Today's New America

Tijuana market stall
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Today the United States Senate passed the bill creating the law retroactively legalizing Bush Administration war crimes and authorizing the president to violate the Geneva Convention's ban on treating prisoners in cruel, degrading ways. The bill gives the president the power to define who is an "enemy combatant" and allows him to try them in unfair trials or detain them indefinitely with no recourse to anybody. The United States House of Representatives passed the bill yesterday and the president will sign the bill into law probably tomoro.

Up to now, the president had unilaterally been placing himself above the law, and therefore the Constitution. Now Congress approves. Apparently, the Republicans in Congress like this bill now because they can use it as some political bashing point in the upcoming elections. Bush needed this now because if the Democrats take over either part of Congress, he probably couldn't get the votes to immunize himself and his people from liability for war crimes. Seriously, if Bush and his administration had not violated the US war crimes act between Sept. 11, 2001 and now, why did he insist on amnesty for himself and his administration for that period? Obviously, the only reasonable answer is that, under the law as it existed until tomoro, they committed war crimes, the kind of war crimes that can bring the death penalty under US law. But guess what? IT'S OKAY! The Congress said so – Bush gets a free pass for past behavior and a pretty open window to keep doing more or less the same thing – treating people they deem "enemy combatants" in cruel and degrading ways and keeping those people from any possible challenge to their imprisonment. And guess what? NOW HE CAN DO IT TO AMERICANS!

There is some (diminishing) hope the Supreme Court will disallow all this in the next coupe of years, but with a Republican-stacked Court, probably not.

The question is now not will Bush Inc take this country into authoritarian territory, the question is can we turn it back. There should be no optimistic fatalism about this – without active resistance and pushback, those with power will seek to increase and totalize it as long as they are able – like the infinitely moving forward traveler in Zeno's paradox.

I am increasingly afraid relying on Democratic politicians and the mass-mediated public culture to propel or even facilitate the pushback/resistance is a fool's game.

So, a preliminary question: do we try to get America back, or do we move on, creating new kinds of society that don't rely on or tolerate the kind of centralized power associated with nation states?