Do not try a colonoscopy at home. You might lose what little freedom you have left.

The prohibitive cost of health care may be the explanation.  Colonoscopies are a highly recommended part of preventive medicine.  But they cost so much, and one has to fool around purging fecal matter that might obstruct the view.  So people must be practicing self-examinations.

Why else would so many American people have their heads stuck so firmly in their lower colons? 

There seems to be a large movement to Occupy the Lower Reaches of the Alimentary Canal because hardly anyone seems to have noticed that America is no longer the land of the free.


One of the people who has noticed is Jonathan Turley, Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.  He has detailed the purging of freedoms in an article in the Washington Post.  Professor Turley states:  

In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state.

He explains:

Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

The ten ways we have lost our freedoms are:

1. Assassination of U.S. citizen
2. Indefinite detention
3.  Arbitrary justice
4. Warrantless searches
5. Secret evidence
6. War crimes
7. Secret court
8. Immunity from judicial review
9. Continual monitoring of citizens
10. Extraordinary renditions

 Another reason so many heads are lodged in so many rectums may be that those who shout racial and personal attacks against President Obama finds that the resonance gives their inane charges and denials a ring of authority because no facts or reason penetrate those teeming colonic walls.  

They can even use the N-word down there and no one hears.  Up in the free air that claim that their charges that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, or even a Christian, has forged a birth certificate, and should go back to Kenya are not racist, but that particular device does not escape the semiotic test of what is being said.  Semiotics is the science of what words designate and how they do it.  The stereotypical definition of the N-word is a person of black or brown color; a person who is inferior; a person who steals and cheats and is untrustworthy; and a person incapable of civilized thought and action.  We break down the designations:

• Black or brown:  the color speaks for itself among those who use it as a denigration.
• Kenyan=black and brown ancestry; inferior African class.
• Unchristian=inferior, uncultured unciviled.
• Forged birth certificate=dishonest, untrustworthy person. 

N=black person from Kenya with forged birth certificate and is unChristian.

You don't have to say the word if you use all the synonyms.  We all get the point.

And that goes for those who say that Obama's policies are inferior and his personal conduct is inferior because he is a black person from Kenya whose Christian credential are dubious.

The point here is that people don't have to try the racist tack to attack Obama.  They could challenge his support of policies that have cost us freedoms in ten ways. 

But they sound more authoritative when their shouts resonate in their colons.
Passers by can't hear the N-word or its synonyms.  It all just sounds like passing gas.  Has that odor, too.  

But for those who have their heads out in the sunlight and air, we aren't free like we used to be anymore.  And that is a policy issue worth debating in the open.  

An encroachment on freedom that Prof. Turley  does not mention is the loss of individual liberties and equality to corporatism.  The supporters of Mitt Romney say any attack of predatory, destructive venture capital organizations is an attack on free enterprise.  Those free enterprises want the freedom to raid, pillage, and plunder corporations in ways the return exorbitant rewards for the venture capitalists, but leave the majority of Americans without any voice in the market and a huge middle class that is drifting into poverty. 

Those venture capitalists insist, like the birthers, that their efforts held build the country and the economy.   Oh, really?  The last I looked ten percent controlled 80 percent of the wealth and earnings, and the poverty roles are growing exponentially.