Clicks: Moral Legitimacy, Serial War & Genocide

So I'm reading a Christian Science Monitor article recommended by a friend as "wonderful writing" -- A day of reckoning for Bush's 'torture' lawyers, by Ronald Sokol -- and I think, Yup, clean, clear, an excellent summary of all that's been said before many times in many places. But when he writes, "To regain its moral legitimacy, America must formally recognize that some of its official post-9/11 practices were unlawful," I have to ask what moral legitimacy is he talking about? America doan haf no moral legitimacy.

Seems to me el Senor Sokol subscribes to a notion of America the beautiful that went away long, long ago, if it ever was anything more than a myth, and it ain't comin' back. Uh ... Vietnam, anyone? Iran-Contra? Remember the Maine? Westward ho!? The belief that America has moral legitimacy was buried next to the WMDs we never found. Drowned in the claim that water boarding wasn't torture.

We live in a world of delusions. I'm no historian, and certainly not an authority on the subject, but long story short: one of those delusions began with the defeat of Shay's Rebellion in 1786. The U.S. Constitution, its virtues aside, was then written to serve the interests of a slave-owning financial elite.

Now click to David Bromwich's HuffPo article on America's addiction to "serial war," a useful term. He reminds us that the national security state as we know it requires "an enemy at all times that exceeds the citable evidence of danger at any given time." And Obama ain't gonna change that.

It is not only the vast extent and power of our standing army that stares down every motion toward reform. Nor is the cause entirely traceable to our pursuit of refined weapons and lethal technology, or the military bases with which the U.S. has encircled the globe, or the financial interests, the Halliburtons and Raytheons, the DynCorps and Blackwaters that combine against peace with demands in excess of the British East India Company at the height of its influence. There is a deeper puzzle in the relationship of the military itself to the rest of American society. For the American military now encompasses an officer class with the character and privileges of a native aristocracy, and a rank-and-file for whom the best possibilities of socialism have been realized.

The worst, too: See Kathryn Bigelow's prize-winning indie flick The Hurt Locker, which has just gone wide, and read today's New York Times frontpage feature on soldier suicides. Oh, and let's not forget all those dead Iraqis.

Remember in December, 2005, when we were talking about potential genocide in Iraq? How it could well be a part of U.S. strategy, or as one Pentagon proposal put it, the Salvador option? Here's Juan Cole writing of the death toll about a year later, in October 2006: "A careful Johns Hopkins study has estimated that between 420,000 and 790,000 Iraqis have died as a result of war and political violence since the beginning of the US invasion in March, 2003." He warned that due to conditions we created the number could reach a million "à la Cambodia or Afghanistan." Is anyone still counting?

PS: A reader writes:

Moral legitimacy... Sounds like a Bush invention along the lines of Office of Homeland Security... Office of Moral Legitimacy. "Here to keep America on the right track..." Sarah Palin would be its first secretary. "I don't want my physically disabled child to grow up in a morally disabled America," she proclaims to an audience of white people (travel expenses sponsored by Wal-Mart).... After her first big success -- the suppression of free speech ("If it's free, you get what you pay for") -- she renames her branch the National Office of Religion, Morality, and Legitimacy -- NORMAL...
August 2, 2009 10:38 AM | | Comments (0)

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on August 2, 2009 10:38 AM.

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