Over the last couple weeks I've been mulling over, once again, my identity as an American. It came to a head today across two separate incidents. The first came on the thing that owns my soul, Facebook. I went around people surfing, when I do when I feel like burning time, and found some girl who happened to be terribly cute. Her political orientation of 'Conservative' was a warning sign, but in itself nothing to panic about. Plenty of very smart, good-natured people happen to have rational conservative beliefs. But then in her 'about me' profile, she let loose a liberals-be-damned rant about her waiting on various liberals to get up and leave the country, making good on vows sworn last November. I hate it when stupid people taunt others. Upon finding this text on the screen, my mouse cursor jumped up and ran as far away on the screen as possible, ending up hiding in the safe haven of the clock and hoping that the carpal-tunnel-ridden idiot guiding him wouldn't take aim at the 'Poke Her!' button and pull the trigger.
But she did at least have a point. Hell, even Bill Maher made it a New Rule not to talk about leaving the country unless you had someone to take over, or worked for Halliburton.
The second incident came during the other thing that owns my soul, my law class. This week's section was devoted to the formerly-secret torture memos, and while most of it was so dense I won't absorb it for another week or two, it became very easy to establish that no matter who you blame for Abu Ghraib, it really came down to Rumsfeld being a bastard by instigating secret operations and hijacking the good work the FBI was doing of interrogating the detainees who are actually useful.
People who I talk to encourage me to do something about it, to grow up and take on their successors face-to-face. I have no doubt I could do it, but why? Why defend a people who didn't overwhelmingly disapprove of the perpetrator of all this last November? Why defend a people who tolerate an administration that does these things? Why defend a people who are insultingly stupid, greedy and fat (all things which go hand-in-hand, if you think about it). Given my language skills, my newfound enjoyment of going international and my love of Spanish women, I seem like a perfectly good candidate to make good on his pledge to get the hell out.
But I found a stumbling block in the course of my law reading. John McCain introduced a bill to regulate the interrogations and force them to follow an Army field manual that's already existing, conforming to international law and according to interrogators, very sufficient to get the job done, all the while being humane to detainees. All of his well-reasoned supporting points (such as the worthlessness of information gained from torture, as it makes detainees desperate to tell interrogators what they want to hear instead of actual intelligence) took a backseat to his main point: that it's just not the American way to torture detainees. It's not the American example to set for the rest of the world.
And that's just it. Like it or not, the world still turns to this land of idiots for guidance when really big questions turn up. We may be miserable wrecks in solving our own disasters, but when the tsunami hit South Asia last year the whole world turned to the US, threw their arms in the air and screamed 'what do we do?!' - and sure enough, we showed up to help.
So while it seems like it's in my interest to get out of the country, and soon, it's actually hurting me in the long run. Because my leaving just empowers the idiots to set an even worse example, which the rest of the world will ultimately end up following when disaster strikes, or the next major war starts. And that adversely affects the people I admire: the skinny, decently-educated, happy-with-what-they've-got people of the rest of the world. Namely, Spanish women. So, much to my own chagrin, I guess I'll have to stay here and take the advice that the elders give me and take these bastards down. Because if we don't, then the world will have to choose in following our example, or the Chinese. And as we all know, that's clearly not in American interests.
