On Friday, the tsunami of conservative, flag-waving, false patriotism that has been washing over this country in the years since 9/11 finally crested right here in middle America and began to slowly recede. And though I was witness to the event, it caught me so completely by surprise that I did not immediately recognize it's significance. The full realization of it only came to me later with the clarity of an evening spent drinking beer and pondering life. It happened at my local barber shop.

I live in the heart of small town growing fast, white flight, suburban sprawl America. The barber shop is like most other small town barber shops. This one has 3 chairs and 3 barbers and they all have a good bit of grey in their hair, as do most of their customers. It's generally a place where I keep my politics to myself, because if voiced, the opinions of a liberal atheist are guaranteed to piss off everyone there. No exceptions. So I generally just talk motorcycles or Cardinal baseball while I get my hair cut and leave the hate-radio listeners to the repeat the latest right-wing talking point. I go there every couple of weeks and I've never heard a word uttered against dubya. I go there for the haircuts.

But on Friday something profound happened. In the middle of one of those continuous streams of multiple conversations that exists only in a busy barber shop, one of the barbers told a story of a recent customer who had just returned from Iraq. He quoted the customer as saying things were never going to get any better in Iraq because you just can't make people who've hated each other for centuries start liking each other, and we just need to get out. That last part - the words "we just need to get out" - landed like a bag of shit in the middle of the room. A bag of shit that everyone present studiously ignored. Silence. The sound of George W. Bush's political base blinking. They no longer have the energy to keep defending the indefensible. He's lost them. Hallelujah.

I say the wave crested here in the midwest, but it was actually broken by the rock that is Iraq. If he had not so confused the War on Terra with his dreams of Empire, dubya might still be pulling this country hard to the right. I feel confident, based solely on my barber shop and beer analysis, that the pendulum of public opinion has begun to move back in the direction of sanity. We are not going to end up as a military theocracy. This time. But we are going to suffer the effects of this preznit and our government's new authoritarianism for a long time to come.