CONQUERORS OF FEAR, IN THEIR OWN MINDS

I'd like to be able to say that you can't help but be moved by "Gitmo Is Killing Me," an op-ed in The New York Times today by a Guantanamo prisoner who's no longer deemed to be a threat to the U.S., but is still being held -- he's been there eleven years -- and is now being force-fed because he's on a hunger strike. I'd like to be able to say that, but most Americans still think Guantanamo is full of the most evil and powerful people in the universe, so there's not much reason to think that the op-ed's message will penetrate.

BooMan calls this cowardice:

It's a credit to our country that a detainee can get himself heard in the pages of the New York Times. But a truly decent country would do something about it. We don't. We don't because we have too many cowards in office. We have too many cowards in office because too many of us are cowards.

I am ashamed of you. I am ashamed that we are so afraid that we will tolerate injustice on a massive scale just to avoid having to feel any small pang of fear.

I don't think it's fear, exactly. I think it's wish fulfillment.

A lot of us want to believe that we're the heroes of our own life stories. We like the idea that the nastiest people in the universe Hate Us For Our Freedoms and would destroy us and our families and friends and neighbors -- the entire country, really -- if we let them return to where they came from, or even if we locked them in exactly the same kinds of supermax prisons where, as Jon Stewart put it, we successfully incarcerate brain eaters and other psycho killers born in the USA.

We like the idea that supervillains with superpowers hate us and want to kill us -- and that we've struck back by neutralizing their superpowers. This is about us. This is a story that makes us feel powerful. This story makes us feel we're not ordinary schlubs -- we're the heroes of our own summer tentpole movie.

The Bush adminisatration and the right-wing media cultivated this feeling. To some extent, the Obama administration still does. They've turned us into a nation of overgrown eight-year-old boys. That's why we can't close Gitmo.