Via Dave's Glittering Eye from yesterday, Dean Esmay says it well:
[E]ver since a small group of irresponsibly unsupervised young twenty-something punks went nuts at Abu Ghraib with a lot of disgusting things they did--which their fellow soldiers caught them at and turned them in for, which their superiors immediately investigated and prosecuted them for, making full revelations to the press and the public, and causing the General in charge of that prison to be fired--because of that, now TORTURE IS SUPPOSEDLY RAMPANT AMONG AMERICAN FORCES.
And:
A guy was chained to a floor, not allowed to go to the bathroom, and forced to listen to loud rap music. The refusing toilet privileges was over the top to me, but: has anyone even asked who this guy was or what they were trying to get him to reveal? No, of course not: we are content to believe that a captured terrorist was "tortured," apparently just for the fun of it.
Three years ago people would have been calling me a pansy and a sissy for saying "tying him down and not letting him go to the bathroom seems over the top." Now I have very little doubt that someone, somewhere out there is going to call me a "torture advocate" just for writing this.
Once, when I was young, I'm thinking about the age of 19 or 20 or so, my father's brother and his wonderful wife were in for Thanksgiving. Uncle Gene was and is one of those guys for whom the world is both ridiculously funny and dismaying all at the same time. I can picture him shaking his head and laughing at whatever absurdity he was talking about at the time. He's the same uncle who took his family to live in Iran during the days of the Shah. He was way ahead back then.
He was a fascist. Oh wait, no he wasn't. I just called him that because he supported Ronald Reagan and you know, Reagan was a fascist. Oh wait, he wasn't a fascist either.
Anyway, that particular Thanksgiving, Uncle Gene and I got into a political argument (this is my shame and joy in life: I am a political pugilist and will likely take the opposite side of almost any argument. I have my limits, of course, but I love a good knock-down-drag-out) and I let my post-adolescent, radical lefty hormones get the better of me. I called Reagan a fascist. I called Uncle Gene a fascist.
I was stupid. In my own defense, I was a kid. I know better now and have tried (I believe I am successful) to teach Caitlin that using this type of hyperbole in an argument is not only ineffective but indicative of a mind that has lost the ability to reason. I am sorry to my Uncle.
Just as importantly, I lost the argument because I demonstrated myself as being basely stupid and so filled with hatred that I was willing to brand people with the mark of the world's worst villains.
Dean is right in his post. When you call everyone with whom you disagree either a communist or a fascist, what will you do when a real communist or fascist comes along? And likewise, what would we do when we see actual torture now that we have lowered nearly ever instance of distress or harsh treatment to torture?
Throwing a Koran on the floor or even touching it without properly approved fingers is now a human rights violation. Chaining a terrorist to a floor and holding him there to the point that he soils himself is now considered torture. We have arrived at that mythical land that is so often invoked, yet rarely visited: everything now is the lowest common denominator.
We are getting to the point where every offense will be a prosecutable crime, because somebody, somewhere might consider it the worst thing that could be done. So it must be.
A lot of this is a product of a world in which more and more people have less and less to worry about. Maybe it's human nature to need something to complain about, as if one's worth depends on what one has overcome. But what do we do with a culture that has experience maybe too many good years?
I had a friend that liked to go camping. His wife did not. When I asked him why she was not accompanying him to the great outdoors, he replied, "Nancy thinks that 'roughing it' is when you don't have cable." To Nancy, it was a back-breaking burden--"torture"--to have to wait in line at the grocery store.
I had another friend who despised Nancy. He grew up in Leningrad and routinely stood in line, outside, in freezing temperatures to get maybe a half loaf of sawdust bread. One day we were having a few beers and he was going off about Nancy. I was in a more quizzical mood and asked what he thought Nancy's problem was. His answer: No perspective.
We have lost our perspective too early. I blame the media, of course, because I can. But in a way it is the media's fault as well as our own. It started when our President asked the American people to make the sacrifice of going shopping in response to September 11, while our media effectively banned all pictures and video of that day. Yes, we have lost our perspective, and now we answer our need to sacrifice with mea culpas to minor crimes. What will we do when we actually have to face reality?
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