Back to the Dark Ages

"If it's torture, it's not constitutional." Or so says our new Attorney General in a classic Orwellian moment, and so we may assume that if it's constitutional , it's not torture and if it's not torture , it is constitutional. Isn't the rule of law a beautiful thing? Conservative pundit Rich Lowrey took a different tack on the NewsHour and just said waterboarding seemed acceptable to him, under the right circumstances. Said circumstances to be decided by psuedo-intellectual technocrats such as himself but we can assume they are inspired by the popular show 24. He said journalists had volunteered to undergo the procedure and found it somewhat less than tortuous.( it was pointed out by Mark Shields that when you know it's just a "demonstration" it tends to be a little less terrorizing) Rich says you do what you gotta do, as the French understood in Algiers. I would actually be willing to pay good money to test old Rich's endurance, terroribility, were he willing to back up his little hypothesis. Schumer, Fienstien et al got tired of quibbling over such semantic trivia ( organ failure, Big Pain, etc) and I'm glad Poor Kurt Vonnegut did not live to see this.

So what is it about the uniform? Cops and soldiers throughout history seem so ready to enforce the power of a ruling elite from which one would think them to be totally alienated, at least in terms of identity and values. A thousand examples exist where the uniformed individuals turn on the people and the class from which they come and enforce the States will. All revolutions hinge on this crucial allegiance but what determines it's strength? Why would the Burmese military turn on their monks? Why would Pakistani soldiers lock up human rights lawyers, Latin American soldiers torture their own people in service of a junta or Chinese soldiers fire on citizens gathered n Tiennamen Square? And on and on and on.

I just finished Go By Go, a novel by local author, jazz afficionado, and culinary critic Jon Jackson wherein Frank Little's murder is finally revenged. Jackson is best known for his detective series ( Fang Mulheisen) and he does an admirable job re-creating the rough and tumble Butte of 1917. The book is dedicated "To The Workers of the World" and methinks i need to buy Jackson a beer next time I run into him and see where his sympathies lie.