Now, admittedly, I am a foolish idealist.  I don’t say this to be cute, only to underscore that living in a world with concrete, monetizable values that override fairness, and what was once quaintly thought of as common decency, it seems foolish to me, over and over, to keep dreaming of a more merciful and equitable society.  It would be different, perhaps, if I had great wealth to hire a talented team to help me market my fond ideals, but that’s a pointless thought.

In the decade before the Civil War, an unprecedented carnage not eclipsed for more than fifty years, when machine guns, aerial assault and poison gas were added to the atrocities of trench warfare, our countrymen were poised to kill each other.   We are again now.    Violence is the default setting in our violent nation and when one people holds another under their dirty boot long enough the only answer becomes murder.  Justifiable homicide, each injured party believes righteously.   

We now have a culture where each side feels, once again, as though it has been held under the other’s dirty boot for long enough.  This feeling is amplified by the mass media, which does whatever it can to get people to tune in.   Billions of dollars hang in the balance and truth, a slippery thing in any case, is reconciled only in the corporate bottom line.

So instead of serious discussions, and an honest search for the real reasons for our problems and possible solutions, we get rationales and overheated partisan rhetoric.  Talented talking head pundits make millions of dollars to pontificate, deliver talking points and push a party line, their demographic choir lustily nodding their agreement, shuddering in disgust, pumping their fists.  My foolish idealism believes, like Anne Frank, before the Nazis killed her, that all people are basically good.  If they had the facts, and a bit of honesty, just a little….

Right, Dave.

I offer just two rationales, instead of reasons, that merely state a good enough excuse to do something truly inexcusable.  In fairness, let me qualify that.   The displacement of millions of people, the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands– not necessarily inexcusable, fair enough.  But to be fair, and in the context of an unprovoked attack on a country ruled by a tyrant and massive destruction in the name of freeing them, it seems a bit hard to excuse.

Rationale for the war in Iraq: 

Why Iraq?  Because we and many others (Democrats too) thought he had WMD’s and because we could use a strong country in the Middle East that was sympathetic to us for their liberation.

This rationale leaves out the oft trumpeted connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, which turned out to be as false as the WMD rationale.   That the CIA and many foreign intelligence sources knew the reports of this connection and the WMDs were false was not seen as an impediment to the invasion of a country that would be sympathetic to us even if we inadvertently destroyed its infrastructure, displaced millions, killed many thousands, subjected it to more than a decade of mayhem, explosions, assassinations and so on, in the name of freedom and democracy… well, such are the costs of war, the price of freedom, one might rationalize.

And I am tortured by torture, as I keep saying.   It makes my skin crawl that so many Americans are so nonchalant about what our government has been doing in our names.  I was proud of John McCain for this speech.  Here is a rationale for torture, you will notice how different it is from a good reason to torture, something that, outside of doing it to inflict maximum pain on someone you hate, I have never heard:

I don’t justify torture…water boarding isn’t torture…it’s used in the training of our troops.  And we only water-boarded three people.  And the times then called for enhanced interrogation methods so that 9/11 could never happen again.

A person saying this, you might think, well, you, Sir, have set up a straw man to try to prove your point.   This is an actual answer to the question “how do you justify Americans torturing people?”.  It seems unfair to suggest that if we grabbed this woman, shoved a bag over her head, rushed her, shackled and diapered, to a dark, coffin-sized cell and locked her in there for a few weeks she would say the same thing at the end of her little adventure.  Even if we did not strip her naked, kept her cell at a comfortable temperature, left her in silence and never put a gag in her mouth, tilted her upside down on a board and poured water into the gag until the doctor monitoring the procedure told us we were about to accidentally kill her.

As for me, I just wish I had something productive to keep me busy enough not to think of these things.   I sometimes envy people I know who are running at high speed all day, far too busy to ponder, more than momentarily, things so sickening, and so futile and depressing to ponder.

photograph from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is A Battlefield.