What We Owe To George Bush

Satar Jabar has a difficult day at Abu Ghraib

A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will ever become the laughing-stock of the world.

-- Henry David Thoreau

Try to look at the bright side. One day, we might look back and have to admit that we owe a great debt of gratitude to George Bush. No, I don't believe he will be vindicated by history, but it is possible that he will be seen as having inspired the people of the United States to confront great moral decisions with profound consequences for the world.

At this time, Congress, and the general public, is being asked to consider a new Attorney General of the United States to fill the post left vacant by the infamous Alberto Gonzales. The nominee, Michael Mukasey, would like to be confirmed despite his complete lack of clarity regarding practices of torture such as waterboarding. It has reached the stage where some citizens have taken it upon themselves to defend this practice as legitimate effort to acquire accurate and actionable information necessary to defend the liberty and freedom of Americans. The "debate", such as it is, mirrors numerous others in our society, and assists in sharpening the focus of a fundamental dichotomy. We are now forced to start making these decisions inside a context that defines our perception of ourselves as human beings. Thanks in no small part to George Bush, we are near to making the kind of brutally honest self-assessments we might otherwise have managed to avoid for at least another generation, probably more. I think we should be grateful.

I've had some brief conversations recently with some of my friends from Microsoft, but not enough to get any sense of their reactions to current events. There are a couple of guys I'd like to talk to, so I'm putting that on my to-do list. I don't know of many workplaces that allow politics to creep in very much, but everyone talks a little, and I'd like to have more perspective on how my colleagues have reacted to the stark exposures of the last few months. I tend to expect an understated response, but you never know.

A segment today on Keith Olbermann's Countdown discussed the difficulties with Mr. Mukasey's confirmation, aired the reactions today from President Bush, and offered some analysis from Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. Mr. Alter makes some very good points, but I was most struck when he noted that "there's a kind of cognitive dissonance here that's breathtaking." I've heard that term "cognitive dissonance" many times, and I'm sure I've even used it more than once. But quick! Tell me what it means, without looking it up! Hmm. Before looking it up, I see the word "cognitive" and know that refers to the thought process. "Dissonance" I'm a little fuzzier on, but I believe it's similar to "discordant" when referring to musical sound. Let's look it up: cognitive dissonance. (I'm hooked on Wikipedia. A side note: when I look up "dissonance" by itself, and also when I look up "discordant", I'm directed to the topic "consonance and dissonance" that defines "dissonance", and presumably some variant of "discordant", as "the quality of sounds which seems "unstable", and has an aural need to "resolve" to a "stable" consonance. At any rate ...) The Wikipedia definition begins: "Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena."

So, "cognitive dissonance" can refer to a conflict in one's belief, or value, system. I know this is getting terribly convoluted, but we're working our way back around now. The issue of torture is a perfect microcosm of the larger cognitive dissonances I've been describing in my last few blogs. We as a nation are poised to sign off on a policy that diverges so fundamentally from our human instincts that we have, finally, stopped for a moment, possibly genetically unable to simply press on in our usual numbness, and instead we're forced to confront ourselves in something approaching genuine self-appraisal. Thanks, George!

That waterboarding is torture can't really even be open to question. The victim feels she is drowning, because she is. She is then brought back, from the brink as it were, and made to endure it yet again, perhaps many times. Afterwards, there are no physical scars or disfigurement, but mentally and emotionally, PTSD might be one way to describe the residual symptoms, not to mention the potential for complications such as pneumonia due to the large amounts of water that had been forced into her lungs.

Rear Admiral John Hutson testified at the confirmation hearings. Rear Admiral Hutson is an officer, a lawyer, judge advocate general of the Navy, and recipient of more medals and awards than I feel like recounting here. He was testifying at his second confirmation of an Attorney General, having also testified against the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales. After some formal statements, Admiral Hutson offered some additional comments:

You know, torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough. And that should not be the United States. No matter how you define torture. It's unconstitutional, it violates statutes, it violates the UCMJ, it violates Common Article 3, it violates what your mother taught you and it violates what you learned in kindergarten. And we ought not be even close to it.

...

Other than, perhaps the rack and thumbscrews, water-boarding is the most iconic example of torture in history. It was devised, I believe, in the Spanish Inquisition. It has been repudiated for centuries.

It's a little disconcerting to hear now that we're not quite sure where water-boarding fits in the scheme of things.

Disconcerting. A disconcerting cognitive dissonance.

A lie.

I appreciate what George Bush has done for us as a nation. He has brought us together perhaps as no other President before him. We stand amid the rubble of our seemingly adolescent image of our country as a protecter of our value system, and have found it to be an abusive father. We are without question in a state of shock, but I think we're coming out of it. I am still somewhat isolated by my condition, but I imagine the murmurings in offices and break rooms, over drinks after hours, even in meetings and town halls across the country, and of course, on the internet, where I see it happening. We know we have to come together and make some decisions.

We can see the unspeakable horror that is Iraq. We can hear Hamid Karzai's plea from Afghanistan for America to stop dropping bombs on his people. We hear the world's disillusionment with America, even if Bush and Cheney do not, and our pride is deeply wounded.

We have heard of the Hadley Rules, or perhaps you may not have heard them. If not, you can scan through this article by Scott Ritter, called On the Eve of Destruction for more information. Ritter almost seems to imply that American policy, as defined by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, is something new, but my reading reveals it as much more a consistent continuation of the long-standing policies of American "Exceptionalism" than is commonly accepted. Nevertheless, the positions implied by Mr. Hadley are shocking in themselves. Negotiation with an adversary such as Iran is deemed to be stalemated until Iran accepts the view of the United States, or there can be no negotiation. That this is nothing like real negotiation is apparently irrelevant. The United States is, quite literally, correct simply because it is the United States.

The underbelly of American government has never been so completely exposed, again thanks to George Bush and his temptingly small group of allies. If we peer at it closely enough, we may actually see the disgusting bloat that has fed the wealthy and the privileged, the military and industrial elite, at the expense of all the rest of Americans since the Constitution was first ratified and immediately hijacked for private ends. If we are finally shocked sufficiently, we just might awaken.

I have a decent reading voice, and have considerable storage facility reserved for me on the internet. I'm considering whether to pursue negotiation with Professor Chomsky's publishers regarding the possibility of my podcasting a chapter a day of his latest two books. Maybe there is a way to get it all into this blog.