What’s the Matter with America?

So seems to ask the Bradenton Herald in an opinion piece that ran yesterday:

Why is the American public so apathetic about the Downing Street Memo?

A nation that just a few years ago was obsessed with fudging over sexual trysts by one president seems unconcerned about evidence of lying by another to justify a war that has cost the lives of more than 1,700 American service members, killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

Like a 2,000-pound elephant in the room that everyone tries to ignore, the Downing Street Memo will stay until it is acknowledged and dealt with. It will not go away without a thorough congressional investigation.

Damn. You know, I say that kind of shit all the time, but it’s been a helluva long while since I’ve seen it in a newspaper.

[Bush and Blair] must be made to provide answers. This is not some political maneuver that can be swept under the rug. Indeed, Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal pales in comparison to massive deception to launch a war.

In the '90s we spent more than $60 million for a special prosecutor to spend years trying to dig up evidence of wrongdoing by President Clinton - wrongdoing about sexual trysts with women and a penny-ante land deal in Arkansas. Conservatives were outraged at Clinton's semantical acrobatics and his ultimate lie about whether he had sex "with that woman."

Here we have a war in which thousands are dying and being maimed, and a top-secret document that says evidence was "fixed" to justify it. It's not quite as definitive as a tape recording with the president's own voice, which Watergate produced, but it is definitely a smoking gun loaded with fingerprints.

Why is there so little interest in it being investigated?

It seems as though there are people who so thoroughly bought into the shockingly disingenuous, but immensely popular, line that only Bush supporters were patriots, that they have no idea what to do, now that Bush is being proved a liar and his policies abject disasters. They are the foolish nationalists who regard the nation-state in the same way they view race—not as an arbitrary destiny, but as a birthright, conferring upon them a superiority which they have done nothing to earn or deserve. They are Americans first; humans second.

A blundered priority, that. We are all humans first—and that sameness must supersede the identities and borders of kingdom or republic which divide us. When your flag is more important than your flesh and your blood, irrespective of circumstance, you have crossed a threshold that will inevitably lead to ruin.

Soldiers, those who lay their lives on the line for the good of their country, are sent to do a job when the citizens of that country are imperiled. This job, the job of war, should be a last resort, when diplomacy fails and the only other option is leaving your people to death and destruction at the hands of another nation. It is, despite such tendencies otherwise, nothing to celebrate. A soldier marching to war is a grim sight; he must kill or be killed, and if it is the latter, he must be not be hidden from public view, lest he temper our thrill of war, but instead held out as a reminder of what we have lost, what was given on our collective behalf.

I did not support this war, but I can understand those who did. I would not hold against anyone the decision to support the Iraq War—many people were caught up in the fervor, or were scared, or were resigned to its inevitability. Many people more believed quite genuinely that the war was a necessity. And why wouldn’t they? Their president told them it was. So did their vice president, the cabinet, and the entirety of Congress, including the opposition party. Their media gave scant notice to those who voiced dissent.

But now there is evidence that our country was led to war on lies—an intricately spun web of deceit that extended even beyond our shores, our borders. Many of those who once supported the war now see its folly; their have put their humanness before an unquestioning patriotism, demanding answers and accountability. Where, though, are the rest? Where are the rest of the nearly 80% of Americans who supported this war?

Still busily defending its architects.

Those who see themselves as Americans first and foremost value nothing more dearly than their imaginary construct of America’s infallibility. Nothing America does is wrong, nor those who wrap themselves in her flag, even as they perpetrate the most dastardly of deeds, the most bitter of betrayals. They ignore America’s (and Americans’) missteps, and claim to support the troops simply by celebrating their deployment—disregarding completely the value of questioning whether they should have been put in harm’s way in the first place.

Many of them know the information revealed in the Downing Street Documents is correct. They simply don’t care. An investigation would mean that they might have to acknowledge their über-patriot president had done something wrong, that America had perhaps done something wrong, and that they themselves had been wrong.

And they care more to be right than to be just.