Uneasiness

Today's New York Times has one of their regular, pleasantly voyeuristic articles about a bizarre medical condition -- this time Capgras Syndrome, a form of psychosis in which the sufferer becomes convinced that their family and regular acquaintances have been replaced by doppelgängers -- inexact copies of the genuine people, sinister duplicates who, while resembling their real loved ones, somehow are not them. It's as if the sufferers have been dropped into the first half hour of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," where a Chinese laundryman insists to Donald Sutherland, "That not my wife!"

Sometimes I have that feeling about our country. In many ways it looks like the country I grew up in, feverishly rushing into the future while constantly evoking nostalgia for its past -- now that the 1940s and the late 1960s have been thoroughly mined for nostalgia, it's the early 1960s that are being polished and put on display, what with AMC's "Mad Men" and the hoopla around the 50th anniversary of "On the Road." We continue being willing to sell anything to anybody, stopping only when the evidence that it's killing them is incontrovertible. We continue filling the earth with tons of shiny crap and living like there's no tomorrow. That sure hasn't changed.

But in many sinister ways, this country has changed. When I was a kid, there were one or two things we thought set our country apart from our enemies -- special characteristics that were reinforced in the movies over and over again. We treated prisoners of war humanely -- better than ours were treated. We didn't torture people. And most of all, we didn't invade another country for purely cynical reasons.

Of course, to varying degrees, those myths were false, even in the 1960s when I was a kid. But it was still possible to believe them. Who today can even pretend those things are still true?

I also grew up with the idea that the Constitution, with its protections against any branch of the government becoming too powerful and against invasions of privacy, was inviolate. During the last six years the President and his administration have acted as if those protections did not exist. We don't even yet know all the ways the shadowy men like Addington have quietly knocked the props from beneath the Bill of Rights. We will only find out in the years to come. (Read the July 3, 2007 New Yorker piece on Addington, called the force behind the administration's most egregious assaults on the Constitution and this country's reputation around the world.)

And why is it that none of the Democratic candidates for President have spoken out about the assaults on the Constitution by the Bush administration? Why haven't any of them detailed the ways they will, in their first days in office, roll back these changes? Because they, too, want to take advantage of them. They aren't stupid. They realize how much easier their job will be -- if by "their job" you mean protecting the privileges of companies and corporations over those of individual people -- if they hang onto these expanded powers.

That's why I am suffering a bit from Capgras Syndrome today, the 6th anniversary of the plane crashes of 2001. My country looks somewhat the same. But in many fundamental ways, it is not my country anymore.

technorati: Constitution, Bill of Rights, nostalgia, David Addington, 9/11, privacy