I turned on the Republican National Convention tonight at approximately 9pm.

Hollywood hack actor Ron Silver was shrieking from the podium about the awesome military might of the United States and the need to reelect the Maximum Leader in a vein-popping tone that would have embarrassed Mussolini.

Congresswoman/man Heather Wilson of New Mexico got up next and told a (truth be told, harrowing and heart-rending) story of the self-sacrifice of a military person, before introducing a clip of a veterans' event held earlier in the day at the Intrepid aircraft carrier museum on the West Side of Manhattan. A fake "RNC" news anchor on the scene at the carrier asked a veteran why honoring our veterans was important, and the old guy actually said, "We need to know our history, because if we don't understand our history, we're doomed to repeat it."

Both interviewer and interviewee paused for a quarter of a second in apparent shamed recognition of the soul-shattering irony of his insight.

I went away from the TV for a couple minutes to laugh/piss/puke/hurt myself, and I returned to see an utterly terrifying, Riefenstahlian, fast-cut photo montage of armed fighter planes slicing through the air, engorged nuclear submarines penetrating the seas, heavy artillery machines cocked and loaded and bulldozing across the land, interspersed with clips from those MTV-style Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard advertisements from TV, with the logos of those branches of the armed services whooshing and crashing headlong into the camera, while an African-American gospel chorus screamed out a soundtrack of martial ballads ("From the Halls of Montezuma", "Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder", etc.) and George H. W. Bush and his life's companion looked on in fanged glee.

This was all BEFORE the appearance by fascist cop Bernard Kerik, and well before the psychopathic war-chants of Giuliani and McCain. And this is only Monday night.

Any guesses as to what the continuing overriding theme of this convention might be?

As the C-SPAN cameras panned across the faces in the crowd while all this was going on, the people in the convention hall looked ecstatic, to be sure, but at the same time vaguely frightened....