I’m Molly. Slipped my collar tonight. Don’t you wish you could? I think I look sleek. Do you?

I wrote a series of posts on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Here’s one excerpt:

What do I mean when I talk of splintering? That each of us devolves to one predominant emotion that is somehow isolating. Apotheosis speaks of spite. Eduardo speaks of being sick of sadness as if sadness were irreconcilable with rage. It’s all part of the splintering. Precipitated by the slow withdrawing from MSM view of the images that seared our hearts in the first place — because they might offend the survivors. The first splinter.

Other splinters? Loss of heart. Loss of faith. Conservative/libertarian neo-isolationism, the first since Republicans wanted to give Hitler a free pass in Europe. Not our business. Transference in the form of Bush Derangement Syndrome. He was more than clever in realizing that we could not garrison the U.S. to keep ourselves safe by purely defensive means. He chose a strategy akin to the Allied decision to fight Hitler in North Africa because they couldn’t fight him anywhere else.. So Bush fought in Iraq to keep them away from here. And (omg) he was right. Al qaida streamed into Iraq to fight the Great Satan and died by the thousands, draining their blood and treasure. More splinters. (But) Bush was the problem of terrorism. He was creating enemies we hadn’t had before. Really? If we were just nice to the jihadists, they would be nice back. Like they were in London and Madrid, etc, etc. So we dismissed him from office, hated, ridiculed, endlessly maligned, entirely forgetting that the next great big attack on American soil never happened.

I also had a loftier view of it all. Which seems sadly, naively optimistic now.

Liberalism intervened, the way it usually does, substituting insanity for common sense. Martial victory was transformed to diplomatic surrender and retreat. Apology became the order of the day, and all that was left was pure domestic defense, which meant, obviously, that outside threats could only be dealt with by systematically removing privacy, liberty, and free speech from the home of the brave.

We are now reaping what we have sown. We gave up fighting or even naming the enemy. We killed rather than captured and interrogated because interrogation is so unpleasant. We pretended we could protect ourselves by persecuting, uh, ourselves. We let the TSA grope our grandmothers. We accept that profiling Islamist killers is racist and intolerable. We apologize for discovering that everything we do is monitored and recorded. We stand up to decry anyone who objects to our new subservience to government as a traitor. How cool is that, bitch?

Go ahead. Choose safety over liberty. Blindly trust the NSA even as you fear the IRS because the one has nothing to do with the other. Those of us who know better will soon be in our graves. Where your beloved government will soon and surely put us. The little girl with the new lungs owes her life directly to Sarah Palin, because the heavy hand of HHS showed everyone that routine federal regulations are the death panels she warned of. Hence the judicial intervention. You know. Necessary PR. Not to say spin. Pitiful. But for everyone who isn’t a ten year old front page story, the death panels do hover and smirk in waiting.

But the doomed old ones will have the last laugh when all is said and done. The real America will die with us who are denied treatment for lives actually lived, including all the smoking and drinking that used to be vices but are now what passes for immorality in a hedonist culture that pushes ten year olds to buy “morning after” pills without parental notification. So you’ll all die younger than the ones you euthanize via budget cuts. You’ll die of STDs and hepatitis and obesity and boredom. Those of you who don’t die of authoritarian acts of personal destruction because you got in the way of somebody more important, more connected, more protected.

Safety? There’s no such thing. Life is dangerous. It always has been and always should be. Otherwise, it’s the zombie existence our movies are suddenly, presciently obsessed with. But there is always irony. As your lives contain less and less moral content, you will be more and more vulnerable to the mechanisms of ruthless government that target you when you become, for any reason, inconvenient to someone just as heedless and feckless as you, only higher up in the political class structure. You won’t stand a chance.

Because the only ones who could have taught you how to fight, and stood with or in front of you in the fight, will be dead in the mass graves of ObamaCare.

Get used to your collars. Make sure your licenses are up to date. Don’t ever miss the dates required for your distemper and rabies shots. Get spayed before you do anything that might require you to be put down. Learn how to sit, lie down, and stay. Believe me, your life (such as it is) depends upon it.

Put a collar on this. Go ahead and try. I don’t do orderly.