Heretics, Us: A Novel of Outrage by Jeff Musall

If there’s one thing that can be said about America, it’s that it doesn’t lack for most things. We seem to be in great supply of everything. From 150 television channels (yet there still seems to be nothing on) to at least a dozen different so-called “energy drinks” to a seemingly bottomless supply of talentless individuals willing to humiliate either themselves or others on national television, if a America were a company—and sometimes I think it is—we would be in the position of having to lower prices due to over inventory. Yes, America is well stocked.

Except for two things. One, we obviously don’t have nearly enough troops to handle all of Mr. Bush’s imperialist war plans. But we wouldn’t even need that if America had more of the one thing it’s really lacking today: outrage. Has any other country since Nazi Germany ever been as apathetic to the insanity taking place around it as America is today. The great irony of the technological age is that despite the fact that Marshall McLuhan’s global village is closer than ever to becoming a reality, despite the fact that people all across the world are interconnected with each other via television, the internet, cell phones and everything else that serves to bind us…humans are more insulated from the world around them than ever. Whether it’s addictive hours of video games, or internet sites, or those irritating little earbuds connected to MP3 players, humans—and especially Americans—are detached from what’s going on beneath their noses like never before. One can only imagine how envious the perpetrators of the Vietnam War must be when they see how easy it is to distract Americans from the genocidal foreign policies of the leaders of this country…and their puppets in the White House and Congress.