What have we become?

Senator John McCain has nailed it, when it comes to the damage this Bush administration has done to the American identity--the identity each American uses in some way to form self-identity.

In Bob Herbert's column, McCain is praised for his response to arguments that the "detainees" in U.S. custody are not "prisoners of war" but are "terrorists" (a term that needs definining, see my earlier post). McCain's response is that it "is not about who they are. It's about who we are."

In further support of McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham's amendment to the defense bill, a letter from retired armed services personnel states that the treatment of detainees, supported by the White House, endangers our enlisted personnel and "is anathema to the values Americans have held dear for generations."

When you add this to the way Bush's attack of Iraq has changed the identity of each American, you see that the damage to our future generations is staggering. As I pointed out in the linked post, one of the reasons Americans are so drawn to the cowboy image is that the cowboy hero has the capacity for violence but restrains that violence according to a code of honor. Bush, despite his attempts to identify with the cowboy, violated that code of honor when he attacked without provocation a disarmed country. Bush is not a cowboy hero, but a gunslinger, or more accurately, an oilman--the Texas icon that displaced the cowboy and whose allegiance is to profit and the power of "might makes right" rather than the code of honor.

Since the president is the figurehead of the United States, these changes, if unchallenged, will affect the self-concept of all Americans, but especially the younger generation who is still forming self-identity. The only way to combat this corruption of what it means to be an American is to name the dishonor and shame the dishonorable.