"It's not the information, it's the politics …

...It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary."

So says Mark Danner, a professor at Berkeley's Journalism School and the author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror" (a book that he managed to publish seemingly within months of those grinning, sickening photos). He's talking about what went on in El Salvador with its U.S. funded death squads, but he's also applying it to the current administration It's a perfect summary of why we have a rage-inducing disconnect (on both sides) between the reality-based communities on the coast and the horseshit-relishing Red Staters. We scream "Lies!" and they scream back "Politics!" And we're both right.

[Warning: Full-throttle rant ahead.]

Danner has always seemed an opportunist to me in person, someone motivated not only by truth but equally by the acclaim awarded to those who uncover the truth, but I realized after reading this interview by TomDispatch's Tom Engelhardt that I was wrong. Sure, he likes the spotlight, leading packed Zellerbach Hall in questions for Robert McNamara or debating Christopher Hitchens, that shape-shifting snake charmer, but that's not what drives him. He's an idealist, a moralist who believes that America Should Not Be Doing These Things -- torturing people, assassinating leaders, wiretapping its citizens, the whole bucket of creepy crawly Bill of Rights-eating worms. And neither do I.

Which is why it's been a rough week for my required reading. Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker about Alberto Mora, the Navy's top legal counsel, the one guy who tried to stop the authorization of systematic torture of suspected terror suspects being held in the no-man's-land at Guantanamo, who had access to the highest levels and yet was blithely, smugly circumvented by Rumsfeld's second-in-command -- this pissed me off so royally that I had to go hit the heavy bag in the studio for at least 10 minutes, all the while imagining John Yoo's face.

John Yoo, incidentally, is also a professor at Berkeley. I have never met or interviewed him. As I hit the punching bag I fantasized alternately between being the one to break him in an interview -- not by inflicting pain but by leading him gently and inescapably to the understanding that he had not only failed to stop America's enemies, he had created more and caused America's defenders to doubt themselves -- and spitting on him. Me, spitting on him. I have never hawked a loogey at anyone in my life, but that is the impulse I feel most vividly toward this placid, bland law professor.

I'm lazy. Here's Jane Mayer describing why Yoo is spittle worthy:

Yoo "…had helped to formulate the argument that the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, unlike that of all other foreign enemies, was not covered by the Geneva conventions; Yoo had also helped to write the Torture Memo. Before joining the Administration, Yoo, a graduate of Yale Law School, had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and taught law at Berkeley. Like many conservative legal scholars, he was skeptical of international law, and believed that liberal congressional overreaction to the Vietnam War and Watergate had weakened the Presidency, the C.I.A., and the military. However, Yoo took these arguments further than most. Constitutional scholars generally agreed that the founders had purposefully divided the power to wage war between Congress and the executive branch; Yoo believed that the President's role as Commander-in-Chief gave him virtually unlimited authority to decide whether America should respond militarily to a terror attack, and, if so, what kind of force to use. “Those decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make,” he wrote in a law article.

So the main thrust of the New Yorker article, which should have been heartening -- at least there were some high-level people in NCIS and the Navy who thought, hey, the Geneva Conventions protect our soldiers too, once we throw them out and let the president do whatever he wants just because we're at war, we might as well be living under SADDAM HUSSEIN for fucksakes. Mora, the guy who tried to point this out, is the son of a Hungarian and a Cuban. As he says, people who went through the brutal crushing of the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary and fascism in Cuba, among other things, "tend to have very strong views about the rule of law, totalitarianism, and America." As in, We Don't Do That.

But we do. Or rather, our leaders and their minions do. As a populace we have become so inured to the moral corruption of our government -- putative Christians loving thy neighbor as long as Mr. Neighbor is rich, white, and heterosexual, toasting each other with crude oil and the genocidal blood of countries we could never be bothered to "let freedom ring in" because there's no spoils there for us, nothing at stake.

(I'm getting myself so worked up again that if I weren't completely clogged with a cold, I'd have to go out and punch the bag some more.)

Anyway, as Mark Danner says, America now bears more than a sneering resemblance to Eastern Europe in the 1950s and '60s, "in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it." We feel powerless. The cancer is so deep, so rotten, that you think, how can I possibly do one-hundredth of what John Kerry and Paul Krugman and Jimmy Carter have tried and failed to do -- to wake up this country?

I believe Americans are narcotized by our wealth and choices of entertainment. We are so obsessed with surfaces, with celebrities and consumer culture, that we are easily manipulated by someone who seems -- seems being all that is necessary -- tough, honest, and with moral certainty.

Which brings me to Required Reading No. 3, Frances Fukuyama's dense, overtly dull but actually fascinating cover essay in last week's NY Times Magazine, "After Neoconservatism." (Really, this essay was a riveting page turner. I felt like someone took my tiny peanut-brain up to 30,000 feet and said, Look down, you can see all the funny little patterns the ants are scratching in history's dirt.) Once upon a time, Fukuyama or "Fuke Yo Mama," as I like to call him, was a card-carrying neoconservative. (Alas, his card did not have his nickname.) And then he saw the light, and the light was, oops! neocons are actually more Leninists than Trotskyites. They forgot that social engineering does not mix with the transformational uses of power, and they thought they could cram democracy down Iraq's throat and it would sit up and beg for more. In the words of my boy Frances:

They believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

Go, Frances, go! Among other things, he makes a persuasive case that Iraq may finally bring those pesky neocommies to their knees. Good ole boys did not mind going off to war when it meant saving Mom, Sis, and Apple Pie from dirty bombs. They're a little less keen when the project gets shifted around to bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East so that eventually, the world can be a better place and some daisies will grow in the desert. Say what? Fukuyama says, and I think he is correct, that "Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society." Or to people who really like watching American Idol and believe that their government is only spying on and torturing the bad guys, not just Ahmed from the corner store who sells phone cards for Egypt.

So, I close this endless rant, which I seriously doubt anyone has bothered to read all the way to here -- I wouldn't, but I'm writing this for my peace of mind, not yours, because if I don't these feelings of impotent rage will plague me all night long-- I'm going to wrap up with some inspirational words from Mr. Danner.

It's a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don't believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don't believe that.


There are two borderline dangers here. One is to go off into a state of political debility in which you think that none of this matters. To hell with politics, let's try to live our lives. And that's a very natural response, to kind of bow out of political engagement, but I think that would be very wrong and very harmful. The other risk is to equal the administration in their exaggerations and their distortions, in their stunning lack of fidelity to what is happening. To exaggerate, to overstate, to alter the truth in the cause of a political goal -- this, I think, is very tempting ... very tempting. When you see Fox News existing as it does, you want something of the same on the other side. But I don't think that's my job and I'm glad it's not the job of a lot of writers and journalists out there.

So, that's what motivated this rant in the first place. I can't just avoid reading this stuff while I moon over whether I will ever finish my "romantic comedy slash family drama" of a novel. We have to engage. However small that engagement is, we have to do it. For me, it's continuing to get the thoughts and observations and oratorical fire of the Berkeley peeps out there into the world, where others can blog them and print them to pass around and get fired up.