Posthuman Blues

For Shame

"Consider further the context of that interrogation and intelligence gathering. The aim then was not simply or mainly to root out pockets of resistance and ongoing subversion or new terrorism and thereby pacify Iraq and protect American lives. This was the time when the administration was frantically bent on finding proof of the stocks of weapons of mass destruction and the alleged pre-war links to al-Qaeda that were advanced (as we now know, falsely) to justify the war. It was also part of a more massive program of detention of supposed evildoers in Iraq, numbering 10-12,000 by different accounts, an unknown number of them still held without charge or notification to their families -- a little-known story with its own cargo of abuses. It fits into the broader pattern of the so-called War on Terror in which the United States covertly and overtly supports a Gulag Archipelago of detention camps and interrogation centers over the Middle East and Central Asia, either on its own bases or on the territory of other regimes, mostly repressive ones, with whom America works."

The author of this excellent editorial decries America's lack of revulsion, its numbness to atrocity. But is this really a surprise?

Look at the garbage shoveled out by the entertainment industry: vacuous, banal, vulgar, boundlessly stupid -- but viewers don't even realize that they're being insulted. How can anyone expect an appropriately outraged response to far-away POW abuse when voters have been dumbed down into cellphone-wielding idiot savants who just want to see who wins "American Idol"?