheer, once again, the awesome destructive power of a civilization brought to a point on the neck of one single human.

This was a human being whose trial and execution should have been an exclusively Iraqi affair. Instead, the taint of US involvement in his murder places him in history while cold-blooded killers like OJ Simpson wander around freely as if all is well in the human community.

Newsflash: we're sick and getting sicker. If snapping the neck of a human being made helpless gives you a stiffy, you either drink or drug too much, or you really do belong in the Sunni Triangle in your boxers with a box of ammo and a rifle that is full of sand.

To see Ford's funeral juxtaposed with James Brown's funeral on CNN has got to be the cultural highlight of 2006.

On the one hand a working class hero goes out celebrating his career in music with family and friends, heavy on emotion, low on formality and control.

On the other, we have a toady of the leadership class reminding everyone to appear to stay in control of one's faculties, that death is the ultimate sadness with the living left to grieve and wonder.

I recall Harry Truman's funeral...a dixieland jazz band played, "When the Saints Go Marching." I don't recall if his body lied in state in the rotunda, or not.

Harry Truman's dubious decision to drop the world first, and hopefully only, nuclear bomb on a population, was about as unfunny as lives can get. And yet he had the huevos to go out with a celebration.

Gerald "Make No Waves" Ford went out the way he lived his liverwurst-laden life: holding up the values of stuffed shirts who naively presume that stability and civility can be found somewhere in the past.

Provided that we continue our energy dependency on petroleum (2000 petro calories to one edible calorie), the US has business interests in the Middle East.

Given US history in areas like Europe and South America, it makes perfect sense that we would be in Iraq attempting to establish a string of fascist/stooge dictatorships that give free reign to our ever-bloating corporate machines.

But, listen-up, Mr. CorporateFascist, because this message won't be repeated as clearly or concisely anytime in the near future. What dangled at the end of Saddam's rope was your fate, too. You have sealed it without any outside assistance.

We are One. One planet. One Mind. One Life. One World. What we do to others we can not help but do to ourselves.

Think that you can project all of your guilt, fault, blame and responsibility onto anyone, or everyone, else? Watch how quickly the noose tightens around your own neck until you, too, dangle powerlessly and helplessly, your brain still hearing the jeers, your eyes fixed on your noose while you wonder why death has not come to you as quickly, nor as cleanly, as you would have liked. Swinging and swaying like a six foot bunch of United Fruit's finest, your heart stops short of breaking at the unfairness of the world as you have created it. Paralyzed, yet unafraid, they put you in a bag completely unaware that you no longer just hear their words, but their thoughts as well. Then you realize you are shut out in the cold by their hatred of you, the same hatred that separates them from one another. It all makes perfect sense now.

Just in time for you leave.