Swine, debt, & Facebook
So what kind of world is it when the national debt has its own Facebook page?
One that has gone completely nuts, you might say. And you probably wouldn’t be too far off, in my humble opinion. Next thing you know, we’ll have Star Trek conventions. And that starts us down the slippery slope to Sodom and Gomorrah.
(Yes, my opinion is quite humble. It’s the rest of me that’s arrogant. It’s an easy trick for those of us who are Geminis, but the rest of you shouldn’t try it at home.)
Of course, there are some among us who believe that allowing same-sex marriage is a sign that we’re pretty far down the slippery Sodom and Gomorrah slope. So there they were on Monday, wringing their figurative hands, as Iowans of the same sex gathered to get marriage licenses and ring their physical hands.
Couldn’t you just hear the edifice of civilization cracking on Monday as the infamous S&G slipped into view?
Yeah, me neither.
That’s the whole problem with the 9/11-was-God’s-punishment-for-not-lynching-gays-on-sight crowd. They’re right so often.
By next week, we can only hope, same-sex will be so yesterday that it’ll be about as much news as opposite-sex marriage and we’ll have something else to fret about.
Swine flu, maybe.
Oh, I know, many people are already fretting about swine flu. I’m not, even though Iowa is the leading hog-producing state in the country, and you’d think that swine flu would find Iowa the perfect place to alight.
No, says the state’s top public-health official.
So I’m not fretting. Of course, when a friend of mine who is currently vacationing in Mexico returns, I’m going to have to find some creative ways to avoid seeing her for a month or so (“Yeah, I’d love to meet you for coffee, but unfortunately, all my waking non-working moments are taken up with the national debt’s Facebook page. It’s just astounding. You should check it out. You know — stay home, get online, click away, stay home.”)
Who knew Facebook could stop a flu pandemic?
To be completely honest with you, when I first heard about swine flu, I thought it sounded like something Dick Cheney would pass around. Not only can the guy not shoot straight, he can’t sneeze straight.
I mean, call me a paranoid-socialist-lefty type, but it sounds like the kind of “enhanced technique” that the former Stealth President would come up with to disrupt Qaeda operations.
And Cheney was one of the masters at promoting “enhanced techniques” — such as waterboarding, which many of us would call torture.
Oh, I know — Bush administration always insisted that waterboarding wasn’t torture. But waterboarding has an interesting little history. Reportedly invented during the Spanish Inquisition (there’s some wonderful company to keep), it has shown up now and again in human history, including, public radio’s “On the Media” reports, during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia during the mid- to late-70s.
When the Khmer Rouge employed waterboarding, the U.S. government and the U.S. media described it as torture.
So when the Khmer Rouge, also famous for creating the killing fields, uses waterboarding, it’s torture. But when the CIA employs waterboarding, it’s merely “harsh interrogation techniques.”
Like that word “technique,” do you? It’s so refined, so … French. Sounds like something you might do on the coast of the Riveria: I did some waterboarding téchniques — the surf was fabulous — and then I hit the casinos for a few rounds of baccarat, à la James Bond. It’s so much more civilized a game than blackjack.
But, you say, Cheney and others say those interrogation techniques kept us safe from Al Qaeda.
However, Steven Kleinman, an intelligence officer and an interrogator in the Air Force for 25 years, with tours of duty in Panama and both Iraq wars, says those harsh techniques don’t work at all. He notes U.S. interrogators used non-harsh techniques “to persuade a detainee to give us information on the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — information that led to his being located and killed in 2006” (New York Times, March 11).
Kleinman also points out that U.S. interrogators in World War II did not resort to torture when dealing with Nazi and Japanese prisoners.
In fact, after that war, the U.S. prosecuted some Japanese for war crimes for using waterboarding.
Hmm.
Luckily, we have swine flu to worry about, so we don’t have to fret about torture anymore.
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