B.O.E.

Digby from Hullabaloo has a great post about the torture memo. The last sentence,

"The slippery slope to totalitarianism started in a conference room where coffee and donuts and microsoft power point presentations on torture and pain were on the agenda one morning."

just killed me.

Some of the vitriol in my last post comes from a dark sense that the vapidity and superficiality of the 24/7 TV Reagasm, the vapidity and superficiality of the Bush administration, and the terrible evil that the Bush administration has given animation to are intimately connected. That they are all emanations of the same unthinking and conscienceless miasma.

It wasn't until I read Digby's post that I realized that such a feeling wasn't complete madness. Disconnected and only semi-logical, yes, but not madness. Even this is a cliched sentiment, but we are living in times that demand seriousness and conscience and yet the forces that claim authority, ie. the press and political leaders, are terrified of that which is serious and real. They weave their unrealities until they cover everything, they build impressions over reality until it is all but invisible. In this case it took the ugly reality of these terrible (and, perhaps this is ironic, staged) photographs documenting torture to puncture this veil of pleasant fantasy.

It is deeply painful, then, to see these petty mythmakers conjure fake Reagans to obscure the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq, the by-now-obvious malfeasance of the Bush administration in several different directions, and the responsibility Bush, and, indeed, all of us, has in these. It is more than sad- deeply disturbing, in fact- to me that the great message spread at this moment is that what made Reagan a great leader, and by extension makes all leaders great, is some genial contextless optimism, some brainless American exceptionalism. It's a goddamned lie. If the road to hell is paved with anything, it is this kind sunny enthusiasm.