Excerpt: U.S. and Them

I wasn't at all certain as to why my folks didn't trust Martin Luther King and the Kennedys but I understood that the  killings were part of the awful conspiracy.  The fluoride they told us would protect our teeth was engineered to give us cancer and produce big profits for soulless government agencies.  I understood that, like cancer, constant threat and everyday violence was intended to terrorize us, to weaken us, to destroy our ability to resist the Communists when they finally invaded.  Communists figured weary citizens would want to stop witnessing elaborate funerals and the swearing-in of presidents we hadn't exactly voted for.  Americans were no longer patriots.  An alarming number of Americans had actually convinced themselves it was possible to befriend our enemies.  People were forgetting who our enemies were in the first place.  Nobody said Khrushchev anymore.

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