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(Read the BuzzFlash September 25, 2007 interview with Naomi about fascism creeping into America. Have we crossed the threshold?)

Naomi Wolf came to literary fame as an articulator of of a post-Feminism Feminism. In the late '90s, she stirred up a little additional dust (due to the strange obsessions of the mainstream media) as a consultant to Clinton and then Gore on image positioning.

Most recently, Wolf has devoted time to the Woodhull Institute (which she co-founded): "The Woodhull Institute is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, non-sectarian educational organization that provides ethical leadership training and professional development for women."

That's all by way of background to Wolf's latest book, a searing poltical call to arms to save democracy, "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot."

Printed by the socially conscious Chelsea Green Publishing House, "The End of America" describes the "ten classic steps dictators or would-be always take when they wish to close down an open society." Wolf makes abundantly clear that "each of those ten steps is now underway in the United States today."

Wolf warns: "John Adams wrote, 'Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.' We stand at a defining moment for America. If we do not act now, we risk the freedoms that sweat, blood, sacrifice, and loyalty to inalienable rights have earned us over the past two-hundred thirty-one years."

Wolf offers this prefatory quote to her book from Justice William O. Douglas: "As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must become aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

BuzzFlash calls this menacing era of Bushevism, the twilight of the Barbarians.

In a letter to booksellers and librarians, Wolf wrote: "We in America have been letting democracy run on autopilot, trusting 'the pendulum' of reason and fairness to swing back. But the pendulum is broken in an unprecedented way. It turns out that liberty, like nature, requires a relationship with us if it is to sustain us."

In short, we have failed the test of vigilance.

Naomi Wolf reminds us that freedom cannot be taken for granted. If one doesn't fight for it against the forces of oppression, we will be like the slowly boiling frog that doesn't realize that it has been killed until it is too late.

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