Friday, July 17, 2009

Precious Freedom

Sometimes our better selves guide the pen, even if our real thoughts are opposed to the written words.

If the white, property-owning men who founded this country did not actually believe blacks, women and working people should be equal to them, at least the words they wrote belied their presumed assumptions. You cannot print words about the universal rights of man and hope readers will forever understand man was really meant to be limited to a racial subset of men or one economic class. It is also hard to read those words and think the entitlements to life, liberty and happiness stop at national borders. Maybe they wanted freedom to become more common than even they themselves could support in their own time.

It wastes time arguing what people may have thought, then. Now, we believe freedom is universal no matter what was in our founders’ hearts.

“America will remain strong and united, but its strength will remain dedicated to the safety and sanity of the entire family of man, as well as to our own precious freedom,” said President Gerald Ford upon taking the oath of office (more famous for its “long national nightmare” sentence).

The language used in our political discourse matters. We may not live up to our words at any given moment. Few among us are so constant. Yet it is wise and practical to include the soaring rhetoric of freedom into our laws and official documents. If our fidelity to freedom slips today, at least the language will exist to give subsequent generations a chance to put into practice our self-evident ideals. Weakening freedom’s words puts us at risk of becoming political atheists, or those who do not believe in the people’s right to govern. Political atheists do not believe in universal rights. They frequently use the practical concerns of the moment to undermine our system of government.

These are the stakes in the current debate on what torture means. A few crazies believe we should allow all forms of torture. Most of us do not. It is un-American.

Torture has been used by every military force and national power since the beginning of civilization. Of course America has practiced torture and is using it now. The only people who seem not to know this are those who have been lucky enough to stay out of war or out of prison. Anti-torture language or laws have never stopped the practice. That is not the point.

It is still wrong to torture people and our laws must make all forms of illegal, no matter what we currently believe is practical. We will fall short of our ideals, who does not? The worse alternative is if we fail to embody those ideals in the language of our law. Then, we risk a greater danger of losing those ideals forever in the dilution of the moment.

Sometimes, we catch up in practice to the words we publish, but I would not waste time waiting for that with torture. Still, I am not wretched enough to believe it impossible that America can, in its deeds, move closer to its ideals. Ask women and blacks, who fought to be included in the universal language of our constitution, if you think there is no chance that America can correct its practice of freedom. We cannot control what subsequent generations will do. The best we can hope for is they will take our words at face value.

Wretchedness knows no boundaries. We now call it torture when our enemies do it. If torture is practiced by Americans, it becomes enhanced interrogation techniques. It is a despicable complication of clear language this weaving of torture into the fabric of patriotism.

If you are being interrogated with enhanced techniques and it feels like torture to you, it is torture.

When the rest of the world sees that America openly supports a splitting of enhanced interrogation technique hairs, they naturally understand our precious freedoms apply only to us and us alone. American exceptionalism might become to mean our laws and freedoms apply to everyone except non-Americans. We must make it clear by our actions that our ideas of governing apply universally.

Ford went on to say in his acceptance speech: “truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.”

Break the bond we have with the rest of the world and we give the terrorists who would attack us the tool of truth.

That strained bond might break at home, too. Many Americans also find the language subtleties of enhanced interrogation techniques torturous.

As the spinach-hating little girl created by Carl Rose and E.B. White might conclude today: “I say it’s torture, and I say the hell with it.”

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