Hanging out in a nation where people start celebrating a historic holiday a good three weeks before it actually comes round sounds good, doesn’t it? But there’s no time-release of turkey or chocolate eggs prior to November 5th – instead it’s the gunpowder that Guy Fawkes stocked away in his storage rental under Parliament in preparation for what would have been the bloodiest, most devastating, high-treasonin’ mass assassination in English history, brought to the current day via child-fashioned Asian fireworks. The audio effect: relentless shelling by the Austrians, with police cars providing the air raid sirens.

The recent film version V For Vendetta has rekindled some deserved interest in the old Guy, and why we might need him – not yet, but soon. Terrorism doesn’t mean anything and our governments are hiding a lot from us, and it ain’t purty. It’s refreshing (as any relativist observation) to find that Germany is the farthest away, of all the Anglofritz states, from a complete totalitarian regime. Its rigidity and apparently self-righteous legalisms continue to provoke uneasiness in Deutschland’s sister nations, but who’s doing the actual restriction of freedoms?

It’s common for foreigners to blanch at some minor but ideologically-hand-tipping German directives, like banning media or police beating the living shit out of “protestors.” But what's cookin' back home? Hey, how about 4.2 million surveillance cameras watching our every move and keeping track of our inter-city movement, Britain? Or American citizens not being able to enter or leave their own country without clearance? Hey, now you can be imprisoned without trial and tortured (lite), with confessions extracted during that time serving as binding evidence in that trial you weren’t going to have? What the hell is that, if not shades of 1984?

The current administration has really screwed the pooch this time, and it’s either they alienate all but the most slavish and most punishing of their power base, or just go for Emergency Council Under New Terror Constitution scenario. Clinton's scandals blurred the line of accountability and what the public can and can't know -- if Bush doesn’t address how his reign of misinformation is affecting our most basic freedoms, if he instead uses it to accomplish behind-the-scenes, he will engender enemies that V's knife tricks will pale to. I’d rather not be dragged into that world, thanks, and the least I can do is show my marked prejudice against this policy. I've just lost any excuse not to, and looking into that Capitol cellar space I've had my eye on.

It the meantime, don’t burn Guy Fawkes till we see this one through. Seriously, the fireworks are enough: in sheer volume, they put Independence Day to shame. Why are we burning effigies, again? I’m not going to participate until I find out that he’s really just a wooden guy who’s sick of living. I will take a Black Cat, though.