Reading notes

[Sat 2005-01-29: Bumped back to top because it’s damned important]
[originally published Saturday, 2005-01-07 at 10:59 am]

I think the United States’ national soul is on the brink of spiritual death. Maybe it’s already dead.

Alberto Gonzales should never have been nominated for the position of U.S. attorney general, much less be on the brink of confirmation. You empower the torture and injustices he’s empowered, and you yourself may, if you’re lucky and contrite, be forgiven and rehabilitated at some point in the future, but in a just nation you have permanently disqualified yourself from any position of authority.

But we are not [being] a just nation.

Bob Herbert today captures the present situation well:

The administration that thumbed its nose at the Geneva Conventions seems equally dismissive of such grand American values as honor, justice, integrity, due process and the truth. So there was Alberto Gonzales, counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby, interviewing on Capitol Hill yesterday for the post of attorney general …

Mr. Gonzales shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near that office. His judgments regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners rounded up in Iraq and the so-called war on terror have been both unsound and shameful. Some of the practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome, medieval. …

The Bush administration and Mr. Gonzales are trying to sell the fiction that they’ve seen the light. In answer to a setup question at his Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Gonzales said he is against torture. And the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last week that said “torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms.”

What took so long? Why were we ever — under any circumstances — torturing, maiming, sexually abusing and even killing prisoners? And where is the evidence that we’ve stopped?

The Bush administration hasn’t changed. This is an administration that believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing the very nature of the United States. …

I see the administration’s pathological inability to accept responsibility creeping into the culture. Its “whatever I can get away with” delineation of right from wrong is leaking into attitudes everywhere I turn, seems like.

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive. …

I’ve just had a real live former Hitler-era Nazi — someone who turned his life around decades ago and is now the most delightful of people — tell me he’s chilled by the similarities he sees between what he fell for in 1930s Germany and what’s happening in the U.S. during the past 4 years. It’s looked similar to my intuition for a long time now; he says from first-hand experience it is similar. I’d rather us learn from the past, not repeat it, thankyouverymuch.

How any Christian sees anything godly in these people mystifies me. It’s just deception within and without. There is no “setting free the oppressed” going on, as Jesus cites as evidence of the liberating presence of the Spirit of the Lord. What we’re doing is imprisoning people, not proclaiming release to them; we’re oppressing people, not setting them free.

Americans have tended to view the U.S. as the guardian of the highest ideals of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that’s getting more and more difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of justice have no choice but to look elsewhere.

“Do justice”? Love kindness? Walk humbly? By Micah’s measure, we’re already three strikes and out: Injustice, cruelty, and arrogance define us in the eyes of the world. Clearly we’re not measuring up to what Micah says “the Lord requires of us.”

[via Armando]

2005-01-21 update:
Fallenmonk reminds me of MLK’s apropos words:

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.