It's Memorial Day weekend of 2005 and I stick two fingers in a scanner that takes an electronic picture of my fingerprints.

It’s Memorial Day weekend of 2005 and I stick two fingers in a scanner that takes an electronic picture of my fingerprints. Getting into Disney World today is like gaining access to Ft. Knox. I’m allowed to insert my ticket, which is read and kicked back to me.

“Where is this Kurdistan? I have never heard of this,” he says. I point across a short bridge to the Kurdish customs office, flying a large Kurdish flag, as it has since 1991.

If there was any doubt about the state of acid culture in America, last summer’s Phish concert in Coventry, Vermont, cleared it up. The verdict is in: it’s gone.

Lynne Cheney, wife of (vice) President Dick Cheney, came to the University of Maryland this past February 29 expecting a free hour on C-Span to plug her budding career as an author of children’s books at an event billed, oddly, as a "Policy Watch."

"To tell you the truth," said arresting Officer C. Curry-Haglere of the DC Metro Police Department, "I’d rather live in a world the way this guy sees it than the way it really is." Thus ended a rather surreal night of corporate-sponsored patriotism at the NFL/Britney Spears/Pepsi extravaganza called "Operation Tribute to Freedom." The evening’s entertainment stretched from the Capitol Hill Mall to a VIP tent full of badly wounded Iraqi war vets to the inside of a DC jail. My brother Greg and I were attending so as to pay our tribute to Freedom.

There are currently 171 Greens who hold elected office. This is small solace in such rough times, but still an impressive number. Of these, there are still more State House of Delegate members (one) than dog catchers, although it’s tough to imagine a Green dogcatcher.

By the time you read this, the employees of mid-Atlantic Verizon may already be on strike, or they may have settled on a new contract. But throughout this summer Verizon workers and managers were getting psyched up for that worst case scenario—that necessary evil—the labor strike. Through it all there was something a bit surreal about the girding for war.

As the carnage of the 20th century begins to fade from memory and crystallize into written history, it is instructive to note which events get forgotten. For example, you probably haven’t heard a lot about the United States government’s radiation experiments on live, uninformed, human subjects who were usually poor African-Americans.

The semi-fraudulent bubble of recent years is finally getting a full hearing in the court of mass panic. The great swindlers Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing have taken the savings of the middle class and now, as the President says, “America has a hangover.”