“Go home and write anything that comes to your mind. Don’t stop. Write for ten minutes or till you’ve filled a whole page.”

Ken Macrorie said this just in time, as far as I’m concerned.

The date was May 5, 1964. I was still in high school, a month shy of graduation. That fall I’d be going off to Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, 120 miles from suburban Detroit where I grew up. I had never heard of Ken Macrorie, had no idea he was a member of the English Department who taught classes called freshman comp and advanced writing.

I had no idea the man who would become my mentor, lifelong friend, coach and truth-telling goad — my best teacher — had just had the biggest breakthrough of his career, and my destiny in two years was to have him change my life as a consequence of that breakthrough. I was going to Western on a hunch, an ironic shrug. I almost joined the Army — I was seeking, I think, some sort of reality shock therapy. I was sick of school, bored, confused, desperately looking for something I couldn’t even begin to name.

Compare Tony Blair's latest confession to mass murder with Bush's. The BBC has just aired an interview of Blair in which he was asked whether he would have attacked Iraq even if he had known there were no "weapons of mass destruction" there. Blair replied:

"I would still have thought it right to remove him."

Him is, of course, Saddam Hussein. And of course Blair did know that Iraq had no serious weapons and that any such weapons were not Bush's real motivation. The Downing Street Minutes record a meeting at which Blair was informed of that fact. The White House Memo (from January 31, 2003) does the same.

Blair tells the BBC that he would have gone to war because Iraq posed a "threat to the region." Never mind that the Downing Street Minutes record the Foreign Secretary informing Blair that,

"Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

And never mind that in the same meeting the Attorney General told Blair, as he told him again just afterwards in a letter, that regime change was not a legal basis for war.

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.