Well, that's a relief. Despite all the warnings and hysteria, the entire country got all the way through the Fourth of July without anything getting blown up.

Actually, my dogs -- the biggest of whom has spent the better part of the week cowering under the office desk -- are quick to remind me that for days we've had endless explosions right outside our window. But I don't mean fireworks. Those are our explosions. I mean their explosions -- you know, the evil-doers. Them.

Our nation was awash this holiday with warnings and paranoia that terrorists would strike, apparently on the premise that because this holiday is a big deal to us, someone would come clear from some cave in Afghanistan -- or more likely, the family mansion in Saudi Arabia -- to show just how much they despise our beacon of freedom and democracy blah blah blah. Or perhaps people just remember that movie a few years ago where the aliens came from 26,000 light years away to blow up the White House on July 4, and figured -- "hey, those guys were aliens. So are these guys. They probably think the same way."

But seriously. Rationality has left the house when places like the Clark County (Wash.) fairgrounds fence off the area where their big annual fireworks display happens and search everyone coming in. News flash: someone coming from Saudi Arabia, intent on killing as many people in as highly revered an American venue as possible, is gonna pick a day important to them -- not us -- and is not gonna make a beeline for poor Clark County. You might as well just search the parking lot for a limo with Saudi plates.

These warnings and the official paranoias that go with them have an intended audience and purpose. That purpose has very little to do with terrorism, and that audience is us.

A particularly clear example: here in Seattle, a few days before our latest Big Day, the local FBI office chief comes out and says that it's near-certain that Seattle will be struck by nasty terrorists. Actually, he didn't make that public -- he said it in a closed session of the King County Council. The guy who made it public was our local sheriff, Dave Reichert.

And it wasn't that Big Dave wanted us all to be properly vigilant, or that he was in CYA mode in case something did happen (though that's also true), or even that he just had a Really Big Secret and was bursting at the seams to tell it and some reporter just happened to walk by. No, Dave told us for the same reason the FBI told county council members: times are tight, the council has to cut spending, and law enforcement wants its piece of the pie preserved. Expanded, if possible. And what better way to justify it that an imminent, unseen, unprovable-but-really-scary menace?

The same is true in podunk counties across the country, where John and Joe County Supervisor (or whatever) come away credulously assured that Springfield Municipal Park is high on Al-Qaeda's list. And the same is true with people like John Ashcroft.

Remember Jose Padilla, the guy who last month was noisily announced to have been apprehended while planning to set off an Al-Qaeda "dirty nuke" in our heartland? Turns out the evidence against him is non-existent, but ask yourself: given that the Dubyaites had already held Padilla over a month, and plan to keep him imprisoned forever without charges or trial, why did we need to know at all that the man existed? There would have been no trial, or any other way to find out about his case, unless they announced it. Which they did, in a carefully and noisily orchestrated and politicized manner, after six weeks -- not to announce they'd foiled a nefarious plot, but to provide the best justification they could find for suspending the U.S. constitution for a few decades.

It was pretty flimsy justification; it also put the lie to the notion that our Fearless Defenders and their freedom-suspending actions have helped foil any other nefarious plots. If they had, we'd have heard all about it. But keeping us good and scared is the best way to justify such McCarthy-era abominations as the Patriot Act, investigating and searching law-abiding people because of their religion or politics, imprisoning people forever without charges or trial, and lots of other things, too. Like: mind-boggling corporate welfare for military contractors, support for corrupt, corporate- friendly dictators around the world, and a new military invasion every sweeps week. And increased budgets, decreased accountability, and lots of fancy new kill toys for expanded law enforcement agencies of every conceivable stripe.

Every one of those regularly trotted out, banal warnings about imminent terrorist mayhem is a lobbying pitch for those policies, and very little more. In other, better days, we knew to call last week's terrorist "warnings" for what they were: propaganda. And we knew what to call the policies they're meant to justify: a police state. That's what our high school English teacher told us when we read "1984." In fact, just about every nasty, authoritarian, Orwell-embracing regime in history has used a

Threat To Our Security -- often a much more plausible one -- as a justification for their power-grabbing ways.

Which brings us back to the ultimate defense the Bush Administration, and their like-minded compatriots in counties across America, are offering against people who hate our beacon of freedom and democracy: If we don't have any more freedom or democracy, they won't hate us.