Dear George,
America has always been a country of innovation. We may not have many original ideas, but when we steal one, we proceed to improve on it. Nowhere is this more evident than in war.
War is more than just a conflict. It is a mystical union between two or more adversaries in which each takes on the qualities of the other. Take, for example, World War II in which a democratic United States fought two militarized opponents: Japan and Germany. Sixty plus years later, Japan and Germany are thriving democracies while we are a militarized state.
However, Americans do more than just embrace our enemies’ qualities; we improve on them. The Germans developed the Blitzkrieg that began with air raids followed by an armored assault.
Child’s play! Where the Germans damaged, we leveled. We showed those krauts what bombing is all about at Dresden, Hiroshima, and Tokyo, all of which we wiped off the map. The Germans created; we improved. America can take pride in the fact that since 1941, we have dropped more bombs than any other country in the world. And the beat goes on.
But, our bombing innovations pale beside what we have managed to do with torture.
The Gestapo thought it had the corner on torture, but they were childish brutes when compared to good old American know-how.
Everybody tortures. Torture has a long and noble history, but traditionally, it has been done in basement dungeons, in the dark and in secret. Up until now, no civilized nation has wanted to broadcast that it tortures.
Well, you changed all that. You have brought torture out of the closet and given it a patina of respectability it never had before. We have done that by making torture a discipline of the social scientists. Drawing on research done by psychiatrists and psychologists in the fifties and sixties, we have refined torture and transformed it into a therapeutic procedure in which the victim is slowly depatterned through a combination of sleep deprivation, humiliation, sensory disorientation and pain until he is reduced to an infantile state in which he will tell his therapist anything he thinks his therapist wants to hear. (People who question the value of intelligence gathered through torture forget that the purpose of torture is not to gather information but to terrorize everyone who has not yet been tortured.)
While I appreciate all that you have done to sanitize torture, it would not have been possible without many decades of careful preparation. You see, George, torture as practiced in America is the climactic aria of the Angry White Male (AWM). Your minions have spent decades nurturing this creature, feeding into his anger and bile, and slowly increasing its energy by incremental steps, inflaming and fanning it until it reached the boiling point and became the molten lead poured over all of the imaginary threats that engulf the AWM until torture and slaughter became the only possible solution to his angst. (Granted, not all white males are angry, only the ones who formulate and influence policy.)
The AWM is the product of a carefully orchestrated upbringing. He is a man who grew up on the Hollywood western. (Bear in mind that most cinema genres are simply variations on the western in which a rugged individual stands firm before evil and conquers it.) Thus, did our AWM grow up believing in his own rugged individualism as he began a life journey to root out evil wherever he confronted it.
So, what happened?
Our AWM finds himself part of one of the many bureaucracies that prize subservience over rugged individualism, and where there is neither good nor evil, but only a bland amorality. He discovers that life, rather than being a western, is little more than a mind-numbing plod from day to day, each day a grinding bore filled with the petty and the innocuous.
Of course, this is going to piss him off. Life is not as it should be; it has cheated him, and something must have caused it. Thus begins his search for a cause. Being a true patriot, he knows the fault cannot lie with America. So he blames hippies, liberals and commies for turning America into a land of kissy-feely wimps. He blames them for the gnawing dissatisfaction that eats at him even though he has “everything”: a nice house, a frigid wife and kids who are either on drugs or on getting laid.
When Ronnie appears on the scene with his promise to transform life into a gunfight on a dusty western street, the AWM knows he has found his Messiah. Ronnie will make it all better with his dulcet voice and soothing imagery.
But his wife is still frigid, his kids either stoned or pregnant, and his life is still a boring plod. So he begins to blame foreigners of a different hue. They are the ones despoiling the American Way of Life with their strange languages and customs. And of course, this plague is added and abetted by the liberals with all their prattle about “multiculturalism” and bilingual education.
So when Arabs bring down the towers on 9/11, the AWM is exhilarated. Not only does it kill the boredom, but it confirms all of his suspicions about the brown skins.
Now he has a tangible target for all the anger and rage that have been building over the decades. His life finally has focus and meaning with a real evil with which to do battle. So when your torture memos start to surface, he cries: Yes! Yes! A thousand yeses! It is only meet, right and just that we torture the brownies as an act of retribution for the evil they personify.
Now, it no longer matters if he’s over his head in debt or that his wife is a post hoc virgin, or his kids are fucked up. His life has purpose and meaning; he is a somebody who stands for something. At last, his life has color and excitement. Whenever it starts to grind him down, when his supervisor gives him the disapproving looks that can end a career, all he needs do is think of some poor hajji being hung by his ankles from the ceiling of his cell and the world is made whole again.
And, it is because of this that he will be eternally grateful to you and will consider you as the greatest president ever to bless the American Way of Life.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Joes
6:42:24 AM 
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