A Commentary on America
This is a sad time to be in America. Not because of anything others have done, but because of what Americans have done. The rot, you see, is home bred. Take this as an example: it is extraordinary that Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, recently found it necessary to say:
“It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them.”
Really? Senator: the very fact that you were engaged in a debate here in America and needed to say this is dumbfounding. It is beyond belief. It would never have occurred to John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson, or any other of the long line of American politicians to speak those words. It would have been unnecessary. It would have been an anathema. The transparency and balance accorded in our legal process is a basic tenet of freedom. It is one of the elementary building blocks of democracy. To think otherwise is to accept tyranny and authoritarianism. Yet here we are: Senator Graham felt the need to caution against repression. And even he, because of the need for domestic political nicety, failed to rise all the way to the heights of indignation that the occasion demanded. His words were carefully chosen: “it would be unacceptable, legally”. Where is the moral outrage? “Unacceptable” How about beyond the pale? “Legally” How about morally? Who cares about the legality of moral turpitude? Only a bureaucrat: only someone who has abandoned freedom and has substituted equivocation, weakness, and blind obedience for thoughtful certitude.
This is the extent of the rot. America apparently has lost the ability to discuss issues as moral imperatives except in the context of petty partisan bickering. Even then the moral values so widely touted in recent elections are neither moral nor values. They are a political agenda. They are divorced from the underlying values that have led Americans to talk of American “Exceptionalism”. Those underlying values are timeless and apolitical. More importantly they are non-negotiable. To undertake an act of tyranny, such as the sham trials being advocated by the current Administration or the continuance of the perpetual imprisonment of the internees at Guantanamo Bay, is to walk away from “Americanism”. It is to do away with the very foundation of “The Land of the Free”.
America was founded as an antithesis to tyranny. It was not supposed to augment it. Americans like to see themselves as basking in the light of freedom. They like to talk loudly of it. They lecture the world from the heights of their self-perceived superiority in all things democratic. Why then do they condone the contradiction of their way of life? Why is it that a senator uses weasel words to criticize tyrannical policy when the occasion demands moral clarity and rage?
This is the extent of the rot: there is no rage. The opposition is cowed. There is no clarity because Americans are raised not to respect or understand their liberties, but to worship at the altar of mythologies. They forget the struggle necessary to attain freedom. They are not on the front line in the fight they are indulged by the victory won centuries ago. They have forgotten that criticism and opposition require strength. That to remain free a people must remain vigilant and that words like “patriotism” are just that: words. They mean nothing unless they are backed by action and, if necessary, sacrifice. Americans appear to imagine that all the sacrifice was in the past: the Founding Fathers were the ones to create a free nation whose sole current responsibility is to slide along in material complacency as if that were a substitute for freedom. As if the Founders created a perpetuity that requires no nourishment. Americans appear to believe that strength can only be material; that material means military, and that military implies conquest.
On the contrary: American strength has always rooted in its moral leadership. Based upon the struggle against tyranny, forged there, honed in subsequent struggles and defended by bygone generations that leadership is vital to the world. America is an idea. It is a thought. It is a moral concept that leans against the tide of oppression. To undertake the evil action of the current Administration is to destroy the very idea that is the one and only durable defense America has. For America to prevail against terrorists it must simply continue to be America: proud and free, truly free, dissent, due process and all. All else is defeat. That is the extent of the rot: Americans seem not to care or understand why or how it is that the current Administration is leading them to defeat. America is a belief, and when Americans stop believing it is no longer America.
No American, no real American, no patriot, could for an instant contemplate secret trials where defendants are not even aware of the evidence against them. Not for a single moment, not once, would any of the Founding Fathers have entertained such an overtly tyrannical act. Not once. That there is need for a debate over the legality of such trials is an abrogation of every thought those original Americans had. It is a denial of what they fought for. It is a perversion of the moral sinew they put in place. Yet here we are having such a debate.
It is indeed a sad time to be in America.
