My sleep has been troubled since the American electorate decided against aborting the monster growing within the Oval Office.

There's a recurring image that disturbs my slumbering brain. In nightmares, I see a gigantic black sun burning above me. I tremble beneath it, but can't look away. When I close my eyes it burns through my lids and inscribes its image upon my retina. I remember it upon awakening. Though my conscious mind cannot see it, it continues casting its darkness upon the colours of my day.

It's rare that a specific image troubles me so. Tonight I decided to familiarize myself with it as best I could. I took down the encyclopedias of symbols from my bookshelves, wiped the dust from the covers, and started reading. It turns out that my imagination isn't the first to be captured by this strange fantasy.

The Aztecs placed an image of a Black Sun upon the back of the god of the underworld. The image appears in Revelation 6:12, and in the ornamental floor design of Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, Himmler's headquarters of the SS. There were Nazi pilots who painted it on their airplanes before going into battle, and even today, neo-Nazi thugs turn to it as a source of spiritual inspiration. For alchemists it symbolized primal, undeveloped matter, while for psychoanalysts it represents the unconscious in its most elemental and terrifying form. Throughout the world, the Black Sun has been seen as a harbinger of death and decay, leading to countless superstitions surrounding solar eclipses. Soundgarden even produced a song called Black Hole Sun not too long ago.

All in all, it seems an appropriate enough symbol for the emotions that have been aroused in many of us by what happened in the world's only superpower just after Halloween, 2004.

Until now, many of us have given the American electorate the benefit of the doubt. After all, Gore technically won the last election, not Bush. Besides, Bush ran in 2000 on a platform of isolationism and small government, rather than imperialism and Big Brother. We could therefore tell ourselves that the American people were, for the most part, innocent of the crimes of their leaders. We can't tell ourselves this anymore.

The American people reelected Bush even though they knew that his administration willfully lied in order to justify invading a country that had done Americans no harm. They knew about the suffering the Iraqi people have endured, the hundreds of thousands killed by the war with Iran, the first Gulf War, and the sanctions regime. They knew that the latest invasion and subsequent occupation have so far claimed over 98,000 lives. And still, they voted him back in.

They also knew that the Bush administration was tearing up their civil liberties and their social safety nets. They realized that in order to win, the GOP was preparing to use the most antidemocratic connivances imaginable, from ethnically cleansing voter rolls to installing machines that would systematically spoil unwanted votes. They understood that the management of their country was being handed over to corporations with the same ethical and ecological sensibilities as a psychopath. They were well aware that the Bush administration had allied itself with a homophobic and anti-Islamic fundamentalist movement that's turned Jesus into Aries, a movement that trumpets the vicious glories of patriarchal authoritarianism while courting Armageddon with nihilistic glee.

It's this last point that bothers me the most. The historical precursor to the American union of apocalyptic mythology, sexual repression, scapegoating, and imperial hubris isn't hard to find. Christian rock may have replaced Wagnerian opera, but the melody remains the same.

Even the administration's most natural enemies bent their knee to the Bush regime. Traditional conservatives, ever wary of big government, swore their fealty to the fastest-growing and most ruthless American government of their age. Overworked and unprotected labourers sang the praises of a tyrant ready to deny them their health care and eliminate their social security. The victims of the wasteland—the people upon whom chemical pollution has inflicted learning disorders, cancers, mental illnesses, infertility and a host of other plagues—clamoured for Bush as loudly as anyone else, even as he ignored the desperate advice of thescientific community in his haste to destroy whatever environmental protections remained in his blighted country. The people of Florida, still bloody from the furies of global climate destabilization, were eager for this fossil-fuel pharaoh to reclaim the dynastic throne.

American voters knew exactly what Bush was doing in their name and a majority of them approved.

What we're seeing in the United States is the ascendance of what Bertram Gross described as “friendly fascism” in his 1980 Black Rose book of the same name. In contrast to classic fascism, in friendly fascism Big Government does less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. Nonetheless, there are basic similarities between these two forms. “In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower- and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.”

Canada, meanwhile, is a nation wedded to this brownshirt. We sit nervously at home while he stalks the streets in search of victims, awaiting the day he'll decide to unleash his fury upon us. Our bravest leaders ridicule his ideological tirades and complain about his brutishness and the way he exploits us. Still, they don't speak too loudly, and they don't ask for a divorce. They know that we've made ourselves financially dependent upon him and that we don't have anywhere to go. Our more timid leaders don't even have the nerve to nag; instead, lost to the raptures of the Stockholm syndrome, they lust after their aggressor, and encourage the rest of us to joyfully kiss the knuckles upon his extended fist.

And so here we are, shivering in the ebony rays of morning, seeing clearly for perhaps the first time the face of the man lying next to us. And this may well be the only virtue of the Black Sun, this feeling of vertigo and horror: it lets us see what would otherwise be hidden. Such clarity, however painful, is necessary and valuable. It reveals the evil within the world and within ourselves, and also the good. It can awaken sleepwalkers and illuminate the perilous lands into which they've strayed. Most of all, it lets us begin to see the world the way that the oppressed see it, both in Canada and abroad.

In doing so, it makes new alliances possible, alliances that those of us who value justice and democracy will soon come to desperately need. In order to respond intelligently and ethically to the resurgence of First World fascism, we need the courage to keep our eyes open, and to let them become accustomed to the light of this underworld sun.

Come, let's welcome the dawn together.

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