So true

Frank Rich's latest offers this observation:

IF you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That's when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq). To prove the point, the partying journalists in the Washington Hilton ballroom could be seen (courtesy of C-Span) fawning over government potentates — in some cases the very "sources" who had fed all those fictional sightings of Saddam Hussein's W.M.D.

Colbert's routine did not kill. The Washington Post reported that it "fell flat." The Times initially did not even mention it. But to the Beltway's bafflement, Colbert's riff went viral overnight, ultimately to have a marathon run as the most popular video on iTunes. The cultural disconnect between the journalism establishment and the public it aspires to serve could not have been more vividly dramatized.

It is now rather obvious that the mainstream press in the United States no longer observes the world so that American citizens can make informed judgments about that world. The mainstream press instead issues from the institutions it is meant to observe if it conformed to its ideal. As such, the mainstream press, taken as a whole, is a mere publicity mechanism and thus a tool of elite governance; it surely is not the institutional expression of some of the capacities inherent in a democratic concept of a citizen. Its system logic is that of the market in a for-profit, elite-driven, private property economy.

‘Good people’ don’t torture

Only monsters torture others. Americans are 'good people.' They are not monsters. Therefore Americans "don't torture," as President Bush made clear. Yet the historical record is now plain and unassailable: America did use torture as an interrogation-disciplinary technique. Moreover, as Frank Rich points out,

…we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government's highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to "24"; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

And:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.

Briefly put, the United States committed crimes against humanity (torture) in order to justify one fundamental war crime (the Iraq invasion) it committed in pursuit of its imperial ends. It did not commit these crimes against humanity in defense of the Republic or American democratic institutions, such as they are. They were not acts of self-defense. Rather they were just one specific tactic used to achieve imperial ends.

But are common Americans guilty of this crime? Yes they are, in some indistinct measure. They acquire their guilt because this criminal enterprise was put into effect by a democratic government; by definition the citizens of a democratic country are implicated in the crimes committed by their government since they have the institution powers needed to install the government that committed the crimes and the powers required to remove it before or after it commits the crimes.

Phillip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram, Martin Niemöller and Hannah Arendt would not find this possibility — that normal folk commit or are complicit with these kinds of crimes — surprising. Neither malice nor indifference to suffering are uncommon properties among human beings. They are universally distributed.

Denial

Frank Rich's latest points to the possible problem generated by a collective dependence on this defensive maneuver:

One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21^st century is Americans' reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly "changed everything," slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama's toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

Indeed, a contemporary reliance upon this kind of self-stupefaction dates back to the Reagan presidency, which combined a politics that masked system decline by occluding this decline with rhetorical flourishes composed of false hope and national triumph. It is a shame that Dutch Reagan is not alive and sentient so that he might bear witness to the world he promoted by his actions and words.