Why Are We Shocked?

The conduct of U.S. service personnel in Abu Ghraib should not shock anyone. This is not some anomaly, some aberration, it is standard issue human. Americans have held a higher image of themselves than is deserved. The American record of treatment of their fellowman is not the paragon that the American believes that it is, or wants it to be. Our high ideals are nothing more than some abstract thought. From Andersonville to throwing V.C. suspects out of helicopters in Nam, we have tended towards maltreatment of prisoners. That should not be so surprising when you think of the maltreatment inflicted within the American prisons. In case you have forgotten, the film Brubaker depicts that very well.

Regardless of how many times Bush uses the term “compassionate,” neither him, nor his party, nor the American public at large are compassionate. The average American will watch a fellow citizen starve in the gutter or under the interstate bridge rather than fund a program that might feed him.

So, this charade of shock is just so much hierocracy. Action speak tons, while abstract ideals are simply empty words chiseled finely into cold impersonal blocks of granite.

and others. It seems to me that people like them believe only law-abiding, God-fearing Americans have the right to be treated humanely and all others, especially darker-skinned foreigners, can be treated worse than animals.

there are no icebergs. The media and the people and even top Dems keep repeating the mantra as a new gash groans into the ship of state.

If this is a shocker why not consider the likelihood that this squelched repressed leakage is just the tip, that in fact there are quite a few tips of icebergs lately in the seas Bush has been sailing us into.

Sack the captain. Change course!

has warned us, there is much more to come...

America is better. Our society is free and pure and bursting with the goodness of joy and light. It's only a few bad apples that cause us to have the highest incarceration rate on earth and the greatest per capita gun deaths. We're good and more religious than any other industrialized nation.

We went to save the little brown wogs from wicked persecution and bring them oodles of sweet, sweet democracy; we simply can't be bad.

And lo and behold: we aren't. It's just a few bad ones. It's just another convenient "them" to keep us safe and warm in our happy "us-ness". Think of it as a "mini-them".

We really do think we're better.

So did the Confederates.

So did the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese.

So do Fundamentalists.

Fucked.



Utterly fucked.

And in addition: why does this outrage us so much, and yet hundreds of dead innocents in Fallujah is just a statistic?

Why is Lynndie hated more than a pilot who fires a missile into a neighborhood?

More than 10,000 dead civilians.

Don't get me wrong, this scandal does sicken me. But to be honest, I've been so sickened so often in the last year that this is a little hard to feel.

"... that this is a little hard to feel."

I think that about sums up what a lot of us feel.

People I know are sooo outraged over the possibility of the draft being reinstated that they're thining of voting for Kerry, but thousands of innocent people die and it doesn't matter? So selfish.

About 25 years ago, there was a big Chicago Police Department scandal in which cops were hauling women stopped for minor traffic violations into the station, strip searching them and their "body cavities". (Not me.) If cops can do things like that for running a red light, who knows what else people with authority might do.

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i imagine that a lot of people at du, for example were'nt ''shocked'' -- outraged perhaps.
or their worst nightmares came true.
but i can imagine that for many -- the torture and abuse are par for the course when the military and politics become as closely aligned as they are now.


i'll apologise in advance for using the old punchline.

America has a long history of abusing other people and of torture directly or indirectly. Stark examples are how Black Americans, Chinese and Mexicans have been treated and how Vietnamese people were treated. This holier than thou crap that W spews is either delusional or plain political mumblings.

The photos are disgusting and the real behavior is depraved yet the real story is of the heavier torture that is systematic that will have no photos.

we're all softened up on luxury and loud noises and shiny light shows and prozac and liquor and weed and meth and technocommercialoverkill.

inhumanity goes all the way back to the beginnings of humankind.

some awful shit happens when you go and have a war. most americans don't know war. the folks in iraq and afghanistan know war quite well, and they are outraged by the photos, but not shocked.