In the days after 9/11 the panic and hysteria were so thick in the air that people were saying a lot of crazy things. I remember writing a blistering post some time back about Jonathan Alter, who is a good guy, but who lost his mind for a bit after 9/11 and entertained this torture concept in his column. We all remember Alan Dershowitz going on the record early with an argument to make torture legal. I was quite stunned at the time, but I assumed that once the smoke cleared the nation would realize, with some chagrin, that many of the things they felt and believed while the rubble was still fresh was no longer acceptable.Welcome to the The New America.
The opposite happened. Our culture, debased by years of ugly rightwing eliminationist rhetoric has gotten worse. It is so much worse that it has abandoned the taboo against torture. There is no other way to read the results of this week.
Some of our leadership did speak out against the abuse of prisoners. Hillary Clinton, in particular, addressed the humane treatment of the captured enemy in explicit terms of fundamental American values. Others did as well. But overall, I think it's pretty clear that speaking out against torture is still something that requires chutzpah --- which means that approving of torture is now the norm. We need to recognize that and form our strategy based on that recognition. We are no longer the country I grew up in.
However, although we're living in a New America, it does have a familiar sort of feel to it; kind of a Soviet feel. I'm reminded of a column from way back in 2003 describing the beginnings of our transformation into Soviet America:
...I went home–and made the mistake of turning on the television. A half hour later, I was watching a shot of George Bush waving goodbye to a throng of adoring sailors dissolve into a black screen, leading to the chilling voice-over that I did not imagine: "We now return to Friends, already in progress."I need a drink.
It was at that moment that my headaches went away, and I realized that I had woken up in the Soviet Union.
It has become fashionable on the left and in Western Europe to compare the Bush administration to the Nazis. The comparison is not without some superficial merit. In both cases the government is run by a small gang of snickering, stupid thugs whose vision of paradise is full of explosions and beautifully designed prisons. Toss in the desert fatigues motif and the "self-defense" invasion tactic, and there does seem to be a good case.
But it’s way off. It’s wishful thinking. The Reich only lasted 12 years. The Soviets reigned for 75. They were better at it than the Nazis, and we’re better at it than the Russians. Ask anyone who’s lived in a communist country, and he’ll tell you: Modern America is deja vu all over again. And if ever there was a Soviet spectacle, it was Bush’s speech last week.
Think about it. Huge weapons on display, in foreground and background. The leader who has never fought dressed in full military regalia. Crowds of adoring soldiers and "shock worker" types dressed in colorful costumes, carefully arranged for the cameras. A terrible, excruciatingly dull speech, 20 minutes of incoherent, redundant patriotism (Bush used the words "free" or "freedom" 19 times in an 1800-word speech) and chimpanzoid chest-pounding.
On May Day.
That was Red Square every year for about 70 straight years. And now it is a most natural fit in our society.
The genius of the Soviet system–and now the genius of ours–was that it appealed not to the hatreds and passions of its people, but to other, more dependable qualities: laziness, banality, drunkenness, cowardice. It gave you a piece of sausage and a bottle of vodka and asked only that you take a few minutes to cheer some pictures of tanks rolling into Prague. Its leaders (with the exception of Stalin) were a succession of Bush-like plodders who were dumber than your chimney-sweep uncle and could barely speak their own language.
...
The...irresistible instinct toward mediocrity is the same.
So is the fawning sentimentality, and the preposterous fake idealism. In Soviet times, a man who was afraid to speak frankly on any topic in front of his own children and whose neighbor had disappeared two days before was capable of shedding real tears over the plight of the American Negro, a popular Soviet cause for decades. You see the same thing here in the States: no job, no health insurance, fucked for life by the credit bureaus, but swelling with pride over the sight of an Iraqi child with a candy bar.
Modern observers look back at the early Soviet days and wonder how it is that people could possibly have believed those fantastic tales they read about in the state papers–the lurid descriptions of fascist terrorists and wreckers who conspired to poison reservoirs and turn up rails and put broken glass in sausage in the most faraway, seemingly irrelevant places in Siberia and the far north. The answer probably is that they wanted to believe them. Because that was what was in their hearts. It wasn’t a lie that was being put over on them. It came from them.
Few sane people survived those early years to pass on genes to the next generation. The ones who did remained in careful hiding for decades while they waited for the beast to rot from within.
That may be our only hope in the States, because the problem isn’t removing George Bush. It’s the rest of it. This whole thing, all around us, is a package deal. From war all the way back to Friends, already in progress. A monster that mighty doesn’t need a führer.
