Repeating History: Once More, Without Feeling

Hey, remember the 80s?

I came of age during the Reagan era, at the tail end of the Cold War. The world seemed to be teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation. War Games came out when I was in high school, as did the TV movie The Day After; and also there was that wishful scene in Superman IV when Christopher Reeve rounded up all the world's nuclear weapons and threw them into the sun - dreadful movie, but a nice bit of insight into what was never far from the front of the pop-culture mind. I went to high school (in the Deep South, of course) with kids who freely tossed around such jingoistic phrases as "Better dead than red!" and I used to have regularly recurring, vivid nightmares about mushroom clouds. How close we actually were to going up in one horrible blinding flash, I don't know; but it seemed very real at the time, and was a terrifying possibility to grow up with.

Without belittling the tragedy that was 9/11, it wasn't on the same scale as the eradication of all life on Earth except cockroaches. So I am just not buying the Bush admin's ongoing use of the "terrorist threat" to justify the abandonment of many of the central values that define a civilized nation. If they were really concerned with preventing the loss of innocent life, they'd have given more of a shit about Hurricane Katrina (whose effects are after all far from over). I don't go as far as believing conspiracy theories that involve the Bush admin in the 9/11 attacks; but I don't doubt that they consider it in retrospect to have been, on balance, a positive event, of tremendous use to them in acquiring unprecedented amounts of power.

In the aftermath of Katrina, Kanye West famously remarked that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." I never understood why that statement was controversial, except in that he probably could have left off the racial qualifier - Bush's racism, I think, is off-handed; he probably never met a black billionaire he didn't like.

I've been disgusted by one thing after another this administration has done. Illegal wiretapping, racial profiling (sure, why don't we go ahead and just notify any prospective terrorists what they should look like in order not to be screened carefully?!), indefinite detainment without charge of thousands and thousands of people, massive human rights violations, instigating a war of aggression on a sovereign nation and destabilizing it to the point of civil war - and worst, most horrible of all, the callous, cynical insincerity behind it - the fact that people are suffering and dying on such a massive scale, not for any real cause, but as a political marketing ploy gotten insanely out of hand, while those in power are almost outright stating that a vote for change is an act of subversion.

All that said, I can't believe - absolutely cannot believe - that the Geneva Convention is now under attack. I wonder if it has the same symbolic significance to most other people? Because, to me, it comes down to what differentiates a civilized force (even one involved in wrongful action) from the Gestapo. I really had thought it was above question - even to a moderately sociopathic ruler, self-interest alone would dictate holding to the rules established by a community of civilized nations, or at least trying to appear to. But I am coming to believe that our current leadership is not just moderately sociopathic. They're greedy, grasping, completely lacking in empathy or any sense of accountability or consequences, and drifting increasingly out of touch with what most people agree to be reality. Come to think of it, they're acting startlingly like people who are coked out of their minds.

Remember the 80s...??