Wednesday night, I watched the July 4th, 2007, fireworks display on my friends� new plasma TV screen in their handsome apartment that overlooks the West Side of Manhattan in the 60s, near Lincoln Center. It looks out to the Hudson River, though Macy�s fireworks were broadcast from the South Side Seaport, downtown and on the East Side of town, not far from Ground Zero, which is still largely a hole in the ground after nearly six years.

It blew my mind as the cameras cut from explosions of light, filling the sky with fire and smoke, reminding me of that morning of 9/11. In that sky blue perfect light, it was the huge explosions that brought the World Trade Center down in an hour and a half, not the fire and smoke generated by the airliners crashing into them.

On the other hand, my closest friend, traveling to the WTC before the hit with a film crew to get a pickup shot for a commercial about the wonders of New York State, that very reliable person claims they, that veteran film crew, all saw Flight 175 coming south and making its 180 degree turn into the smoke to hit the South Tower. And I subscribe to this truth.

Cutting back to the Macy�s firework display, cutting from the soaring cascades of light and color, cutting to the awe-struck faces of the crowds, mouths open, smiling like children, delighted with the spectacle, I could not but think of this spectacle being beamed across America, as to my friends� nearby living room, and millions of viewers glazed by their plasma or tube TVs, as one patriotic chestnut after another played over, punctuated by cheery announcers, football star Tiki Barber, and a cast of thousands cheering, looped with applause, and so on, the whole nine yards.

Was anybody remembering the symbolism of the fireworks, or of the lyrics of the national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, written by the 35-year old poet-lawyer Francis Scott Key, present at the bombardment by the British on Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 13, 1814, so close in its time to 9/11? And this bombardment was one more try by the British to bang us back into subjugation, some 38 years after our July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence; 35 years after the creation of our Constitution. Old King George and his court didn�t get it. We didn�t want them running our country like a colony. We were free men. We had the right to bear arms, to fight back, and we did.

Our Revolutionary War fighters were fighting to get the British Empire off our soil, the way the Iraqis today are fighting to get our forces off their soil. Not, as President (King) George Bush told troops in Virginia on Independence Day that they were like the Revolutionary War soldiers, fighting to free Iraq for democracy. We are an occupying force there. And the opposite is true. They want the us out. And that�s why they are revolting against our presence. How clear can we all make it?

Yet, I wondered watching these fireworks how many out there got it, stuck to their TVs, or talking as we were, as a Salsa band from Lincoln Center filtered through the building�s walls, and mixed with the TV�s National Anthem, kind of like a Charles Ives symphony, many musics making one. I wondered how many got it that that our 9/11 was a �false flag� operation, pulled off by our own government to turn us against the Muslim world and towards world domination and total oil domination.

September 11 didn�t even have the saving grace of Pearl Harbor, allowed to happen by FDR to pull a war-shy America into a war against the continent-gobbling Hitler and his Axis partner, Japan, Empire of the East, its sun rising on ever more and more territories. Curiously, the body counts of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are alarmingly close, roughly about 3,000 souls. I wondered how many knew that we, that our glorious fireworks-making government and friends, did these kinds of things on an ongoing basis. Even like Operation Northwoods, in which the Joint Chiefs planned fake terror attacks, supposedly committed by Cuba, in order to attack Cuba and take it from Fidel Castro. And during these attacks our operatives would kill our people to rile up our country against Cuba.

This is all part and parcel of playing Empire, engaging in Imperialism, whether you�re American, Japanese, or German, what with the Nazis burning down their revered Reichstag government building and blaming it on communists, and using it to take over the government and devour the nation�s civil rights, much as our PATRIOT ACT does. Hitler and the Nazis subsequently led their built-to-last-a-thousand-years Reich into extinction in some 12 years. That�s another side effect of Empire building. Sometimes it leads to your Empire being torn down by all those you have oppressed.

So, I�m wondering, sitting there watching the elegant plasma TV on the wall, like a moving portrait of America�s faces, servicemen and women, kids, moms, pops, granddads, grandmas, uncles and aunts, my extended family, my friends in this room, my wife, are we being numbed by this spectacle into forgetting its revolutionary reminder, kaboom? Don�t take oppression sitting down. Kaboom, get up and fight back. Kick these bums out of the White House, where 9/11 was engineered, by doing nothing or everything. So, either way, Bush/Cheney and their violent court have to go, preferably to jail, optimally to Guantanamo, since they love torture and the lack of prisoner rights so much.

That�s the message, folks, the postscript to the 4th of July. It�s a Revolutionary War Celebration; our Revolutionary War to remind us generation after generation how our country came about. It�s a reminder that America is not just about comfort, plasma TVs, Macy�s, barbecuing into oblivion. It�s about a Declaration of Independence and Constitution that give you the right to rebel when the government is denying your basic rights, spying on you, stealing from the national treasury to fund wars for its own profit, squandering the blood of the young for the voracious appetites of the elite, the politically corrupt, the murderers of freedom and democracy.

That�s the message, folks. That�s what all the woo-hah was about Wednesday night, really. Don�t say I didn�t remind you. Think of me as your own Internet Paul Revere, shining the light and crying, �The enemy is here!� The enemy is those who would rule us with an iron hand and silence. It is those who would sweep us away like 9/11�s ruins, eliminating all evidence, and leaving sickened workers to die. Shut off the TVs and listen to what�s being said to you now. Then listen to your conscience. Listen to the bombs bursting in air. See the rockets� red glare. They�re still there. And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Period, over and out.