Matt Taibbi's dissection of US culture — is worth a read

22 March 2018

"Goon bombs city on horseshit pretext"

So begins Matt Taibbi's recent analysis of the United States' fondness for imperial murder and, arguably, genocide.

Looking at the Iraq War and its aftermath, Taibbi concludes that the 2003 invasion was the lynchpin of the United States' geopolitical and cultural decline.

Ironically, he implies, Americans shield themselves from grasping both cause and magnitude of that fall from (at least occasionally defensible) rectitude.

Taibbi's most telling insight

Extracts summarize Taibbi's conclusion:

The consistent thread throughout all [our] foreign policy losses was our relentless, stubborn belief that would have succeeded, if only we'd been allowed to use more force and violence.

Secret prisons? . . . Torture? . . . Warrantless surveillance? . . . [R]ead our library records, toss out habeas corpus? Sure and sure.

The press . . . rolled over when the military insisted we not show photos of dead soldiers in the war.

The propaganda goal was to sell a war without victims.

Our wars have begun to vanish from our legal process, the same way our "enemy combatants" just magically disappear from the earth once captured, to a secret arbitrary world we show or don't show as we please.

A decade and a half later, authorities no longer need to ask anyone permission to do anything.

They've created in the interim an entirely separate, secret set of rules giving them the right to kill, imprison, torture, or spy on anyone.

We flatter ourselves that Trump is an aberration. He isn't. He's a depraved, cowardly, above-the-law bully, just like the country we've allowed ourselves to become in the last fifteen years.

Osama bin Laden has to be laughing. He had to know all along that only Americans were capable of destroying America.

Meaningfully argue with that . . .

. . . if you can find a reasonable structure of facts, as well as an ethical basis.

However, I cannot see an honorably rational retort to his analysis.

The moral? — Complacent denial is the soul's most reliable invitation to evil

Failure to factually self-observe and redirect are forms of cowardice.

We live in a nation predominantly filled with, and led by, courage's absence.

President Trump is, as Matt Taibbi indicates, not the core problem. We should not confuse a gesticulating symbol with the ingrained cultural characteristics that it characterizes.

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Matt Taibbi's dissection of US culture — is worth a read