“We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening.” -Radiohead, “Idioteque”
If you have not read Parts One and Two on Vice President Cheney in The Washington Post, it is must read material, perhaps the most important news story of our times.
Before I talk about the article, a conceptual premise: It is an essential feature of free society, though many have forgotten, that the true way to maximize the collective interests of a nation and to maximize the interests of the self is through self-limitation. The checks and balances of government, the submission to law, the formation of community morals, are all, in the proper dosage, guides that promote our general well-being and allow us to proceed forward in the environment where we are most likely to use our judgment and less likely to act on passion. When our passions swallow our judgments whole, we have pursued what we believe to be in our interest all the way to our own demise. We know this in thought from as far back as Plato’s Republic, and we know it from everyday life when we see the drug addict, the dictator, the party loyalist, and we even see it in ourselves when we do something as simple as say something out of hurt feelings that we do not mean. A reduction in our capacity to self-limit, in short, is a route that leads to not to unlimited freedom but to tyranny and slavery, to be ruled by that which should not rule alone, either in the state or in the self.
This is what underscores the significance of the reporting on the Vice President’s activities in the White House. It is clear from the story that the Abu Gharib abuses came from orders initiated knowingly and willingly by the Vice President of the United States, though American soldiers had to do the prison time for it. It is now clear that when Congress or the Supreme Court has rebuked the White House for a policy that oversteps the bounds of their office, they search for the legalistic loophole to keep doing it anyway, and they do so in total secrecy.
But perhaps most galling of all in the story is the Vice President’s “principled single-mindedness of purpose.” For all of the principled unwavering that the Vice President does, it is quite noticeable what competing principles he must sacrifice along the way to do so. He sacrificed his beliefs on how information ought to reach the President of the United States that he told James A. Baker III all the way back in 1980. He sacrificed the principle of accountability by recently declaring his office beyond the scope of practically any oversight besides the President of the United States. He had the Military Commissions Act changed so that his own branch of government is the legally prescribed arbiter on what counts as “torture” or not. He even, in pursuing his principles, abandoned the idea of principle itself. How else can one explain such patently relativist statements like the one Cheney made “in an interview with ABC’s ‘Nightline’ on Dec. 18, 2005, saying that ‘what shocks the conscience’ is to some extent ‘in the eye of the beholder.’”
And for what higher principle did the Vice President sacrifice al of these competing interests? Nothing more than the unfettered ability to use the full power at his command to take however many people he chooses from anywhere on the Earth and to do with them whatever he pleases. He is not a leader of a democratic government, nor is he, as many have indicated, a shadow despot. He is an agent. He is our own nightmarish O’Brien, fully confident that the end of power is to use power, unconcerned about restraint in applying the doctrine, happy to engage in torture, eager to convince us all that reality does not exist outside of the party, and all too eager to plow over reality to justify his actions like as Hannah Arendt once wrote about McNamara and the Whiz Kids, “the murderer who says that Mrs. Smith is dead and then goes and kills her.”
There are, as we now know, absolutely no words, no real reasons that can defend such actions by the state, which is why the state has worked so hard to wage a grueling campaign against truth in the combination of assaulting and limiting publicly available information and by attacking the validity that there is even such a thing as reality out there in the first place by constantly redefining the obvious into the contestable. They have limited the appearances of their political violence, and in so doing, have only to win the battle of abstracts, feeding imaginations that want to hope to believe in their good intentions and praying upon the imagination, hope, and good will of a people who cannot see for themselves. They have built an empire of dreams for us to believe in, and hopefully now, even this visage has faded. So much the better. The experiences we have come to hold as true about an external reality that seems, for all intents and purposes, quite real, has taught us that any state that operates on the principles that this White House believes in, had best be be dreaming, because its application leads unfailingly to despair.
Posted by stevenmaloney 
Posted by stevenmaloney 
Posted by stevenmaloney 
