I've often had cause to be embarrassed about my country. America, the home of trailer park chic. Where we revere the myth of the founding fathers and preach the idea of the self made man, while teaching in every schoolyard and every boardroom the power of mob rule. Where we are loud, ignorant, arrogant, prideful, and xenophobic.

But until Abu Ghraib, I was never ashamed to be an american.

I have no words, no bile strong enough to condemn the soldiers who committed these acts. I have no punishment fitting for the commanders who ordered it, or their commanders who turned a blind eye, or *their* commanders who squinted long and hard at the Geneva conventions and decided that there was plenty of wiggle room here, and even if there wasn't any room over there, well, it just meant that that part couldn't possibly apply to *us*, now could it? We're americans, we make the rules. Doesn't mean we have to follow them.

I have no fitting words for anyone who would try to justify these actions. You never want to believe that someone who looks and sounds just like you could do something like this. Like a small child, you refuse to look at it, wiping it out from your own personal reality. And when there are no places left to look that are not crammed full with the images of ugly truth, well then - someone must've made 'em do it! They *deserved* it, didn't they? 'Cause of those airplanes and those suicide bombers? 'cause they're out to get us, an' we gotta get them first!

It's ugly, isn't it? And now, it's never going to end. They did to us, we did to them, and now they have to go and do to us again. And again. And again.

The last comfort some had was in the idea that even though the country was going to hell in a hand basket, even though our government was clinically insane, we could look at the next person, even some stranger who just happened to be passing by; and know there was an even chance that they were, at heart, a decent person.

No one wants to believe in that ugliness, believing opens the door for the awful question "If that person, who looks and talks just like me, could be party to these awful things, what does that say about me? Do I have that same ugliness buried inside me?"

Yes. You do. You feed it with every denial, every protest, every attempt to turn the blame or hide behind rules of procedure.