{"id":690,"date":"2006-09-29T17:58:44","date_gmt":"2006-09-29T17:58:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=690"},"modified":"2006-09-29T17:58:44","modified_gmt":"2006-09-29T17:58:44","slug":"disgusted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/09\/29\/disgusted\/","title":{"rendered":"Disgusted"},"content":{"rendered":"

My concept of America formed early and was gathered largely from old black-and-white movies, Schoolhouse Rock<\/i> cartoons, and, yes, Star Trek<\/i>, which despite all the lip service about a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-species crew projected a largely American (specifically JFK’s “New Frontier” America) sense of identity. And while I never subscribed to the jingoistic “we’re number one” mantra that so many of my classmates seemed to reflexively utter whenever news of some international dispute managed to filter down to our grade-school consciousnesses, I always understood that Americans were the good guys<\/i>. I may not have quite believed in the concept of American exceptionalism, but I did believe that our country was respected in the world and, more importantly, worthy<\/i> of respect, not because we were superior human beings who were inherently better than everyone else, but because we chose<\/i> not to do the kinds of nasty shit that other nations did. Like Captain Kirk choosing to spare the helpless Gorn<\/a>, who would surely have killed him, the Americans of my understanding struggled to rise above our brutal natures, to find a better, more humane way of doing things.<\/p>\n

That meant we didn’t send our own people to Siberia for speaking their minds. We didn’t persecute people because of their religion or lack thereof. We didn’t invade and take over other countries in order to expand our own territory or influence. We tried to help<\/i> the rest of the world, not just ourselves. We cared if innocent blood was unavoidably shed. And we most certainly did not, under any circumstances, torture<\/i> people.<\/p>\n


\nNaive, wasn’t I? But then I was a child, and children are supposed to be naive. In time, I learned the truth: Americans weren’t always automatically the good guys, justice wasn’t always served, racism and other prejudices were still alive and well in this country, American “help” was often perceived as meddling, and blind nationalism was the default setting for a whole lot of my fellow citizens, possibly the majority of them. As for torture, well, my inner cynic long ago acknowledged that Americans probably did<\/i> do it, and that it may even be occasionally necessary, but I took a miniscule amount of comfort from the idea that it was only ever justifiable under the most extreme of circumstances, that it was a rarity that took place in the shadows without official sanction, and that, if it ever came to light, the average Joe in the street would be appalled. Perhaps it was only further naivete, but I honestly thought — or at least hoped — that our character as a nation looked a lot more like Hawkeye Pierce than Colonel Flagg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill<\/a> that, among other loathsome things like authorizing the holding of someone indefinitely without trial and suspending habeas corpus<\/a>, essentially condones torture as an official policy of the United States of America. Oh, it includes some language that prohibits “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, but it also grants the president the power to interpret “the meaning and application” of those Conventions. Considering that our current president used to enjoy making fun of death-row inmates<\/a> who were about to meet Ol’ Sparky, that his administration established America’s first gulag at Guantanamo, and that someone on his cabinet (my money’s on the Dark Lord Cheney) thought it was a good idea to reopen Saddam’s old chamber of horrors at Abu Ghraib for our own uses, I suspect that his interpretations on this subject will be, if you’ll forgive the irony, liberal<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The disgust I feel over this turn of events really has nothing to do with the president, though. This isn’t an anti-Bush thing, even though I freely admit that I feel nothing but contempt for the man and everyone who works for him. It isn’t a Democrat\/Republican thing either, although I’m reservedly proud of the Democrats who voted no on this bill, ashamed of the small handful who voted yes, and positively revolted by the Republicans, who created the bill and all approved of it. It isn’t about “coddling” terrorists or the fear that our own troops will be poorly treated if they are captured. And despite all the overheated strawmen arguments, it isn’t about pulp-fiction scenarios in which Jack Bauer only has 20 minutes to find an atomic bomb and removing a few fingers with a cigar-cutter is his quickest option.
\nWhat this is<\/i> about is a fundamental revision of what America stands for<\/i>. I have no doubt President Bush will sign this bill into law in very short order, and once he has, we will have codified torture<\/i>, not merely turning a blind eye toward exceptional occurences of it as we have in the past but actually making it legal and even expected. And by so doing, we’re turning our backs on the very core ideal of this nation: that there is a better way to do things than the way they’ve always been done before. Torture has always been the technique of bullies, thugs, warlords, and medieval monarchs, the very people whose rule our Founding Fathers rejected when they declared independence 200 years ago, and the same people The Greatest Generation fought to defeat 60 years ago.<\/p>\n

There are those who would say that the only people who need be concerned about this are terrorists and their supporters (not necessarily true, by the way, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is), and that they’re getting exactly the treatment they deserve, the same treatment they’d happily give to us. But that’s just it, isn’t it? We’re lowering ourselves to their level instead of taking the higher road.<\/p>\n

I don’t believe we ought to extend full civil rights to the folks at Gitmo, or that we should hang pretty little curtains in their cells like Andy and Barney did in the Mayberry Jail. But neither should we treat them as anything less than human beings who have an inherent value simply because they are<\/i> human beings. That’s what made us noble in our victory in World War II: we treated the worst monsters of humanity with a modicum of dignity and decency. And I imagine they were surprised to receive such treatment. They didn’t expect it, and many of them probably knew they didn’t deserve it. But they got it anyway, and that said something to them, to the nations of the world, and to ourselves about who we Americans really were. And we were admired for it.<\/p>\n

This new law says something too. Something ugly. Something which shames me as an American, and as a human being. Who are we, really? And what does this country truly stand for? I used to think I knew. I’m afraid I don’t any longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My concept of America formed early and was gathered largely from old black-and-white movies, Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, and, yes, Star Trek, which despite all the lip service about a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-species crew projected a largely American (specifically JFK’s “New Frontier” America) sense of identity. And while I never subscribed to the jingoistic “we’re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}