Houston Cares

It's a lazy Sunday by anyone's typical definition. I woke up around 2:30 to find that Mikey and Dayna were back from whatever and that the 90s ensemble is once again complete. Good thing, too, because we only have a week to plan for this little shindig we're throwing.

Reality about the coming semester is starting to sink in slowly. Eighteen hours of reality plus a good, healthy dose of social snafu and dammit, I have to mail my family's Christmas presents to them sometime before March. I think this semester's book cost, even if I drop one of my English classes, is going to come out to somewhere between $400 and $FUCK. I'll hit up the Amazon tomorrow and see if I can find some better prices than the Rice Rape Dungeon bookstore.

I truly have enjoyed these last carefree days before the semester starts, though. Nothing but YouTube during the day and drunken stupor during the nights. I've decided I can concede defeat and admit myself to be a YouTube whore but only because Google owns YouTube. Speaking of Google, if you spend any amount of time at all browsing, say, journals and blogs and stupid shit like that then boy do I have the tool for you. Google Reader. It's all rather self-explanatory, but basically it takes in RSS feeds and spits them all out on one page. It's a lot easier than having a big-ass list of bookmarks.

The upbeat of the past two weeks is starting to waver again. Someone help me keep tempo.

Ah, Funny.

Finally, one of my editor-in-chief columns from the high school newspaper.

America: home of apple pie, Wednesday night board games with the family, the Boys and Girls Club, and Sesame Street. The United States is definitely the pinnacle of moral values and innocence in the world, right? We have Elmo and Kermit teaching kids that name-calling is reproachable and that fun stems from cooperation. We have radio evangelist James Dobson working to get that heathen homosexual SpongeBob SquarePants off of the airwaves. And we have President George Bush instituting that the United States will not fund groundbreaking scientific innovations for the sake of moral justice.

That's all gravy, except that we're smearing blood in the faces of Islamic prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, making them unclean, and thus denying them their salvation. We're also wrapping prisoners in the Israeli flag and forcing them to soil themselves. Oh, and how can I forget the women interrogators who tease and touch these purported Islamofascists, again to make them unclean in the face of their god. These gems are just a few of new allegations that are leaking from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Iraqi and Afghani rebels are held indefinitely and interrogated in non-accordance with the Geneva Convention.

I'm rather bothered by the fact that Americans hold their noses high in the face of other countries. There's nothing wrong with America having a moral compass but there's a clear double standard at work. We contend to be leaps and bounds ahead of Europe and the Middle East when it comes to values, yet we stack pyramids of nude Iraqi prisoners and take pictures. We make excuses for some of the most abominable acts in human rights history--- stuff that makes Chinese water torture look like a trip to Shipwreck Island. If those acts of torture really are comparable to “frat jokes,” I'm suddenly really, really scared of college.

Some right-wing zealots are quick to condone this behavior, pointing to the images of smoldering towers on 9-11; “they get what they deserve.” The war in Afghanistan to unseat the Taliban and al Qaeda was more than justified by any pretense of the word. Last time I checked, though, thousands of Iraqi and Taliban soldiers were dead and even more maimed. Our revenge has been had many, many times over. I would go so far to say that the revenge has even been exacted on innocent people. Maybe I could live with torturing the hijackers themselves and the higher-ups behind the terrorist attack in order to protect America, but I could never condone torturing a group of prisoners simply because they belong to the same religion and live in the same part of the world.

My favorite argument when it comes to torture, the one that makes me double-take like Daffy Duck, is “at least we're not as bad as [blank],” with the blank being filled with Nazis or the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgency. I'm sorry: America should try its darnedest to be the exact opposite of Nazis, not a notch or two below. No, we're not the Taliban: we're not beheading innocent hostages or driving car-bombs into hospitals. But on the continuum of really bad things, I'd say that renouncing someone's assumed salvation is almost as bad.

"No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” That's what the Fifth Amendment says. “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” That's what the Geneva Convention says. Those aren't really hard rules to follow.

Enter Alberto Gonzalez, President Bush's nominee for attorney general. Just like his predecessor, John Ashcroft, Gonzalez sees no problem in placing “terrorists” outside of the Geneva Convention's rules and regulations for prisoner treatment. Gonzalez is also very vocal about extending the rights of interrogators to a broad, almost “whatever means necessary” plan. To anyone who voted (or supported) Bush's re-election campaign, realize you may be a small part responsible for the appointment of a repackaged Dr. Joseph Mengele. You may be, with the tiniest sliver of guilt, responsible for unspeakable atrocities performed on wrongly-convicted prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

I realize that the American military has a job to do in defending this country. I also realize that the United States tries to make strides in defining and protecting the morals of its citizens. Heck, most American voters back in November made their decision based on the “moral values” of each candidate. Maybe we should step back and think about what those morals really are. Maybe, just maybe, those morals aren't all invested in one political party.