"Because we're the fucking United States of America!"
Rhetoric is an art not to be dismissed. It can move mountains thought securely rooted, it can light fires best left unkindled, and it can stir up souls thought long dead. The very best rhetoric speaks the honest truth and speaks it in a way that truth passes through the ears and into the heart, moving men and women at their core and then moving them in the world. This can be accomplished through grand oratory and honeyed words, apt analogies and mellifluous metaphors. And sometimes it is best accomplished through plain speaking and straight talk.
When Jim Henley profanely reminds us all why we should not condone torture, he largely won an argument whose positions were flailing wildly past one another. Certainly, a group of hard heads, "realists" as they would have it, will continue to complain that extreme times demand extreme measures, forgetting that the present is always at the extreme of history, and that their glorious future - after just this one crisis is over - will extend into an eternity of pain.
The rest of us now have a simple and inarguable answer for them. Just look around, cock your ear and listen and you will hear the voices speaking a simple and honest truth. We will not march into that suffering future or lend it our support, because we're the fucking United States of America!
All that is best in us, as American citizens, is unleashed in our unabashed love affair with our country. American patriotism is a strange, chimeric beast, never seen in this world before. Always wandering, always searching, never fixed to a piece of ground, but eyes always gazing at the starry heavens, fixed on an idea. Remind Americans of the idea, call us back to the journey, speak the truth of what we always knew we were, speak it hard and straight, and that love will overflow.
. . .
Mr Henley has gone on to acknowledge a broader reason to oppose torture (via Cold Fury), "because we're fucking human beings", which is also true, but as an argument it does not, alas, carry all the weight of his earlier formulation. Humanity is a flag that some will gladly follow, but it is too abstract, too afloat in time and space, too broad and too shallow. Sure, I am and you are human beings, sharing so much, but so are the killers, the murderers, the bombers, the shooters, the genocidaires - and the torturers. Humanity weeps. At least, at the very, fucking, merciful least, here in the United States of America, we are not the torturers.
Fight for it.
Posted by Martial