The past that Frank Capra helped invent. The past the seemed to ennoble America—when what we know now is that we are nothing special. People who can go either way.

Tom Englehardt provides a sobering look at Obama that is painful and important to face.

In other words, if you can’t go to court and get the punishments you want, the solution is simply to create courts jiggered in such a way (and surrounded by enough secrecy) that you’ll get the decisions you desire. If that isn’t a striking definition of American justice, I don’t know what is.

How to span the distance. How to grow up, as a nation. How to let go Memorial Day as it was—honoring these men, absolutely—and still suffer the truth: We are a country that practices torture. Not just now, but always. Exceptional servicemen and women. Unexceptional, when it comes to leaders who lie, people who buy the lie, a country that outsources our torture. How tacky, how shitty, how quintessentially American.

And we are kept busy with the toys and the demands of modern life, and who can afford the time to demonstrate nowadays, and of course this is how capitalism was supposed to work and we are indeed a nation of sheep.

Memorial Day—Baa.

Tomorrow: Noam Chomsky and the history of America and torture. Now that’s something to look forward to. No? … But it sure as hell is something we ought, if we are ever to get out of this mess, to accept.

Tags: in memoriam, obama

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