I listened to most of "This American Life" on public radio today, and the whole show was taken up with 9/11 and the people held at Guantanamo. To make a long story short, most of the people originally held there were frankly not suspected of anything (certainly not charged with anything), and the five remaining inmates are suspects. They have all been subjected to torture (they're suspects, not convicts), there are legal-like activities going on, but not one of these suspects has been tried. After these many years, it looks increasingly like none of them will be tried. They're in solitary confinement, deprived of all Constitutional guarantees, and never even charged. They're just living out what's left of their lives in indefinite sentences. And this happens because the Constitution and the rights it guarantees (to you, me, and the rest of us) is set aside, and some parallel, if perverted, form of military law is allowed to take its place.
Even victims' families want justice, including the possibility of plea deals, or anything that could end this endless perversion in a way that befits what this country was supposed to be. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ("KSM"), who is considered a central suspect, and talking about this gross perversion of the "justice" for which this country is supposed to be famous, said he thinks this disturbed process will turn Americans against their own country, and the Constitutional democracy which supposedly characterizes it. As if we ourselves would adopt the contempt for this country that the 9/11 perpetrators had. KSM thinks of this as a baton the 9/11 perpetrators have handed to the rest of us. (It should be noted that one of the unanswered questions in this "This American Life" piece was why the 9/11 perpetrators committed 9/11. No one knows, and no one is making any effort to find out.)
But turning Americans against the United States was already under way, even before innocent, or even suspected, Arabs were tortured and endlessly incarcerated in Guantanamo. (We of course take a very public and very dim view of other countries that do what we're doing. Inventing wars, torture, endless punishment for no confirmed crime...)
We were unabashedly horrible to the Native Americans, whose land, system of management, and lives we took. Because they were here. We treated Africans at least as badly. But we tried, at least in part, to do better. We've continued to make our mistakes (let our antisocial leanings get manifested), with one not so good president or another, or one disruptive Congress or another. But we sort of try to recover. Ideally that should include an open admission of error, but we tend not to do that.
Although we made some breathtakingly boneheaded choices when it came to supporting anyone, no matter how terrible they were, to lead other countries, as long as they said they weren't Communists.
It's hard to tell when things began to deteriorate in a more unretractable way. LBJ, for whatever social and "Great Society" good he did, prosecuted a Vietnam war he never made a real effort to "win." Or end. And he was a very manipulative, if not obnoxious, person. But the American avalanche wasn't obvious at that point. It became somewhat clearer with Nixon, who was on the verge of being impeached, because he didn't care about the Constitution. Although as far as I can tell, he had seemingly significant, if not severe, personal problems, including a dangerous level of paranoia. But the country, under the reassurance of a Congress that was still functional, pulled together, made it clear to Nixon that his behavior was criminal, and he resigned, because he had the sense and perspective, at least, to know he would be impeached. By members of both major parties, who cared more about propriety than they did about party.
Ford called an end to this, by pardoning Nixon. There were many people then, and possibly many people now, who agree that the country should not have been dragged through the mud of a Nixon impeachment. But there's an increasingly nagging sense that this was a dangerous concession that allowed people not to expect a proper course of action when wrong is done. Especially when wrong is done by people in power.
Ford's term was otherwise uneventful, if empty and aimless, and Carter was, as best I can tell, the best human being ever to inhabit the White House. But he was a good and nice guy, and apart from negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel, he doesn't seem to have inspired many people.
And then came Reagan. For me, this is where things started to fall apart. Reagan was dishonest and manipulative (money does not "trickle down;" it trickles up, and when you let that happen, and lower taxes, you're going to get a deficit, as we later learned, after Reagan and his sleight of hand were gone), but he was an actor and had ways to charm people. But he had a slogan: "government is the problem." I wonder what it would be like if he could have been transported back in time, so he could tell the Revolutionaries, who fought and died to create this country and its generally revered Constitution, and who were in part represented by Benjamin Franklin, who said the Founding Fathers were "giving [us] a republic, if[we] could keep it," that the republic they established was the problem. They gave us a Constitutional republic, which we spent almost 200 more years improving and perfecting, and Reagan declared that republic to be the problem. In fact, the whole Republican Party seems to have adopted that view. Ah, to be a fly on the wall, when they explain to the Founders how completely wrong they got it.
The Clinton years were relatively quiet, with Clinton's trademark cheerleading, and his personal/marital mess, but he replaced the large deficit with which Reagan left us with a surplus.
I still say Reagan was the start of the avalanche, but if anyone thinks he wasn't, then Cheney/W most certainly were. (Please watch Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11.") As I said no one really knows what 9/11 was about (if you think you do, then call "This American Life," and tell them; they very much want to know), but it created an opportunity that fell into the laps of Cheney and W. They totally invented a war against a country that was in way involved, got loads of Iraqis and Americans killed, created nice contracts for Cheney's former company, paralyzed Congress so that few members were willing to point out that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, and got Cheney and W re-elected. And Cheney and W hit upon a scheme that had never occurred to any other country in the history of civilization: start a war, and lower taxes. There was nothing rational going on in this country any more. And of course, the table was set when W got himself elected in the first place by cheating, with the help of his cousin, his brother, and a sympathetic Supreme Court. Cheating has of course now become the byword of a certain faction, who either cheat to win, or if they don't win, they accuse, with zero evidence, the other side of cheating.
And then came Obama, whose term was feel-good for some (he got elected twice, so I guess a lot of people felt good), but he didn't do what he should have done. He didn't do a proper job of creating universal health care, or a few other things, because -- and he admits this -- he was trying to be conciliatory to people who were never going to like him no matter what he did. And although everyone complained about the Cheney/W deficit, which was attributed to Obama from the first day he got into office, he did not raise taxes, as he should have done. So, whoever wanted to feel good about Obama felt good for as long as they could, while the invented war continued, the deficit grew, and too many Americans still didn't have adequate access to "health care."
Hillary Clinton would probably not have been a great president, but she mishandled her campaign, and thanks to the distortion created by the Electoral College, Trump won, as W had in his first election. There's a quote from H.L.Mencken that goes "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." I would have said that "great and glorious day," which lasted eight years, was the Cheney/W years. Nope. It is without any question Trump. Although most voters didn't want him in 2016, an even higher proportion didn't want him in 2020. But bizarrely, and unspeakably, he got more votes in 2020, when he had spent four years making unmistakably clear that he was an inveterate liar, a moron, and interested only in himself, than he got in 2016, when he only gave us abundant reason to suspect it.
Biden has been a bit of a mess, doing some things right (mostly reversing some of Trump's policies) and way too many things wrong. His biggest asset is that he's not Trump. Helluva resume.
So, as I said, I think KSM was giving 9/11 too much credit for turning Americans against America. We had already abandoned our spirit and our mission, and we've given ourselves many more, and more glaring, reasons to take an increasingly dim view of ourselves. Reagan and Republicans are very direct about it: "[American] government is the problem." (I really do wish I could hear them explain that to Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and many others. I know people who won't eat beef or pork, but they'll eat fish and fowl. I say the same thing to them: I want to be there when they explain to the fish and the chickens why cows and pigs are meat, and they -- the fish and chickens -- aren't. I want to know how convincing that sounds.)
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