Volumes have been written and posted this week about the Senate's report on torture, much of it predictable. The Right believes that the report is the work of America-hating bleeding hearts who do not care about our security, and the Left has revived its appetite for Cheney, Bush, et al. to be tried for war crimes. Well, we liberals do care about our safety, and that is why we are conscious of the effects our actions have in the minds of our enemies. As for former presidents and vice presidents sitting in the dock at the Hague, well, that's just never going to happen.
One editorial caught my eye. It spoke to how the report means that the United States has lost its "moral authority" in the world. Moral authority? I do not believe it means what he thinks it means.
Whichever country the author was referring to, it surely can't be the United States. We may have claimed to have such a thing, but that was the wishful thinking of privileged, wealthy men possessed of little more than a common European heritage and the means to keep themselves remote from (or quickly forget) the kind of life the average American has always led.
Founded as a grand real estate venture and a foothold in this hemisphere by the moneyed interests of the UK, our survival and expansion were made possible only through the continuation of the steady extermination of the indigenous people whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait 6,000 years before the creation of Earth by the God who gave the British their authority. Having established dominance here, they began building this nation on the backs of human beings imported from Africa under the most deplorable conditions and auctioned off to the highest bidder with no regard for their dignity or humanity. These workers were bred for brute strength and durability and kept in conditions no better than those for the beasts of the field.
When our forefathers broke away from the mother country (not for personal freedom but to line the pocketbooks of the landed and merchant classes), they expanded and strengthened the slave trade and allowed the economy of half the country to be built around forced labor extracted by the lash of the whip. As this country grew, this "peculiar institution" became more entrenched, and it took four years of brutal fighting and 620,000 lives to rid this nation of legal slavery.
Following that war, it took 100 more years - years filled with Klan marches and cross burnings, lynching, "separate but equal", poll taxes, church bombings, and forced economic subjugation - for the descendants of those freed by Lincoln to achieve even the most rudimentary freedoms they had been promised.
We came out of the Civil War to become a nation that transformed the world through innovation and industry, all of it powered by a working class denied the right to organize or earn a living wage. As this nation became wealthy, we struck out, chasing the Spanish out of Cuba and the Philippines, subjecting the former to 60 years of corruption and servitude for their sugar and the latter to a bit of ethnic cleansing.
America came to the rescue of Europe and defeated the Kaiser, vaulting to prominence on the world stage and dividing nations as if we had that right and setting the stage for nearly every major conflict in the 100 years since. We believed ourselves to be the smartest people on Earth, and our hubris led us to almost completely and permanently destabilize the international economy.
We saved the world once again (while settling the distant relatives of our enemies in concentration camps and segregating the men we sent to die in foreign lands), only to bring us all close to extinction through the nuclear arms race.
One hundred and ninety-one years after we became a nation, it finally became legal for whites to marry people of color - by judicial fiat - but schools were STILL segregated and crosses were still being burned
We are now well into the 21st century, our government at a perpetual standstill because our President is black. Our veterans are living in the streets and taking their own lives every day, forever wrecked from fighting wars begun on the basis of lies, wars which made the men who began them millionaires many times over, and the majority of our wealth is in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population that spends billions to elect leaders who vote to keep American children hungry and our workers unprotected. What kind of moral authority can a country like that claim? What kind of moral authority belongs to a country that spends about 5% of its GDP annually to support an institution wherein roughly 40,000 of its members (men and women) are sexually assaulted every year and then subjected to the worst kind of intimidation and shaming for the privilege of having been raped?
I could go on and on, but my soul hurts and I'm tired. It's time to stop pretending that we have lost something that was never ours. True morality will come when we face that fact.