Peridyd's Progress

The country that I grew up in is officially dead. It's died by its own hands, and largely because it was too full of fear to turn and face itself in the mirror. By authorizing torture, indefinite detention, secret evidence, by suspending habeas corpus, and by abrogating the Geneva Convention, we are now the enemy of freedom, and, chillingly, we are the world's lone superpower. This is now a dictatorship. The most powerful dictatorship in the history of the planet. None of us, unless we are the President himself, has any real rights, and his rights know no limit.

If I believe that this is so, if I declare that we have become our own worst enemy, if I avow that the President and his cabal are the moral equivalent of Stalin, or of Mao--which I do, and don't get me started with the comparisons to Hitler--I can now be seized; I can now disappear forever, and there's not a court anywhere in the world that can challenge my disappearance. That, my friends, is the definition of absolute power. And what did Abraham Lincoln teach us about absolute power?

With apologies to T.S. Eliot:

This is the way [my country] ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.