babylonDon

Why Is America So Mean?

Ted Rall


NEW YORK--"The 82nd," the man ahead of me in the security line at the Kansas City airport said. He was 64 and white, very Hank Hill and not the kind of guy you'd typically see chatting up a skinny 20-year-old Latino dude. But they were both veterans. Common ground is a given.

"I was in the 82nd too," the kid told the old man. I looked down. The kid's legs were gone. He was standing on metal. Implausibly and heartbreakingly, white Converses adorned the tips of his prosthetic legs. High tops.

On the other side of the metal detector, I caught up with the young vet (Iraq? Afghanistan?). HomeSec was giving him the whole treatment: arms stretched out, the wand, stern expressions and stupid questions. The wand beeped and beeped. The TSA guy scowled. "I've got titanium all the way up my spine," the kid explained.

You're kidding me, I thought. After what he's been through. After what he's done for his country. I wanted to scream: Bastards! You should wave him around the checkpoint. Here, sir, we'd like to offer you a seat in first class. No, no, no charge.

I bit my tongue. Here in the land of the twee and the craven, I know when to shut up. That's what we do now. Airports are nodes of high-intensity fascism in a nation settling into authoritarianism lite. Hassle the bastards and you might end up dead. I had a flight to catch, doncha know.

Have we, at long last, any decency?

In one respect, the three remaining presidential candidates say, "Yes, we do." They've promised to close Gitmo.

What ought to happen to the nearly 300 detainees is obvious. Hand each of them an apology, a bag of cash--a million bucks wouldn't be nearly enough for what they've been through--and a plane ticket home. Those who can't return to their countries of origin because their U.S.-backed dictatorships would murder them receive a penthouse suite in the U.S. city of their choice.

I'd let them switch places with their guards and 300 top-ranking members of the Bush Administration for a couple of days first. No questions asked. Just get on the plane, and don't forget your bag o' cash.

Anyway.

Here's how messed up, how separated from common sense justice the United States of America has become: We might close Gitmo. But we're keeping the inmates!

"When it comes to closing Guantánamo, talk is cheap," Columbia law professor Matthew Waxman tells The Los Angeles Times. Because, you see, the U.S. government has violated the victims' rights so egregiously for so long that there's no longer a legally appropriate way to process them.

"Especially vexing," says the paper, "are scores of foreign detainees: Officials lack evidence to prosecute, but warn against setting them free." It's an 800-year-old Western legal principle called habeas corpus: you can't hold a person in custody without charging them. Oh, wait--Bush got rid of that.

"Because there is little evidence against them that could be used in a U.S. court, government officials fear that a federal judge could order them freed," the Times continues. Heaven forbid that we release people, even if there's no evidence they've done anything wrong. What's next? Taxing the rich?

"Then you would have 100-plus future sleeper-cell members unleashed in Kansas," a "midlevel official" told the Times. No grain silo would be safe.

Gitmo inmates have been waterboarded, urinated upon by U.S. soldiers, violently force-fed and driven to suicide. Some of the "dangerous terrorists" (John McCain's description) were 12 years old when Afghan warlords sold them to U.S. forces for cash bounties. They've grown up in Gitmo. When do we finally, at long last, decide that they've suffered enough?

Maybe we should just shoot them.

It's not just foreigners. Even for its own native-born wretches, America couldn't find a path to fundamental decency if it were lit up like Times Square on New Year's Eve.

In ancient Rome, executioners abided by a rule: If they failed to hack off your head after three swings of the blade, they set you free. Not here. Men condemned to lethal injection wake up screaming; the guards administer more poisons and barbiturates.

Veterinarians abandoned the three-drug cocktail used to kill inmates in most states because they considered it cruel to animals.

Many death row prisoners are innocent. Sometimes they even manage to prove it before their executions. "At least 205 men and one woman nationwide have been exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989, including 53 who...were convicted of murder," reports The New York Times. But what happens to those who are set free?

No compensation is enough for someone who serves years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. But society ought to come up with something.

There ought to be money. Millions and millions of dollars. So much that the victim of a judicial miscarriage never has to work again. It wouldn't bring back the lost years, the shattered relationships and murdered moments. But it would be a start.

Then again, this is America. We don't apologize, much less try to pay penance. Here's $24 and a cheap suit. Too bad about those 15 years. Thank you for playing. Want compensation? Find a lawyer who'll work for $24 and sue.

Ah, but there's a catch: you need a law under which to file a lawsuit. 36 of the 50 states have laws that specifically prevent innocent ex-prisoners from going to court to seek the damages they ought to have been given without asking. Twelve of the remaining 14 have limits. (New York and Maryland do not.) California caps total payouts at a stingy $100 a day, up to a maximum of $10,000--even if they lock you up for 20 years by mistake.

As individuals, Americans are generous to a fault. They do the right thing, or at least they try. The disconnect occurs when we express our collective will, through our courts and government officials. Our laws and our politicians are mean, cheap and callous.

How did a soft-hearted people wind up making such a hard-ass country?

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"America, the greatest, best country that God has ever given man, on the face of the Earth"- Sean Hannity, professional broadcast journalist.

