Unless you are black or a recent immigrant, you have no experience living in a police state. Then, you may want to consider this article as your primer for living under terror. If Naomi Wolf in her recent book "The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot" has it right, you don't have much time to learn. Wolf's book is scarier than any Stephen King's fantasy (at least for me), I don't recommend reading it at night.

The second book I started reading last night is "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy" by Charlie Savage. I found this book even more interesting than "The end of America" because where Wolf's book is prescriptive, Savage's is descriptive (the Stewart-Colbert two-headed monster should invite the author to the program if it hasn't yet).

The first thing you need to remember is that tyrannies are extremely popular. For one, they usually come to provide peace and order to societies that feel that things are out of control. It doesn't seem to matter that societies end up being as bucolic as cemeteries instead of as chaotic as a County fair, we have, after all, our well-cherished peace and quiet. The other issue is that when people start being incarcerated, disappear, or begin to be otherwise "organized", the rest of the society tends to shut down in a very human way. You see, our instinct is to avoid pain and seek reward, when the threat of pain becomes too high, it is just natural to withdraw into silence. Dictators usually herald this silence as the clear demonstration that the silent majority supports the system, hence the popularity of tyrannies. So, if you are human, you may need to be aware of this little flaw of ours.

If you don't mind a little bit of strong hand in order to have your well deserved comfort, here are a few simple steps that will allow you to participate in the social experiment of a totalitarian America: