Broadway Needle Exchange

Am I sick/cynical/stupid to find something weird about this headline from the front page of nytimes.com? “Rudy Giuliani has staked his campaign on the idea that he will keep America safe from terror the same way he kept New York City safe from crime — with ruthless efficiency.” Yet he didn’t keep NY safe from terror . . . Not that I’m saying he could have. Nobody did and nobody probably could have, him especially. If anything, it speaks again to the absurdity of “war on terror” rhetoric.

Career Opportunities

Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute.” Sounds like a great place to work.  Where can I get my application?

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s confession

How can we trust anything that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed “confesses” to? After four years in what I can only imagine were hellish conditions; tortured, unfree, and deprived; almost certain that I would be found guilty for whatever crime that the U.S. government chose to accuse me of, I too would admit to anything my torturer, my captor threw at me, accused me of. Even the linked article mentions that Mohammed admitted to crimes the planning of which the U.S. government was unaware of. Perhaps it was because they were never planned? If I was assured by a jailor that I would be found guilty of planning the deadliest terrorist attack against history’s greatest superpower, and then was questioned about planned assassinations on U.S. president’s while having my toenails pulled out, I would probably make up some bullshit too. And confess to any other of high crimes and treasons while I was at it, just to make the pain stop (as Mohammed did). If you need any greater proof of how delusional our government might be, look no farther than the fact that they might accept this man’s tall tales.

This is why laws are passed to outlaw torture and guarantee the civil rights of even the most apparently despicable of human beings: because once you start to solicit “truth” through pain and deprivation, you come up with untruth — a world in which appearances must be assumed deceptive. Enlightened civil society is a sort of contract we all enter into in order to guarantee, to some extent, that waking life is not an illusion. As a Marxist, I certainly feel that we can improve on that contract, but I also see its brilliance and its necessary adoption such that we may avoid regression to an earlier state of human development or total annihilation of the human species — the American system’s chosen path.