Disgusting

Via Digby, we have this GQ article about Abu Ghraib, and the man who blew the whistle on it.

Joe Darby, the only man in the whole sordid affair whose actions do America proud, will have to spend the rest of his life like a mob witness. What is even more disturbing is that he is being protected not from the military, but from every high testosterone dipshit in Appalachia.

Something is wrong with the spirit of America, and it's not going to go away because more people watch Benny Hinn on television. The sort of person who can hate a man for standing witness to a moral sewer like Abu Ghraib and refusing to keep his mouth shut is the sort of man who can stand witness to the crimes of fascism and remain silent.

George W. Bush's case for his own presidency in 2000 was that he would restore honor and dignity to the White House. Now, we all know that really means "no more blow jobs." There are a number of problems with this. The first is the conflation of private and public morality. Many great men are not good men, and many great men are greatly flawed. Thomas Jefferson held slaves, and had children with one of them. It is hard to imagine the relationship was exactly consensual. FDR slept around. JFK slept around. Martin Luther King Jr. slept around. This may diminish all of them in some way, but it does not mean they weren't great men, or great leaders. This foolish conflation is a part of the moral infantilizing of our culture. It is accomplished in part by the entertainment business, for sure, but it is also accomplished by organized religion, political movements, and the unhealthy logic embedded in parts of our capitalist economic order. The solution is obviously not to ban or destroy each of these, for that is absurd and would be equally unhealthy. I don't know what the solution is, but part of it is standing up to evil the way Joe Darby did.

The sickness that makes protofascist goons want to murder a moral hero is the sickness that allowed the war in Iraq to be taken on in the way it was taken on. Whether you agree that the Bush administration tried to convince America that Saddam was involved in September 11th, it is clear that his appeals, and perhaps the war itself, tapped into a dark desire among Americans for revenge, revenge for September 11th. There are a million men in this country whose frustrations with life are such that, given the right permission, they would beat a man to death with their own hands. Perhaps more than a million. Which is not to say they are criminals, or psychopaths exactly. Perhaps I'm going a little over the top. The civilians who had the most enthusiasm for the war are not necessarily sick people, but they are the next tier down in terms of bloodthirst.

Most of these men didn't know anybody in the towers, or on the airplanes, or in the Pentagon. For many of these men, or the type of man I'm talking about (and I imagine they are mostly men) September 11th and the Iraq war are an obsession and an abstraction. For these men, and those like them, the war with Iraq didn't have anything to do with Saddam, the flesh-and-blood bastard; it was about Saddam the symbol of all that is evil. Bush sent Americans to war not just by appealing to our fears (using the terrifying image of a mushroom cloud to achieve a political end) but by appealing to our hate, our brutal side. This man who claims to represent a culture of life is the same man whose governorship saw more human beings executed than any other, who presided over a bloody and unnecessary war in Iraq, the man under whose leadership our men committed atrocities in Abu Ghraib.

The conventional wisdom, and I've even seen it echoed today by Matthew Yglesias, is that Conservatives value Character and Liberals value Cleverness. You know, I value both, and I'm a proud liberal. But besides that, this is just more branding, more marketing. The fact is that the people who call themselves conservatives might value character individually, but what the conventional wisdom is saying is that they are uniquely susceptible to a specific type of appeal. They like their foreign policy macho, their morality Manichean, their economic policy social darwinist, and their theology literalist. Our discourse, on all sides, is too degraded and spectacular for character to be real. Bush, for them as for most of us, is not a person, but a Personality. What matters is that a mantra and a storyline exist to wipe away all doubt and complexity. Not all conservatives worship at the altar of Chauncy W. Gardner, but enough do that this election will be closer than it ought to be.

Again, I don't know what the solution to the sickness in this country is, but I think replacing Bush is part of it. Not because I think John Kerry is some kind of magic bullet. He's not. He's a politician, albeit a largely decent and competent one. I trust Kerry to govern as a president, not as a king. I trust him to be accountable to the American people. I trust him to work hard to work hard to solve the real problems facing our government- terrorism, a troubled energy policy, a healthcare system that doesn't work, an economy that favors the powerful to the exclusion of everyone else.

I don't know what the solution is, but I know it involves November 2nd.