I sit today listening to the attorney general explain to a far-too compliant congress how the president has unlimited war powers. We’ve been told recently as well that we are now engaged in the “long war.” This from an administration that puts more energy into branding and public relations campaigns than governing and securing.

This “long war,” we are told, requires that we must suspend our national beliefs, our operating principles (the Constitution), and our sense of what’s right to protect ourselves from an enemy that is everywhere (but nowhere since we cannot find the enemy and bring it to justice). But in all this we are losing much more than the “fact based” reality that the president likes to scoff at. We are losing our imaginal country as well. And this will be fatal.

What is the imaginal country and what are the signs that we are losing it? The imaginal country is where we deposit our hopes as a people, it is the idealized place that always inspires us even in the darkest, most trying times. It is the country that doesn’t always do the right thing but does keeping moving toward doing the right thing whenever possible. Our real-world country was attacked on September 11, 2001, not our imaginal country. This was what people meant when they said we came together that day. Our imaginal country has been under attack from the moment our government was imposed on us by the supreme court. Although many of us feared what this would mean, few could have predicted the damage done to our imaginal and real-world country.

What are the signs that this imaginal country is being lost? There have always been poets and dreamers (and often these are contrarians) who can see that imaginal country, who have entrance to it, but who live in this world with us regular people. They urge us on, they berate us, they brace us up, they piss us off and then they say, “Who wants a sandwich?” Kurt Vonnegut is one of these interlocutors, one of the dearest and most honest.

Today we read again about his increasing despair for this real country and even more for the imaginal one. As a child in the Depression, he and other children (my dad, my mom) dreamed of the imaginal country, the one that was prosperous and was possible again. At age 82 he is not so sure anymore and he cannot easily answer the question that he used to help us all answer – “What is life all about?” What happens to us when our dreamers lose sight of the imaginal country? This is a bad, bad sign.

Another bad sign: In October 2004, Kilgore Trout killed himself by drinking Drano. He did this when told by a fortune teller that George W. Bush would win the 2004 election. Kurt Vonnegut was the poor soul assigned to tell us this (http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1016-21.htm). Of course, Kurt Vonnegut was the dreamer who brought Kilgore Trout into our real world from the other side. What does it mean when the people in the imaginal realm are killing themselves over what we do in this world? How can this bode well for our future if they have no future?

For administration supporters who might say that this is more liberal nonsense that fails to see the glory of our country, I would suggest that the administration is the one that is actively eliminating the hope of the imaginal country. Consider the use of the term the “long war.” What hope is inspired in us or in our children by this? A “long war” that we must fight for the rest of our lifetimes? Have we really fallen into an age so dark that we cannot see the endpoint? Are there really, as the secretary of defense likes to say, no “metrics” to measure our success anymore? What happens to a people when the hope of a better day is taken away from them?

For a possible answer, consider the dystopian novel, The Children of Man, by British novelist P.D. James. This book begins with the violent death of the last human to be born on earth. Environmental, political, social and all kinds of other bad choices have rendered human sperm impotent. The last generation to be born – the Omegas – are coddled and indulged because they are the last. This ultimate entitlement generation is entitled to nothing, it turns out, but the end of the world. They are the meanest generation, the most violent, the most hopeless. They go on violent rampages that are not controlled, perhaps out of the guilt felt by the older generations who used to have hope that the future would be better. Needless to say, the world in The Children of Man is populated by police states.

Now we must explain to our children why we stood by and let their country sink into a “long war.” (We still do think we owe them some explanation, right?) We must explain how we used to imagine that challenges could be defeated and the times would get better – but that was before the administration convinced us all that fear and force were the only realities. The imaginal persons and their translators tried to warn us: The damage we are doing goes beyond us. Kilgore Trout had had enough and I want to cry for him, for Kurt Vonnegut, for us and for our children.

But crying is not enough. We can give in to a dark future, to a police state, we can give in to the nihilism the administration uses to explain its every move. But Doonesbury’s B.D. did not lose his leg in Iraq, nor was my nephew injured there in the real world for us to give in so easily. We owe it to all the fatalities and casualties of this administration to pay attention to their sacrifice, to wake up, to dream again of the better, imaginal country and to start moving toward it again.

Laura Neack is the Rejai Professor of Political Science at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and the author of the forthcoming book, Elusive Security. Email to: neacklj@muohio.edu.

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