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Lewis Lapham sees dark days ahead in the latest issue of Harper's:
"Or, in plainer language, power is as power does, and if it's accountable to no law other than its own, well then, dear reader, at least you've seen the pictures and heard a government spokesman say that America never tells a lie. What else do you expect? Maybe a piece of marble quarried from one of the Capitol's portrait busts, or possibly a small square of glazed tile cut from the flooring of the Rotunda. A souvenir. Something to remind me of what was once a great republic before it lost the war on terror.
I couldn't have guessed at the scale of the defeat until I came to Washington with the hope of proving it a dismal rumor. But except as proofs of fear and weakness, how else to interpret the practice of torture as state policy, the nervous habit of official secrecy, the military entrenchments around the Supreme Court and the Capitol?"
from "Democracyland" Harper's - March 2005
Posted by mike at February 21, 2005 11:16 PM