Rant (#1275 in a series)

We've got your new lingo justifying torture as a substitute for knowing what else to do besides engage in inhumane cruelty. We've got your dangerous, lying Defense Secretary aggressively proclaiming we don't need no stinking Iraq reconstruction planning. We've got your previously secret, now unsecret CIA prisons. We've got your anti-al Qaida Saddam Hussein and lack of al Qaida-Iraq ties (and here). We've got your pure, unadulterated propaganda (and here).

Outrageous, of course! What's new? I find it even more outrageous that this is all news. We're long past the stage in which we should be surprised and outraged over these maneuvers. Yes, the administration has turned once again to rhetorical trickery in its proposal to call torture "alternative interrogation." That's a new one, but, oh, the cynicism! Outrageous! Nonetheless, what's new here? How many turns of phrases have we put up with in the past five years, phrases that are tested in the public sphere and then dropped when they outlive their usefulness or show themselves to be counterproductive to the goal of submission of the citizenry to the administration's goals? But then, of course, what are the administration's goals?!

We have to heap blame on the administration and its utterly corrupt party, but also the Democrats for laying down and having tanks roll over their heads. Yes, blame the microbial elements of the Republicans - the idiot-bloggers and Goebbelsesque boosters. But let's get rid of the politically opportunistic Democrats who've never spoken up except in support as this administration has trampled on almost everything decent about the United States, its allies, and the people the administration has bombed, maimed, tortured, killed, displaced, terrorized, impoverished, threatened, bullied, ignored, and oppressed. We're at risk of having little left to defend, and only manipulated fear itself.

We weren't a torturing country before the Iraq War. Yes, the US tortured in the dark corners of the Cold War. But it was all politely kept out of the public eye. Now the administration lays claim to overtly calling us torturers (or alternative interrogators), and justifying the fact. If we're truly democratic citizens, and we truly have a representative government (a debatable point), we have to take responsibility for our government's actions, whether we voted for them or not. We are torturers. This administration has turned us into torturers. And now it wants to grind the very moral core of the country into a pulpy mass of relativistic, opportunistic, self-serving moralism. We will be torturers for eternity now. This is as morally radical as it gets. Sade and Bataille's Simone had goals in mind, the satisfaction of the limits of desire and objectified lust for enacting the cruelest impulses of human nature. Do we even have these darker impulses? Aren't we simply apathetic reactionaries? Who cares if another is waterboarded, beaten to death, raped and shot in the head?

The outrage, people, is that we're not outraged enough.