Buffy Anne Summers, aka

The days in George W. Bush’s and Richard Cheney’s vision of the US-of-A seemed dreamlike, tenuous — an unhinged nightmare experienced in bits and pieces.  They were days of disconnected moments blowing about like scraps in a chill wind, a wind that whispered strange neocon-certified buzz phrases in our ears with an icy tongue.

But the nights were worse.  Infinitely worse.

For with the darkness came a fog of black uncertainty that settled over our sleep.

The message of torture and surveillance without oversight was clear enough.

They wanted — in fact they still want — this to be our prison.

The whole damn country.

And sometimes when I would awake in a sweat before dawn, it would occur to me that the highest offices of my government were staffed with flesh-hungering ghouls and soul-thirsting vampires.

Writers, by their nature, tend often to think in symbols, sometimes to our detriment, but I don’t suppose there’s any point to having yet another blog unless occasionally one is going to say something most of the rest of the media universe won’t, and I’ve been asking myself lately whether the use of torture by the Bush administration might not have had a deeper meaning, i.e., what might torture be a symbol of? Or, ‘of what might torture be a symbol,’ if you prefer the pedantic.

So I read and I watch and I pay attention and I think. I put two and two together, and what torture seems symbolic of is an effort on the part of some to be altogether rid of modernity. Or progress, as some like to call it.

If one spends a few hours researching the subject, one will discover that many of the same people who support torture and who wholeheartedly supported the Bush presidency are also against teaching evolutionary biology in our schools, and against equal treatment under the law for women and minorities, and against separating religion from government.

So I think maybe torture, and just about everything else about the Bush administration, was just a practice run.

Whether or not these practices were ever about catching terrorists or getting information, they know one of their side-effects can be to intimidate critics and quiet dissent.

If they can get us to accept torture, and even more to the point, if the rest of us have now become so spineless as to let them get away with it, they’ll be back for more, back to roll back the centuries one by one until one and only one interpretation of a two-thousand year-old religious text rules in this country.

If they prevail, I wonder if they’ll outlaw music the way the Taliban did in Afghanistan?

Most of the time all Buffy and her friends had to do was find and slay the monsters. For you and me, it’s a tad more complicated than that.

If you haven’t called or faxed or written your representatives in Washington lately, please do. Demand full accountability. Anything less diminishes us all.

 

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