Out of My Mind (25 page)

In a secret CIA report by its own inspector general, some of the agency's methods of questioning prisoners were said to violate provisions of the international Convention Against Torture. Things like this make it harder for us to continue thinking of ourselves as the good guys.

There's no question we are in danger, as a nation, from terrorists, who are planning, as I write probably, to destroy some landmark buildings in the United States and kill several hundred people in the process. We need the CIA, and our operatives are working, in small, clandestine groups in more than 20 foreign countries, trying to search out potential terrorists. We approve of all that. We do not approve of the kind of torture to which we subjected prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Many Iraqi prisoners being tortured have been captives for more than a year. Is there an Iraqi so brave, so inured to pain that he would hold back secret information he had after having skin torn from his body? Other techniques designed to illicit information include “impairment of bodily function.” I hate to think what that means.

Every once in a while, it occurs to me to wonder where all the women are over there. I don't suppose Iraq has even a token group of women in uniform comparable to ours, but the Iraqis must have wives and girlfriends. Women have all but disappeared in this war. Maybe that's why it isn't nicer. We don't see many American women on the scene, either. Not since the charming Lynndie England dropped her leash.

The Bush administration said that certain restrictions on torture do not apply now because we aren't doing it in the United States. We are torturing prisoners who are not citizens of the United States in foreign countries where those international laws against torture do not apply. Does that make you proud to be an American?

I am nervous about writing so critical a piece as this about the CIA. I could end up on a list—and end up ending up.

For several years now, Americans have been busy asking each other whether we should pull out of Iraq immediately or stay and try to finish what we started. I wish I knew for sure what was right. I even wish I knew for sure what I think. If I knew, I'd state my opinion loud and clear every time the subject of Iraq came up. Unfortunately, I'm ambivalent. Sometimes I'm thinking it's idiotic for us to be there with more of our guys dying every day. The next minute, I'm thinking we're doing the right thing for the people of Iraq. Just as we saved the whole civilized world from domination by Adolf Hitler in WWII, we've saved the Middle East from domination by Saddam Hussein. Was I against WW II? No, so how could I oppose our saving the Middle East from Saddam Hussein now?

In idle moments, I've often thought that if we all had all the facts about something, we'd all come to the same conclusion.

We don't have all the facts, though, and President Bush probably doesn't, either. You'd think that as the people of the world became more civilized, war might have died out as a way of settling international disputes but it hasn't. Instead of using the advances in our technology for the purposes of peace, we've used them to produce more effective weapons capable of killing more people in a shorter time.

I argue with myself about Iraq every day. Last week, just when I thought I'd convinced myself we were doing the right thing there and should finish the job, I read the new federal budget. I saw what our government plans to spend on education in one year compared with what it will spend on what it calls “defense.” (“Defense” is the official euphemism our government uses for “war.” Years ago, some smart public relations expert arranged to have our years-old “War Department” renamed the “Defense Department.”)

The new budget called for spending $439 billion on the military in 2007 and $54 billion on education. If we are the most civilized society on earth, how can we justify spending all those billions of dollars making devices and training armies whose only purpose is to kill people?

War is an industry that makes billions of dollars for a wide variety of businesses. If our Government made all our weapons itself instead of having them made by the so-called arms industry it might eliminate the people who encourage us to fight so they'll profit.

When I was quite young, I thought I might be a pacifist. Pacifists believe that any peace is better than any war. I liked that idea, but I learned that most pacifists were impractical dreamers. It's nice of them to talk about not going to war, but then what do they do when another country attacks theirs to take land or property? Do they sit back and watch because they're pacifists, or do they abandon their ideals and pick up a rifle? The answer is, they fight, and that's why war is inevitable until human nature changes. I should live so long.

It is not clear that Iraq had any plans to take anything away from anyone, and certainly not from us. We get no sense of any civilization in Iraq from reading our daily papers or watching television but there is a great one. We don't see it because of inadequate reporting and lack of interest on our part. We don't want to know that much about Iraq. The fact is, the people of Iraq are not so different from us. They worship a different God than most Americans, or maybe it's that they worship the same God in a different language.

We have never had so conservative a President as the one we have now.

We use the word “conservative” interchangeably with “Republican,” as we do “liberal” and “Democrat.” In the past fifty years, we've had six Republican Presidents and some of them were more conservative than others. They were Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and now George W. Bush. We've had five Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton.

