SUBJECT TO DEBATE by Katha Pollitt ...Sometimes I think America is becoming another place, unrecognizable. David Harvey, the great geographer, tells the story of a friend who returned to the United States last spring after seven years away and could not believe the transformation. "It was as if everyone had been sprinkled with idiot dust!" Some kind of mysterious national dumb-down would explain the ease with which the Republicans have managed to get so many people agitated about the nonexistent Social Security crisis--at 82 percent ranked way above poverty and homelessness (71 percent) and racial justice (47 percent) in a list of urgent issues in a recent poll--or about gay marriage, whose threat to heterosexual unions nobody so far has been able to articulate. Mass mental deterioration would explain, too, how so many Americans still believe the discredited premises of the Iraq War--Saddam Hussein had WMD, was Osama's best friend, was behind 9/11. But even as a joke it doesn't explain the way we have come to accept as normal, or at least plausible, things that would have shocked us to our core only a little while ago. Michelle Malkin, a far-right absurdity, writes a book defending the internment of the Japanese in World War II, and before you know it Daniel Pipes, Middle East scholar and frequent op-ed commentator, is citing Malkin to support his proposals for racial profiling of Muslims. And he's got lots of company--in a recent poll almost half of respondents agreed that the civil liberties of Muslims should be curtailed. Pipes's proposals in turn seem mild compared with the plans being floated by the Pentagon and the CIA for lifetime detention of terrorist suspects--without charges, without lawyers, in a network of secret prisons around the globe. Kafkaesque doesn't begin to describe it--at least Joseph K. had an attorney and the prisoner of "In the Penal Colony" got a sentence.
As I write, the Senate is preparing to take up the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Despicable as Ashcroft proved to be, and much as the Senate should have foreseen that and rejected him, he had not at the time of his nomination been responsible for memos justifying torture. He hadn't argued that the President stood above the law and could pretty much do whatever he wanted. He had not been in the center of months and months of revelations about the horrific doings at Abu Ghraib, in detention centers in Afghanistan, or, even as you are reading this, Guantánamo. How can it be that the smart money is on Gonzales being confirmed? That Charles Schumer, a popular blue-state Democrat with a war chest bigger than Alexander the Great's, is already talking sagely about the presumption that the President gets the Cabinet members he wants? ... you don't need a high IQ or a PhD to believe in law and human rights and the Golden Rule. The problem is fear. The media are afraid of looking too "liberal," intellectuals are afraid of being called "anti-American"--and they will be if they challenge too vigorously the crimes being committed in America's name--Democrats are afraid of having their remaining bits of turf plowed under and sown with salt by the Republicans, the left is afraid of looking too "secular" and not "supporting the troops," and ordinary people are afraid of being blown up by the terrorist next door. Fear dust. That's what it is. Fear dust. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050124&s=pollitt Via http://www.pacificviews.org/ Gary Denton _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
