Over the weekend on Up with Chris Hayes Chris and Glen Greenwald exchanged thoughts on the new film "Zero Dark 30" as a theatrical apology for torture
Hayes and Greenwald agreed that the US has not had a reckoning of the torture issue either in a legal sense or in a moral one. Because of this lack of reckoning we a s a nation still have a strange and veiled relationship with torture.
Lets explore why reckoning is so important to the healthy soul of an individual or a whole country.
In an earlier segment of the show Chris Hayes asked Richard Lucibella (publisher of S.W.A.T. Magazine) about the seeming paranoid fear that is laced into the modern gun culture. The fear of intruders, of stalkers, of killers, of tyrannical governments awaiting behind every dark corner. Why is it there? Is it ,in fact, there and not just a liberal caricature of "the gun culture"
Lucibella didn't really answer the question but no matter...
The issue of violence and particularly gun violence persists in our country. Why does it persist? In "Bowling for Columbine" Michael Moore makes the point that from the Pilgrims forward we have been a scared nation...But that is only part of it. It has been our buried relationship to the response to that fear that continues to plague us.
I think it has everything to do with the "reckoning" mentioned later in the show with Glenn Greenwald. America has never fully reckoned with its own violent history. Because it hasnt done that, a sort of madness persists in the American Psyche. Even though not all Americans and not all gun owners are crazy and bloodthirsty and violent we all have a thread that connects us to this mainline that runs through our nation.
You see this in families all the time...until violent pasts are somehow accounted for through shared histories, storytelling or therapy the distorting power of this violence tends to reflect and refract into individuals who may not even know they are being projected onto by their family who probably not aware that they are projecting onto individuals. Somehow the shame and pain of these destructive events is held in some sort of psychic DNA and stays in place until it is reckoned with as a family or as an individual who no longer wants to be oppressed by their past.
And so it is with our country. Until we as a nation acknowledge our destruction of Native Americans and the punishing violence we have inflicted on Blacks in our own country Mexicans, Filipinos, Cubans, Hondurans, Japanese, Panamanians, Indonesians, Nigerians, Haitians etc we will ,as a nation, be plagued with spurts of unexplainable violence.
I am all for gun and ammunition control but the soul of our nation needs work too. The reckoning is hardly complete among the former colonial powers but the US refuses to see itself as a modern incarnation of colonial power. I wish President Obama actually went on an "Apology Tour" because in some ways that might be the beginning of the process. But the "tour" even as mild as it was drew howls from parts of the nation. For that section of the country acknowledging this pain we have caused is itself still too painful.
Germany and Japan and France and England have all started the process (some longer than others) about the violence they have inflicted.
Reckoning. It needs to be done or the original pain will be reinflicted upon ourselves again and again.