Robert L. Terrell Blog

John McCain’s admission during the first presidential debate that the U.S. government is engaged in torture was probably the most notable aspect of his fractious exhibition with Barack Obama.But one would not know this by the responses of the television commentators who provided instant analysis at the debate’s conclusion, nor the plethora of articles and commentaries that have dominated accounts of the affair during the past few days.

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These are broadly unsettling times here in the United States. The war in Iraq is unresolved, and the one in Afghanistan is quickly and ominously going from bad to worse. Hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs. The national debt is growing like an untreated cancer. The economy is in recession, and if it isn’t, it is in the next closest state of stasis and contraction. Retired people on fixed incomes are watching their life savings evaporate with every downward tick of the stock market, and millions of bewildered average citizens are on the verge of being thrown out of their homes.

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I am watching the Republican National Convention with a sense of incredulity and dismay.  Amid the military salutes, cowboy hats, imperial hubris and tributes to inequitable policies that systematically ravage the lives of average Americans, the tawdry spectacle is deeply disturbing. These are the people who enthusiastically support torture, military assaults, capital punishment, assassinations, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, unchecked presidential authority and an economic regime which ensures that major portions of the rest of the world subsists in wretched poverty.  

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