Torture

I'm old enough to remember when the Pentagon Papers were sold at the checkout counter in supermarkets in a paperback edition published by the New York Times.

It was a great time to be an American, just before expiration dates were stamped on every bag of Cheetos and the Watergate break-ins.

Elected officials and other public servants were required to lie to Congress, they had no choice. Those who told the biggest lies were called patriots; career bureaucrats told the little white minor lies, often to shield the patriots from any criminal prosecution, which was sometimes threatened though never forthcoming.

The art of the official governmental lie has now been perfected: to keep up the façade of an open society while covertly operating a secret government, with the purpose of protecting its citizens from harm, should anyone question the governmental purpose. This requires great skill in both transparency and deception, so that a patriot often has to say one thing and do another, a kind of torture in its own right.

The lies of the state are a particular form of hubris in which one leader can say, "we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us,"--words that in themselves recreate the atmosphere in which torture is thought to be necessary--and another can say that what most certainly happened never happened.