A New Chapter

Paperwight - a member of my blogging pantheon - is letting all the evil done in our name get him down:

I am heartsick that the Republicans have made torture a partisan issue. Yes, you read that right:  the Republicans have made torture a partisan issue.

They have done so by dint of the street gang morality George Bush and his merry band of  Republican Extremists have imposed on the party and which they are trying to impose on the country:  patriotism is unconditional support for whatever George Bush does and whatever is done in his name.  And people are being tortured in George Bush's name.

He's right.  There is no level to which Team BushCo will not stoop to win at politics.  None.  Think of the most dirty trick in the world, the most obscene twisting of human values and moral codes and you still haven't scratched at the bottom of where they're willing to go to hang on to power.   We should all be heartsick at what has become of our country.

That said, when I think about the torture issue specifically,  I don't get heartsick exactly because I believe that we've always been big fans of torture.  There's no way that lynchings, for example, would have gone on as long as they did if we weren't.  There's no way that the official Senate apology for its refusal to take action against it  would have had to be a clownish and confusing voice vote if we didn't still support torture.  And then there's our support for the Death Penalty, which elicits some of the same arguments that Paperwight hears from pro-torture writers.  And, as Frank Rich has pointed out, we are innundated with torture on TV - Alias and 24 are two absoultely brutal and very  popular shows that spring to mind.  Torture is Us.  I've always known that to be true and so I feel vindicated and heartsick in equal measure.  But, I also feel hopeful.

While we've always been on the side of torture, we've never been quite so openly on the side of torture.  We've always been able to pretend that at least we don't support it as a national policy.   The Native American Genocide is considered ancient history and a product of the "Wild West" when all bets were off.  It's frequently and, God help us, easily denied.  When the Senate was refusing to address lynching and so tacitly endorsing it, we were able to compartmentalize the brutality.  That was a southern thing, we said - even though it wasn't exculsively anything of the kind - and the rest of the country didn't support it.   But the time that we're able to hide our barbarism behind regional culture clashes is over and it required this kind of event, this modern war in which the United States officically sanctions torture as a detainment policy, for it to end. 

Jeanne's post, And in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink, the essay she first cites and especially the photo she chose to go with it, with its clear Christian imagery, were right on the money:

Now new images are due to come out.  (someday reg required: dailykos, dailykos)  Photos and videos that made senators blanch.  We on the left and especially our elected representatives simply must find the courage to keep standing up against the torture.  The stooges on the right will still squawk noisily about ideas they don't even understand, forced to defend torture as policy, but in the end nobody will be able to overcome the visual evidence of our crimes.  And, for the first time in the history of the United States, nobody will be able to say that the tortures going on in wartime aren't our crimes. 

Comments

[DavidByron]

Great post.
You're really connecting all the dots here.

[eRobin]

Thank you, David. With you reading all these old posts I feel like I have someone rummaging around in my closets, which isn't entirely unpleasant.

I'm glad you found something you liked! Have you been drinking?

[DavidByron]

Drinking?
I guess I'm missing your reference.

I feel bad about choking your recent comment list up and I don't usually reply just to say I agree with something but that was very interesting how you pull all that together. I notice you have a very good memory for all this political stuff. Do you have some system or some sort of notes or is it all from memory? So often it seems that just being able to recall history is all you need to make a difference. Perhaps that's another reason I quite like diving into the archives...

I think it will take me quite some time to read back through all of them. But a lot of this stuff is every bit as relevent as it was at the time. I'm really trying to not reply to it all though!

I took a peep at your site statistics and you seem oddly under-viewed considering the quality. You'll be on my shortlist of bloggers to finance if I ever win a hundred million dollars.

That reminds me of something I was going to ask but then thought better of it --- how's the Hunger Site thing going? Did being on the reminder list work?

[eRobin]

Drinking?
I guess I'm missing your reference.

I was teasing you. Like you'd have to have been drinking to agree with me.

You're right about going through archives. Sometimes I do that on other blogs - just pick an archived month and read a random few posts to see what I've forgotten.

you seem oddly under-viewed

I know! What's up with that? I write and I write but nobody comes.

The Hunger Site reminder function is fantastic. I'm ashamed to say that without it, I would forget to click over most days. They're store is pretty good too. I've been buying as many gifts there as I can lately and it's been working out well. Especially the jewelry for my daughter's friends.