Guantanamo: Thoughts via DFW and HDT

I’m really torn about this story. One part of me wants to smirk and mock those who think we have a bunch of “innocents” locked up in Gitmo*, but the other part of me wants to say that the real point of the critics is, or perhaps should be, that it doesn’t matter whether these guys are innocent are not. Even if they are guilty, we, as a nation, shouldn’t be putting guys in a legal limbo in a foreign nation.

David Foster Wallace used to talk about there being a “baseline cost” of being a liberal democracy. For the sake of living in our (at least theoretically) free nation, we might have to suffer a certain amount of terrorist attacks/awful mistakes that are caused/blamed by our freedom. We shouldn’t, however, go back on those liberal values for the sake of safety. That idea, one of a base cost for the joys of freedom, has stuck with me probably more than anything DFW’s written. Freedom is a historical anomaly. I don’t see it written anywhere that I have a God-given right to living in both complete freedom and complete safety. And, if given the choice, I’d rather have complete freedom with episodes of tragedy than complete security with episodes of liberty.

I’m pretty confident that the “idea” of America is incompatible with Guantanamo. Maybe we got to this point through ten thousand miniscule compromises, maybe it was through several panics/frenzies brought on by national war. However it happened, the idea that established jails/camps in foreign lands carry the stamp of the nation of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is…off-kiltering. I think Henry David Thoreau (two three-named authors in one post!) had it right when he protested the Mexican-American War by refusing to pay taxes. He somehow got the American idea: it’s not one of a society that must be preserved at any cost. It’s not one of national music and literature or a “national identity”. It’s one based in the idea of liberty, the idea that mankind, bearing certain amount of costs, can live unmolested by his fellow man. The individual will have the freedom to act as he pleases, take the results/consequences solely upon himself, and live by his own code.

When I load up Google News, I don’t see that world anymore. I don’t see that nation. The idea has returned to the books.

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*Every time I find myself enjoying the waters on the ACLU-side of this debate, someone comes and pisses in the pool by saying grade-A retarded stuff about the Gitmo detainees. Lookit: these guys are BAD GUYS. They aren’t chain-smoking coffee-sipping spoken-word artists, they aren’t dissidents. They’re assholes. We have a good debating point when we observe that our treatment of detainees is dissonant with our national ethos, let’s not screw it up with some good old-fashioned stupidity.