I had to drive 200 miles yesterday in the downpour. Sheets of rain, high spray, the Skagit high against the banks, Lake Samish looking...large...even from the road. Listening to the NPR. Voice after voice. Endless discussion. Does torture work? Did it help keep America secure?
Then, y'know, a little cooking show, a piece about municipal banks.
Never have I been so genuinely ashamed of being an American.
Normally can back off. It's an empire and it has to do with me and what I want or believe about as much as my car is the spaceship Serenity. I am an American, and being ashamed of something you can't do a damn thing about is pointless and self destructive. We've done objectively worse things, many of them, in my lifetime. But I'm sick. Literally sick. This is really who we are.
Not one person -- except for a single quote from the president (carefully qualified, of course) said that this is wrong. Not one. The whole day of listening. The government released a report about the rape and murder of prisoners and the best we can do is have discussions of effectiveness. I can't abstract that away, or contextualize it in a reassuring or acceptable way.
Normally these diaries -- when I am moved to write-- are at least about sharing some sense of the world, the bond between writer and reader. Can't do it. I want to puke. I woke up wanting to puke. Even knowing that when an individual has this strong a reaction to their government, they are -- arguably -- having mental health issues, and they'd better put the focus back on dinner, quick, or there won't be any dinner. (Don't tell me to calm down. Please).
A lot of y'all still believe in the American ideal, in the creeds of our nation -- the good ones. I have not believed those in a long time. But I did not think that my fellows -- the people with whom I share a language, some frame of history -- I did not think y'all would talk about the effectiveness of torture as though that were the real issue. Not over and over, not to the exclusion of the fundamental issue. Torture, rape and murder are wrong.
Torture is always and everywhere a moral question. Not simply because it defines us, as President Obama implied. In some ways, that's the least and most self serving reason. Torture and murder and rape are wrong because once your society decides that is OK, then the assumptions of torture become implicitly acceptable at every level. Torture is wrong because when you have power you model power, and you describe morality to police departments, to armies, to corrections officers. To fathers and mothers and children learning to be human beings.
People who advocate torture will always think it was effective, because their vision of expedient power is reinforced and reassured by the complete mental, spiritual and physical destruction of their enemies. They are more certain of their choices if they have cut their enemies to pieces and stared at the entrails, and being more certain, they are more effective. What is there to argue? It is in human nature, and our objections are just those of fools who do not really understand people.
And what is different today? A good question. I guess...now I know more who we really are. And I'm sick.