“To the contrary, has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”-Antonin Scalia

cheapseats

[quote=babylonDon;168449]Why Is America So Mean?

Ted Rall


Some, obviously not all. Americans are also gullible to a fault and unto fiasco.



Plato said something about man always perceiving advantage in injustice. The disconnect isn't that fault-and-foible riddled people who are in a position to get away with shit then try to get away with shit. The disconnect is that we let them.



Because, except for the few who will put their lives on the line in the stead of people who will not put their lives on the line, people are afraid of dying. No matter how shitty their lives, no matter how loudly they proclaim their belief in a better hereafter, people are afraid of dying.

People don't like to get hurt, either. I will suggest that our New & Improvised Torture line of products and services is designed as much to keep Americans in line as it is to keep Others in line.

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Ptech

Good thread Don.

The heartless god is part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Meant to inspire fear on the one hand, and something else on the other.

Another good indicator of it is our per capita rate of imprisonment--we lead the world.

cheapseats

Another good indicator of our being a blatantly racist nation is the wildly disproportionate number of blacks in that prison population.

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Jonesy

This life is screwed-up. We don't know what we're supposed to be doing here, and no one bothered to tell us. About the most we can gather is survival and reproduction. But why should the individual survive and reproduce, when there are unlimited other individuals?

It is no wonder everyone is nuts.

babylonDon

We as a nation, are big fans of judgment and retribution. We really should be focusing more on actual justice. We seem to get caught up in finding a place to aim our anger, than actually attempting to fix situations.

But identifying the problem is as far as I've come. I don't have a lot of solutions.

__________________
"America, the greatest, best country that God has ever given man, on the face of the Earth"- Sean Hannity, professional broadcast journalist.

“To the contrary, has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”-Antonin Scalia

Rollerball

Placing blame is something Americans are great at. I used to be guilty of that too, that so long as you can blame someone or something then problem solved, right?

About 15 years ago I was hired into a team of truly magnificent thinkers at the University of Chicago. (no I wasn't one of them, I was support) If there was one thing that I took away from working with these people it was how not to waste time and energy on finding blame. Up until then I was used to team meetings where the problem was laid on the table and all energy was put into find out who did it, once blame had been placed, we moved on.

When a problem arose at the University the first thing that happened was a solution was searched for, no time at all was wasted on who or what caused the problem, who's fault it was, that is totally unproductive.

Most of the time I witness all energy being poured into finding someone to blame rather than just finding a solution so it doesn't happen again. So in the end you have a scapegoat, but the problem is still there.

babylonDon

It's actually pretty inspiring, isn't it?

I've been to those team meetings, alright. Another effect, is that it develops a mentality that disrupts progress. People expend at least as much time and energy deflecting the stink of blame, as they do actually accomplishing anything. And the fear of accountability hampers creativity. You end up with a group of people, whose only impetus is hanging on to their jobs, by any means.

__________________
"America, the greatest, best country that God has ever given man, on the face of the Earth"- Sean Hannity, professional broadcast journalist.

“To the contrary, has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”-Antonin Scalia

ibex

America is an empire, I know that's stating the obvious but at its core it's no different than many others throughout history. The wealth of this country raised the level of the concept of a "private life" for each American in the latter half of the twentieth century to an unparalleled degree. Millions in the third world lead lives whose main preoccupation is actual physical survival, where the threats of famine and war or entrenched caste systems are literally a matter of life and death. The wealth of this country has been a great pacifier, even for those at the very bottom of the economic ladder. It's also been a device in hiding the glaring inequalities in terms of education, health care and justice within the American class system. The whole notion of a "private life" allows us to remain transfixed on our own lives, our friendships and love relationships, our personal finances, the bits and pieces of popular culture we cling to tenaciously as part of our own identity. How many posters here know somebody who wouldn't know a political concept if it hit him in the head but suddenly got religion when gas prices began to spike upward? Just as "Romanized" citizens of the Roman Empire enjoyed a level of token personal freedom unequalled in antiquity, Americans on the "right side of the law" have more personal freedom than most of the world's population today, but it comes at a price. All empires, including this one, have a rapacious evil at the core of their being, a guaranteed self destruct switch. The good old USA is no different.

Rigged

Justice is a buzzword, it doesn't mean anything. Here's justice, I had this guy when I was working in HUD, his landlord was charging him $400 p/m for a rat infested shithole in providence, that didn't even have a bathroom. He had to share it with another family living in the house-converted- into-apts, and that is being generous. I had to breath through my mouth the whole time I was out there. SO we file the paperwork for habitability and health code violations. Demanding the landlord fumigate, and install proper facilities that the health dept requires for multifamily dwellings, get the building up to code. Ok so rather than do that, at the hearing he shows that the guy who came to us was illegal. Rather than pursue the real issue of taking it to a slumlord, panel makes some calls, guy disappears, and doesn't show up to the hearing that next week. Case gets dismissed. Nothing happens to the slumlord. We tried to bring an action against him for other violations but we couldn't get any of the tenants to come forward. They were all illegal...good old USA...they were afraid of being deported...

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It is what they want, after all: "a god to punish, not a man of their infirmity."