This Week’s Clue: Impunity

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 28  of
This Week’s Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of July 16.

Enjoy.

One reason the President and Vice President act as they do, I believe, is they believe they can do it with impunity.

Both men seem to believe that they can either steal American democracy and dictate their lives away, or that they will be allowed to walk away after January, 2009, to enjoy lives of honor, fat book contracts, big fees, and libraries where they can argue down was up for eternity.

Americans in general also have this attitude. A real Depression seems inconceivable. The thought of actually losing in Iraq seems inconceivable. All the talk of terror threats comes off as ghost stories around a campfire, little kids trying to scare one another because it’s fun.

The idea of becoming Iraq, or Mexico, seems inconceivable. Just as our parents’ stories of The Great Depression seem inconceivable.

I believe this feeling of impunity, or invulnerability, may be the greatest threat we face as a nation. I know it’s the great threat the world faces from us.

The history of nearly every other nation, around the world, is replete with stories of defeat and devastation. In many cases, within the life span of people living today. (Image from CapnBob, who I’m certain never imagined it used as I’m about to use it.)

There are millions of Germans and Japanese who have seared into their memory live pictures of Dresden after its fire bombing, or Tokyo, or Hiroshima. They also have memories of the aftermath, the long years of struggle, watching loved ones die of starvation, or privation, or radiation sickness. They know better than to speak of impunity. Many British citizens still alive can remember the Blitz, and rationing, which did not end until the 1950s.

Most Russians alive today can remember their entire political system collapsing. Half of all Chinese know, personally, what it is to live without, to survive a true tyranny, an uncontrollable government more interested in purging intellectuals than feeding children.

Europe has destruction in its living memory. So does most of Asia. It is the living reality throughout Africa, and the Muslim World. South Americans don’t take words like "dictatorship" lightly, or "disappeared." They have known hunger. They have had children taken from them, their bodies left on the street, shot, or never even found. Never again means something to Israelis, something profound, something concrete.

Only white Americans seem to think we are immune. Only American leaders seem to feel they can stride across the world like Gods, doing whatever they want, for whatever reason, and never pay a real personal price for it, never see their children or grandchildren suffer for it, change their names, sit in jails for their sins or starve.

What happened on 9/11 was horrible, but it only happened in two cities. Mass starvation did not follow. Real dictatorship did not follow. We are not living under Sharia law, nor will we. That’s all scary stories told around a campfire. It is childish nonsense.

But to nearly every other citizen of the world, total destruction is either seared into their memory or it is their living, breathing reality.

American history contains but one example of total destruction in war, and it’s one that as a Georgia resident I’m well aware of. (This is why, at the right.)

The Lost Cause, in the end, became like the example of World War I to many Germans, something to be overcome and overturned. It was for generations we call the Jim Crow era. I believe it is making a comeback in our own time. The lesson, the real, hard lesson, that evil ends in evil, never really sank in.

I would like for Americans to learn this lesson without having to actually suffer like our forefathers did, without having to watch my wife or children die before my eyes, without having them watch me die from a policeman’s bullet or disappear into a jail cell, never to return, until my tortured body is found in some creek weeks later.

That’s why I believe impeachment is too good for this President. There must be no immunity, no statute of limitations, for war crimes. Bush and Cheney must be hounded, for the rest of their lives, and their children must be haunted by the crimes of this time. The political movement they led must be destroyed, utterly.

Or else we will all go through this again. And next time, we won’t be so lucky.