Even though we almost always associate the word “liberal” with Democrats and “conservative” with Republicans, the words have so many nuances of meaning that this doesn't always work. You'd think that a conservationist would be conservative, but most conservationists are liberal. Under conservationist, the dictionary says: “One who practices or advocates conservation of natural resources.” Our ultraconservative President is the last person to fit that definition. Like most conservatives, he believes we should use all the world's natural resources freely now because there's more where they came from. If that proves false, conservatives believe we'll find substitutes or ways to do without certain resources. This is not only a position that can be defended but it's also a more attractive philosophy than the spartan liberal conservationist belief that we have to reduce our consumption of natural resources or we'll ruin the Earth.

President Bush has proposed what he calls a plan for preventing forest fires by letting the lumber companies cut down more trees. He says clearing some of the forests will mean fewer fires. This is comparable to killing every other baby at birth to reduce deaths from starvation.

Most of us have our political opinions and they are seldom formed free from consideration of our own personal or financial interests. For this reason, it's a mystery why so many working people are conservative and enthusiastic supporters of a President who's best friends with their bosses. George W. Bush, the most aggressive pro–big business president
we've ever had, got a lot of votes from people who work with their hands for big corporations at an hourly wage. It's hard to understand.

Liberals are having a hard time understanding the popularity of so conservative a president and his conservative Cabinet members.

Many Bush appointees seem to liberals to have contempt for civil liberties. The Bush administration has operated on the theory that the American public would be better off not knowing the details of everything its government is doing. This is why Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed so little information to come out of Afghanistan regarding our troops' activities there.

I have the uneasy feeling that a great many Americans—the majority—agree with the conservative, secretive, pro-business philosophy of this administration. I accept it, but I'm puzzled.

Every election day we decide which politicians we're going to be complaining about for the next couple of years. Congressional representatives only serve for two years. They just get to Congress and they have to start running again, so they don't have a lot of time to pay attention to the important matters.

Running for election is a demeaning thing to do—going around telling everyone how good you are. People would laugh at us if we did that in real life.

No one says so, but I think voters and politicians have a low opinion of each other. When we call someone a politician, we aren't saying something nice. It's an epithet. We treat politicians like dirt.

Politicians don't have a high opinion of voters, either, though they never let on. There are a lot of things politicians can't be honest about. Candidates would never be elected if they didn't deceive us. For instance, politicians don't decide what they believe and vote that way. They find out what voters want and pretend that's what they want.

It's no wonder politicians are contemptuous of voters because most of the voters they meet want something from them. The voters aren't interested in what's happening to their country. They want a law passed that will help their business, or they need help getting their brother-in-law out of trouble.

That's one reason our political system doesn't work very well when it comes to international affairs. Politicians are so busy getting re-elected by sucking up to voters who have petty little problems that they don't have time for a lot of the more serious stuff.

The classic dilemma for everyone in Congress is whether to do what's right or what the voters in their district want. It doesn't seem as though politicians should ever ignore their best judgment to get in good with voters, but they do it all the time.

Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota senator who died in the plane crash, was much admired but little imitated. He was the only senator to vote against giving President Bush the authority to make war on Iraq.

A lot of Americans are put off voting because they don't think their vote counts for much in big elections. There are too many special interest groups that support politicians. Maybe they are union members, veterans, business executives, Catholics, Baptists, women or political party members. The politician has to pay attention to these people because they vote as a block.

Our political system is a mess—no doubt about it—but no other country as big as ours with so many different kinds of people has ever governed itself so successfully for so long as we have.

The success of President Bush and the Republican Party make it apparent that the people of this country are more conservative in many of their opinions about social issues, the law and the environment than they once were. Those who voted for Republican candidates this year
would not have voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt had they been of age in the 1930s.

One of the things that will have the most impact on life in the United States in the future is the conservative judges, at every level, that President Bush is appointing and which a conservative Congress seems almost certain to approve.

There have been six landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent history. “Landmark” may be a cliché term for them but I can't think of any other. They've had a profound effect on life in this country and it's interesting to consider whether or not any of them will be overturned. I'm proud of myself for having done a little homework and you might like to have your memory refreshed about these decisions. Amaze your friends by knowing these cases:

Some of those decisions would probably not have been made by a court dominated by conservatives. The one most likely to be overturned by a conservative court is Roe vs. Wade. The U.S. Supreme Court has been a noble institution, though. Over the years, it has usually done the right thing whether dominated by liberals or conservatives.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican but a very moderate conservative, appointed Earl Warren as chief justice. Warren was considered a conservative when appointed, but many of the court's most liberal decisions were made during his years in office. While there have always been members of the U.S. Supreme Court whose decisions were 100 percent predictable, over the years many more have been refreshingly independent and surprising.