Apt Words

Date: November 18th., 2005
Sent to but not published in the New Yorker

George Packer (The Spanish Prisoner, New Yorker, October 31st, 2005: 84) quotes Dos Passos' 1927 lament "America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul."
How apt those words are today. The strangers are us. We have allowed the administration to lure us into an unjust war. We have allowed the administration to evade accountability for flawed intelligence, for torture (and the torture memos), for inadequate armor for vehicles and people, and for the big lie, currently in progress, of attacking the Iraq war's critics.
We truly lament for the nation.