Interesting column in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
This year, America doesn't deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.
For we have sinned.
We have failed to pay attention. We've settled for lame excuses. We've spit on the memory of those who did that brave, brave thing in Philadelphia 232 years ago.
The America those men founded should never torture a prisoner.
The America they founded should never imprison people for years without charge or hearing.
The America they founded should never ship prisoners to foreign lands, knowing their new jailers might torture them.
Well, yeah. An America that tortures ain't the America I signed on for when I started being able to think for myself and so forth. "Torture is wrong" is kind of a baseline, for me. Call me wacky, call me nuts. As an American I do not condone torture, nor do I apologize for torture. Period. And while I'm an unabashed liberal, I can't for the life of me see how this anti-torture stance of mine is especially ideological. It rather seems to me a baseline for civilization and so forth. We're not discussing the fucking estate tax, we're not discussing expanding healthcare benefits, we're discussing fucking torture.
I also have this crazy idea that I expect anyone who claims the right to lead this nation to actually live up to certain basic standards like "no torture," because if they don't, it means that we accept that when we say America stands for something, it's all a load of star-spangled horseshit. I live in a world of tangible things -- like green grass, a good beer, forcible simulated drowning, and dead foreign children. I don't give a right flying fuck for an ideal that covers up corpses.
Show of hands how many of you hated this country when Bill Clinton was president? I bet there aren’t very many. That’s because in spite of the many disagreements and outright disgust that many conservatives had for President Clinton, one thing they never forgot was how fortunate they were to live in this country, to be able to fly (not burn) the flag, a right that hundreds of thousands of American troops died to protect and uphold. Most conservatives flew the flag during the Clinton years in spite of their dislike of both him and his liberal policies, because they knew he wasn’t always going to be president and that one would come along and right some of his wrongs.
"Conservatives," then, have no standards at all, and for them "patriotism" is a civic religion devoid of principle or even content.
The flag is cloth. If it means anything beyond that it stands in for a basic set of standards as for what should and should not be done. Torture done in the name of the United States, to me, urinates on that set of standards.
The flag means something to me. This Fourth of July, if we respect the flag, if we fly it, we will weep.
Because we have failed to live up to it.
UPDATE: The never disappointing Macranger:
Well Mr. Satullo, the founding fathers would have had no problem with what we’ve done to protect morons like you so you could get depressed on the greatest holiday in the world. They fully understood the implications of liberty and that in order to keep it you have to fight for it.
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the state.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
Motherfucker.
