Don’t let the door hit you…
This is certainly not the answer to all our many, and mounting, problems as a nation. But as the daily news cycle goes, it was a great moment. I know this picture is a little creepy, but 
images in the mirror are farther away than they appear, and the news that Karl Rove is at last leaving the White House is on the whole cause to rejoice.
I just forced myself to read Jane Mayer’s chilling article about the CIA’s torture sites in the New Yorker. I started the article a week ago, got as far as the second page, and realized that a) I really should read it all because it was so disturbing, and b) I didn’t want to read another word because it was so disturbing. So there it sat, an open magazine on my kitchen table, until I finally worked up the nerve to finish it this afternoon.
Assuming that the Democrats have the political will to actually end torture in our name, get us out of Iraq, restore habeas corpus and the rest of our eroding constitutional rights, and strip the president of his self-declared executive powers (I know, I know, that’s a big assumption), we will have a lot to atone for in the decades to come. The evils that Rove and his cronies have brought to our political system, and the evils that Cheney and his minions have created in our name around the world, are not things that we can easily sit with if we have a conscience and if we truly want to live in a democracy.
After reading Mayer’s account of the unspeakable brutality we are putting foreign prisoners through, and also the torment experienced by CIA employees pressured by the White House to carry out these tortures, I think we will need some version of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in the States and abroad. We need to open up all of our hundreds of military bases around the world and have public forums where every injustice caused by our presence can be spoken without fear of retribution. And then we need to close half those bases and let sovereign nations determine their own policies free of our influence.
Thank God for Dr. Seuss, you know? He has captured so many poignant social moments in rhyme, it is almost impossible not to quote him at these moments, when words fail to capture the depth of the utter sinkhole we have fallen into. But sure enough, The Cat in the Hat has the perfect description of our current situation (and I quote here from memory, which may be faulty):
And that mess is so big and so deep and so tall,
We can not pick it up. There is no way at all.
There you have it, folks: the current state of the union in perfect anapestic tetrameter. Though all our ills cannot be solved with clever verse, it is certainly true that reciting clever verse is an excellent way to survive times which carry more than their share of difficult, inconvenient truths.
There are few images I can think of which are strong enough to balance the creepiness of Rove’s face, but such is the healing power of the Cat in the Hat. We all need to face the hard truths, but not without some humor, please. From Mark Twain to the present, that is one of our nation’s finest gifts to the world, and something we can always be proud of.