Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Robyn Blumner is a columnist for my hometown newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, and she always has something interesting to say. But in yesterday’s column, she shook me to the bones with her essay on the end of “The Great American Experiment in Liberty.”
It happened on Sept. 29 at 2:47 p.m. That was the seismic minute that Congress passed the Military Commissions Act and formally granted President Bush royal powers he had been unilaterally arrogating. The historic action may one day be remembered as the moment the great American experiment in liberty ended. It was a good run.
You see, it is one thing for a renegade executive to crown himself like Charlemagne and declare that his (cough) wisdom is exceptional enough to designate Americans and foreigners as enemies to be detained indefinitely. It is quite another for 315 members of Congress to go along. When the people’s representatives collude to collapse the separation of powers into one omnipotent executive, our nation becomes defined by that act….
The right to habeas corpus, which is the ability to get before a judge to challenge the legitimacy of your imprisonment, is nonnegotiable. Congress may suspend habeas corpus only in cases of invasion or rebellion, according to the express terms of the Constitution.
But Congress has now eliminated habeas rights for noncitizens not in response to a massive invasion, but an amorphous “global war on terror” where the enemy is anyone seeking to do us or our friends harm….
Bush will be free to determine what abuses by interrogators do not rise to the level of “humiliating and degrading treatment.” Then detainees will be barred from court to challenge that treatment.
The law is a true abomination. It is our fault. We let this happen. We allowed them to draw the false dichotomy between security and freedom. We accepted Bush’s Torture Nation and his untouchable island prison.
Judge Learned Hand said “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; if it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” Americans no longer understand what liberty means. They think it has something to do with tax-free shopping and their right never to be offended by others’ opinions.
E Pluribus Unum be damned. Here’s America’s new motto: If we can’t pronounce your name, we don’t care what happens to you. Now let us get back to our Happy Meals.
How was your lunch?
(224 votes, average: 2.93 out of 5)
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October 9th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
My lunch was not happy. I can tell you that. I makes me furious that people are walking around as if nothing has happened. Downright, unrestrained, bloody, furious.
October 10th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
I recently watched a documentary called “Sir! No, Sir!”
It was about how the G.I.s literally shut down the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War because, basically, they believed that the war, and what the U.S. was doing there, was wrong. After watching it I felt inspired and then that feeling disappeared because I realised that that spirit is gone. People don’t really know the difference between right and wrong, not when looking at the bigger picture. And it’s so sad. This article makes me feel that way too.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Having gotten steadily sicker to the stomach over the past five years, I’m firmly in a place I had feared but truly doubted I’d ever be. The next time someone suggests I don’t love America because I don’t support our illegal war, I’ll have to ask “what America? The old one, or this one?”
The heart of the problem is that even really smart people that I know don’t know what habeas corpus is…uhhh, I mean *was*. So now that it’s gone, they don’t understand what we’ve lost. I suspect it will take nothing less than the brutal application of this latest travesty to wake them up to the concept.
The sickening and demoralizing part is that Bush knows exactly what he destroyed, and he did it with urgency and glee. And our ‘representatives’ did it with him. He’s the head villain, but there are too many others out there to inspire hope that this will be overturned any time soon. We’re talking about it here, and that’s good. We must not stop talking loudly enough to eventually reach everyone who can stand up and say “Sir! No, sir!” and bring this madness to a halt.
I don’t want to accept the end of the ‘experiment’. I don’t want to live like that.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
It’s like that when a nation falls, Mick.
The old loyalists wander around lost, fantasize about restoring it, wishing they could live in the old nation instead of in the new nation that conquered it.
America is gone. It’s as gone as Sun Yat Sen’s Republic of China, Weimar Germany, or King Arthur’s Camelot.
America, the Land of the free and the home of the brave, is gone. The central region of North America is now occupied by Das Homeland, the land of the secure and the home of the frightened.
Pining for it won’t bring it back, but that won’t stop us. Of all the places for happy-ever-aftering, this was one hell of a spot. What a glorious place–Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King. People coming along every generation to make it better, more just. Progress.
But walking the streets of America in search of that glory is a little bit like strolling around Rome dreaming of the ancient Republic, isn’t it? There are traces of it all around, but it’s gone forever.
It’s our land of dreams now. Thoreau, King, Anthony, and so many others built it. It was our treasured inheritance. But we didn’t keep it up. We let it die, and whatever life we make for ourselves, we make in the gaudy Mardi Gras pop culture tomb of America.
I know what many of you are thinking: That’s just too sad to accept as the truth.
What a bunch of pathetic, pandered to babies Americans have become. Oh, it’s sad. Too sad for you to accept, you poor dear? It’s not true then. Believe what you want. The politicians and corporations will poll you and spoon feed what you want to hear back to you as the truth.
A few of us may wander misty-eyed through the streets of this gaudy, artificially sweetened, silicone enhanced movie set parody of America, deceiving ourselves with the prosthetic freedom of empty self-indulgence, dreaming of the glory of the one shining spot that was, and what it could have been.
I do hope that, eventually, we’ll get around to doing something else.
October 20th, 2006 at 6:58 am
I was asked the other day why I was so upset about my son wanting to join the military, was it because of the fear of losing him?
Amazingly enough that is not what upsets me, in the last 5-6 years this country has become something that does not deserve my son’s
sense of duty and country. There will be no freedoms for him to fight for if nothing is done soon.
Change will happen good or bad, maybe this “bad feeling” we are all getting will spread, and the “lost” will get together and a new crop of progressive thinkers will become leaders and restore us to a better “of the people, by the people”.
October 20th, 2006 at 7:36 am
Ralph, I do hope that what we get around to doing is something better. It is pretty dismal from this point, though. I wonder if this is how the Native Americans felt?
Laurie, I served in military intelligence twenty years ago as an Arabic Linguist and Middle East Analyst. We were very successful at mitigating a very real terrorist threat then, without having to dismantle the very things that had inspired me to contribute my efforts. I felt that it was worth it then, and I felt that I had contributed something important. I would not join today. As long as ‘Smirk McCockey’ and his crew, supported by our powerless and power-hungry representatives, go on making a mockery of precious things that were once ‘inalienable’, the only thing they’ll get from me is what they can forcibly pry from my clenched fingers. I hope your son doesn’t join.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Mick,
When my husband put on his uniform, my chest used to swell with pride for country, although he is still my hero, my stomach drops when he puts it on now.
PS. Thank you for your service.
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:11 pm
heh!Mick alot of us felt the same way you do under Bill Clinton.All will be well if only you get a democrat for president in 08 right.Then all best are off.Gun control for everone.freddom of speach.Ask the protester arrested in Chicago for daring to prostest Bill Clinton.This is not an ileagal war. congress voted for it.They had the same intell Bush did.Bill Clinton was all for removing Saddam,just didn’t have the guts to do it.