I dread the coming year.

A new year is ordinarily a time of anticipation, but the coming one will be ugly from start to finish. We have become, as Boston Globe columnist James Carroll recently put it, "citizens facing the truth of their status as passengers on a death ship whose course was set without them."

Those of us who are progressive in nature, curious and concerned about the world, and who seek to make it a better place, are now facing a president who believes he has a mandate to become the next Alexander the Great. But Alexander was a warrior who fought at the head of his men, not a coward sitting behind a desk, coddled and protected from the disastrous realities of his own policies.

His opposition has already caved in. Giving new meaning to the word "craven," the Democrats are currently reconsidering their position on abortion.

Compare them with Ukraine's Viktor Yuschenko. Poisoned, his face in ruins, he fought through a dirty, rigged election and is now poised to take his country out of corruption and into the future. Say what you will about Europe and the United States pouring millions of dollars into his campaign to spite Russia, or about Russia's pouring an equal number of millions into his opponent's campaign, Yushchenko stood up and his supporters took to the streets to back him.

Now look at the spineless Democrats. Four years ago, Al Gore disappeared without a fight after an obviously rigged Florida election. And this year? Manicured John Kerry caved again. Try, for one moment, to imagine Kerry drinking a bit of poison, seeing his complexion melt, and continuing to lead the opposition. Yeah, right.

My ancestors left Ukraine to escape religious persecution, and for three generations our family has prospered in America. Now I'm under attack for being a secular Jew. I'm being demonized by right-wing Christians who are oblivious to the wonderfully progressive Jesus who gave the Sermon on the Mount. Instead, they have taken the craziest parts of the Old Testament and redefined them as "moral values."

Certainly, if they love Bush so much, those values do not include the Ten Commandments. The other day I heard about a snarky judge in Alabama who tried to sneak the Commandments into the courtroom by having them embroidered on his robe. Sorry, big guy, but as long as Alabama supports the war in Iraq, the torture and murder of innocent civilians, the death penalty, and at the same time records some of the highest teen pregnancy and divorce statistics in the nation, your God doesn't love you half as much as you think He does.

The truth is, hypocrites like Jerry Falwell, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh would have killed Jesus faster than you can say Pontius Pilate.

Our intellectuals - such as they are - have also caved.

Here is a sample from Walter Kirn, writing recently in The New York Times Book Review: "Now that America's urbane sophisticates have had to acknowledge their status as a fringe group so out of touch with mainstream moral vales, tournament bass fishing, Nascar and Christian rock that their electoral and cultural clout is marginally less than that of Casper, Wyo., legions of self-doubting highbrows are asking themselves how this decline into decadence occurred..."

Kirn may be trying to be amusing here, but his basic premise, that half the country is "a fringe group" because they voted for Kerry, is repeated everywhere in liberal circles these days.

America has always been a country where cowboy "individualism" is worshipped, but that's because we're essentially a nation of terrified conformists. Kirn and the rest should remember that many great artists fought against their culture to create their art.

This might be a good time for another counterculture, like the one the Beats created long ago. But our young people are as lame as our leaders. Thousands of them watched Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show" in the months running up to the election. Every night, they laughed at example after example of how Bush and his lying cohorts were ruining the country. When it came time to vote him out of office, they were out to lunch.

So, as right-minded people in all 50 states gird up to fight against the war in Iraq and for Social Security, Medicare, the environment, the separation of church and state, the sad right of a woman to choose an abortion if she must, and the right of homosexuals, children, and the poor to even exist in this cold, cruel world, what do we have to cheer about?

The Red Sox, for one thing. Carroll's haunting Tuesday Globe columns - now collected in book form: "Crusade: Chronicles of An Unjust War." The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson and Seymour Hersh, for the truth. Web sites like CommonDreams.org, Smirking Chimp, Tom Paine and Truthout, for more of it.

The next four years will be hard on America and harder on the world. Even if Bush finally falls, he has turned America into a death ship, and too many people have already suffered and died.

Joyce Marcel is a free-lance journalist who lives in Vermont and writes about culture, politics, economics and travel. She can be reached at: joycemarcel@yahoo.com.

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