One of the oldest excuses for war is that the enemy is irredeemably evil. He worships the wrong god, has the wrong skin and language, commits atrocities, and cannot be reasoned with. The long-standing tradition of making war on foreigners and converting those not killed to the proper religion "for their own good" is similar to the current practice of killing hated foreigners for the stated reason that their governments ignore women's rights. From among the rights of women encompassed by such an approach, one is missing: the right to life, as women's groups in Afghanistan have tried to explain to those who use their plight to justify the war. The believed evil of our opponents allows us to avoid counting the non-American women or men or children killed. Western media reinforce our skewed perspective with endless images of women in burqas, but they never risk offending us with pictures of women and children killed by our troops and air strikes.
The recent behavior of Congress approaches the level of clinical insanity. This is not snark. It's reality-based observation. And such observation is vitally necessary in order to not sucked into the insanity ourselves. I want to explain precisely what I mean, and I want to present some reference points, so we may appreciate how deep and long-standing this insanity is.
Otherwise, quite frankly, the French Revolution option starts to look mighty good. And we all know how badly that turned out. Just because we are ruled by an imbecilic, out-of-touch, gang of narcissistic twits does not mean we should kill them all. Actions have consequences. They may not know it, but damn sure better. And so it behooves us to find a place of sanity from which to observe, analyze, and start to correct this sea of madness that threatens to engulf us.
And make no mistake, it is a sea of madness. One that we have all been swimming in from at least 1995, when the GOP took over Congress. If we think it started with 9/11, we are deluding ourselves, and one consequence of that delusion is that we expect Beltway Democrats to recover their sanity mush faster than they are actually capable of. Of course, it's eminently reasonable to expect to be governed by people who are sane. But we have not been a reasonable nation for a very long time now.
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