Today, Donald Rumsfeld and four of Bush's chief generals testified in the investigation into the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. You can read all of the transcripts of the testimony here.
But what really struck me was how dehumanized the process had become and how much these high-ranking members of the Pentagon had routinely evaded any kind of responsibility for their actions in the misinformation on Pat Tillman's death.
What really struck me was the fact that one of the soldiers filed an eyewitness report documenting the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. But just a few days later, the report that came to the press was the story that Tillman had died through enemy fire. He was given an entire military funeral for his "heroism" when in fact, he had been killed by friendly fire, or murdered if you wear a tinfoil hat.
And what struck me was the fact that Rumsfeld testified at the hearings that he did not know who had altered the report. There was something unwritten about that statement as well -- given that this is years after the fact, there was something else about his testimony -- he did not want to know. The rest of the generals were the same way.
So, first of all, when you hear Bush or any of the other Republicans talking about the need to "trust the generals on the ground," these are the type of people whom they would have us place our trust in. People with no regard for the truth, for ensuring that all the reports were accurate, with no regard for Tillman's family and the grief that they went through over having been lied to. Petraeus is of the same mold, which is why they are fawning over him even though he is just as much a failure in Iraq as the rest of them.
But the main point that I am getting at is the fact that this is a symptom of a larger problem -- the fact that we have let distant impersonal forces become the measure of all things, rather than man being the measure of all things. In other words, people are totally sacrificing their humanity to some sort of faceless machine.
This is not the only time that faceless impersonal forces have become the measure of all things. Back in the Middle Ages, the Church was considered the repository of all knowledge and only the Chosen Elites were able to access this knowledge. People who tried to translate the Bible into the vernacular were burned at the stake. It was only when people rediscovered the Romans and the Greeks and realized that man should be the measure of all things that things started to turn around and Western Europe experienced an awakening and the Enlightenment. There are still people who want to go back to those days.
And now, we have gone astray from the values of the Enlightenment that have made life better for all. Instead of man being the measure of all things, organizations have become the measure of all things. The result is that people have sacrificed their humanity into impersonal, faceless forces known as bureaucracies and corporations. This sort of corporatism, with narrowly defined responsibilities, are not for the good of the country in mind, but so that people engaged in wrongdoing can cover their asses by saying that it was not their fault.
And this is the sort of depersonalization and twisted thinking that has led to the myth of corporate personhood when right-wing activist judges, the same judges who brought us Plessey vs. Ferguson, thought they could legislate from the bench and bring us the scourge known as corporate personhood. And this corporatism and depersonalization was on full display at the hearings before the Government Oversight Committee.
It is simply a matter of common sense that corporate personhood is a myth. Corporations do not eat, sleep, breathe, or vote. They cannot make love, go visiting, have your children, or do any of the things that make us uniquely human. This is not a matter of getting rid of all corporations or businesses, but of recognizing that they cannot be held in higher regard than people are or given special rights or entitlements that we do not have.
After watching the testimony of Rumsfeld and the other Bush lackeys covering their asses, we watched some of the House debate on SCHIP and its renewal. That bill passed mostly along party lines. That debate was also instructive in seeing the Republicans and their scaremongering and their claim that this was simply an entitlement program. But if they were really against all "entitlements" as they call them, then why do they support all of the multibillion dollar entitlement programs for Halliburton and Blackwater and all of the other war profiteers that Claire McCaskill and James Webb are trying to bring to heel with the appointment of a Truman Commission to ensure oversight?
The problem is that we have lost sight of the ideal of humanity being the measure of all things. Thus, we are face to fact against an ideology which claims that corporations and bureaucracies are the measure of all things. And it is not just confined to this issue. It is unconscionable why some bureaucrat in some insurance company hundreds of miles away should be allowed to decide whether my medical treatment is OK or not. These are frequently people without any kind of medical training or background; they give up all of their humanity. And the railroad companies do not have any concept of the Public Good written into their clauses -- if they see that a certain rail line is detrimental to their profits, then they will abandon it, never mind what happens to the rural communities that depend on it for their local economy. The humanity of the people who depend on them do not matter, only the bottom line.
What we must do once again is recruit and elect people who will once again see humanity as the measure of all things, and not the Church or impersonal, faceless corporations, or even government. We have to have leaders who will see people as humans and not some impersonal objects whom they can manipulate so that they can get votes. There is little difference between the con artists who came into my town today promising people that they would sell them an asphalt driveway for $400, and then insisting that they pay more because the "costs went up" and then marking it up so that other con artists could do the same scam, and the Rumsfeld and the rest of the people testifying, and the corporations who abuse their power by sending our jobs overseas and who engage in stealing our money from workers and giving them to "guests" who are second-class citizens. The only difference is that the first group of people were never given a position of responsibility and power like the other two groups.