Cross-posted from And The Horse You Rode In On
It was surreal.
Friday night the whole country was watching Paris Hilton being dragged screaming out of court and back to jail after the L.A. sheriff had sent her home. Why was everyone watching that? Well, what was the alternative?
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace was fired that day, and the Defense Secretary said that he had to let him go to avoid having him appear before Congress to answer questions about the Iraq war, which is none of their goddam business or ours, either.
Meantime, the military judges at Guantanamo had ruled that the trials there are illegal, so the Pentagon (as Keith Olbermann put it) told them to go back and change their minds.
It bore some resemblance to reality but not much, a version of reality twisted beyond intelligibility. Like quantum theory, which describes fundamental weirdness. Eureka! We’ve evolved beyond Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein to a quantum government where nothing makes sense – by design.
It’s surprising, really, because quantum phenomena answer to the uncertainty principle, and the Bush Leaguers are never uncertain about anything. They’re just wrong. Smug, always certain, and dependably wrong.
Still, in quantum mechanics you can discover the position of something or its momentum but not both. So as long as the Bushies kept wriggling and squirming, their real positions were hard to pin down. Now they’ve lost all momentum, and we can see just where they stand. Up to their eye-stalks in muck.
The way Erwin Schrodinger explained quantum uncertainty was by imagining that you put your cat in a box with a vial of poison gas – John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales would love this – and with a radioactive sample of something that has a 50% chance of emitting a particle that will trigger a detector and break the vial, killing the poor cat, even if it’s an American citizen.
At least your cat has half a chance, but here’s the thing. Until you open the box to see if he’s okay, he’s NEITHER dead nor alive. He’s in a state of quantum uncertainty, like a Guantanamo prisoner, so he has no legal status of any kind and, theoretically, he’ll be there forever, dead or alive or neither or both.
Who cares? It’s your cat.
The quality of mercy is neither strained nor not strained. It’s just on a temporary-insanity leave of absence until we can impeach Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales and consign them to a Schrodinger box in Guantanamo.