I feel as if I am living inside some oppressive, windowless contraption designed to stifle the world as I would want it to be - a device that separates me, hygenically, from some spectre of badness which I am encouraged to believe in. But its isolation is flawed - it has windows, TV screens, internet terminals. And through them I can see what is happening uotside my iron lung.

Things that are deemed to be bad for my health are progressively made illegal. The drug industries created by successive world powers (opium in China by the British Empire, cocaine in South America by the Ameircan Empire) are being denied their potential markets by making it a crime to consume their products. In the USA, huge pharmaceutical corporation use governemnt grants to develop drugs for acne, for erection problems, for wrinkles - while the immuno blockers desperately needed by the poor in Africa to rescue them from the curse of AIDS are not being subsidised because of fears of what it might do to the "free market". Smoking is being gradually relelgated to the margins of human experience by the same countries that produce the largest amounts of lung-ravishing industrial and automotive pollutants.

Things which are deemed to be bad for my moral fibre are progressively being made illegal. Bull fighting, hunting with dogs, coursing and shooting are all on their way out in Europe - and if they're not yet, there are large and powerful lobbies dedicated to making sure they will be. At the same time chickens for our gluttunous consumption are being raised in tiny cells in which they can neither stand or turn, without ever seeing the light of day, being fed reconstituted bits of other chickens. Domesticated animals have been relelgated from their natural role as equal partners in man's struggle for survival to either mindless cossetted pets or faceless masses of insentient produce. Creatures which once had a useful and active role to play in the human economy are now being confined in cramped suburban homes, given their freedom to roam twice a day, on a leash - while their owners proudly sport "save the whales" t-shirts and the cute little panda bear logo of the WWF.

Things which are deemed to be dangerous for my survival are being stamped out of existance on the merest pretext of a threat. Behind the noise of whining about the 10% unemployment in Germany and the state of the health service in the UK, Fortress Europe is quietly closing ranks against the flow of the dispossessed and desperate from the parts of the world on the economic exploitation of which its prosperity depends. They are only economic migrants, after all - only people who want to be able to send their children to school and feed their families at least one square meal a day. They don't really have a claim on our sympathy, the avaricious wretches. The American Constitution (a document which was first violated a bare two weeks after it was ratified) is being ground into dust in the name of protecting the citizenry from some faceless undefined threat which we are meant to believe still powers the hand that flew a plane into a tower on 11/09/2001. But that's OK, 'cause it's only being done in Cuba, and we all know they don't count (being brutish and hatefilled communists). In the run up (count down?) to a new war with Iraq, the Gulf Syndrome is being explored - did the soldiers suffer long term health problems from being exposed to minute doses of nerve gas carried by the wind from factories bombed by the Allied Forces? Not a single voice is raised in question as to what those gasses did to people who lived right there near them. Or what will happen to those people if we start bombing their country again. We're fighting off the maniac who's opressing them, donchaknow. Bound to be worth a few hundreds of thousands of their lives. Just as long as Allied casualties are kept down, because public opinion at home wouldn't like those. Defenseless people have been separated into the same two groups as animals - the familiarly cute (children and old people) and the facelessly unimportant (everybody who's not from the West).

That's it. I don't know how to live in this psychopathically two faced world of double standards any more. This so-called protective sanitised can is not working for me and I have no way out. I look at history and I see that every political pradigm - from tribalism, through feudalism and to imperialism - goes through its most brutal, oppressive, hypocritical stage right before it eventual collapse. So is this the end for constitutional capitalist democracy? Or am I being naive, and what with it not being a proper "ism", things are going to stay the same, only more so?