Prisoner Abuse: Golly Gee, How Could It Happen?
By Dennis Peacocke
Sin not only doesn’t work, it makes us all look stupid. Sin hates exposure and, therefore, finds elaborate and often convoluted ways to attempt to defend itself from genuine scrutiny. Sin believes that the best defense is a compelling and sustained offense. No offense appears more powerful than the tactic that calls into question the motives of “those in charge,” playing into whatever in our common fallen nature enjoys being the “victim” and launching the grand inquisition against those in authority. Satan played this trump card in Eden’s garden, so why should we expect anything different from today’s media? Besides, nothing sells better to a sinful audience than an attack on “those in charge,” and the media knows it all too well.
To condemn the fraternity-like hazing of the Iraqi prisons is a no-brainer that makes even amoral people feel good about themselves. In a random test of men I know, many of them experienced similar, though obviously freely-entered-into, indignities when “hazed” by athletic teams or fraternal clubs in their youth. Indeed, in order to join some teenage gangs in America today, the hazing requires the killing of a rival or raping of one of their women. By contrast, the beheading of an American in reprisal scarcely got a day’s news coverage. It died as a story behind a crescendo of self-inflicted outrage that “we probably had it coming for making naked men feel genitally challenged.”
Is what we did in that prison stupid and wrong? Yes. Should we have stayed with “conventional means” to obtain information or control? Do any of you even know what “conventional means” are? Pass the lollipops, please, to those who still believe in “nice wars.”
Living in our own cultural, make-believe world, with our own new universal systemic suicidal urges, concerns me far more than our moral outrages over some macho soldiers’ sadistic urges being vented in a wartime prison. Nobody seems to enjoy a good cultural colonic more than we Americans. The French and Germans, contrary to our protestations, are children in the art of “America bashing” compared to American professors, social critics, and media-room “green light” senior editors.
How could this prisoner abuse have happened? Furrow your brow, buckle up, and I’ll help you see what the real question is. To a nation of culturally intimidated, nominally Christian masses, that apparently sees no problem with fetus-killing, feel-good philosophizing, self-actualizing, separating God and morals from real life and public values, public schools collapsing, postmodern thinking pre-dominating; violence-driven entertainment and music abounding; sexual disease and copulating with anything that moves; bashing Christians while favoring New Age and Islam, the real miracle is that we’re even asking the question!
I love America. The real question is not, “How could it happen?” but rather when will America get real, come off the media dope, and start asking the genuine questions that will help us find true transformation? As the bottom continues to fall out, Mr. Bush is not the primary problem, and neither are the terrorists; we are the problem, and that’s . . .
the bottom line.
