TORTURE: Though I'm every bit as troubled by this administration's apparent embrace of torture as digby seems to be, I'm less surprised by it, I think -- and less pessimistic about the future as well.

At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them....

Now that we've let the torture genie out of the bottle, I wonder if we can put that beast back in. He looks and sounds an awful lot like an American.

As I said above, I share digby's concern, though not so much his surprise, for like all children of the American South, I have always known that this thing we rather grandly call "civilization" is at once illusory and at best provisional; tomorrow's lynch mob is seldom much further away than today's church social. That's our burden and our truth down here in God's Country, and it's difficult to reach the age of reason without having somehow reckoned with it. And that reckoning, though not terribly pleasant, does tend to leave one with what you might call the long view in these matters.

Which is why I can confidently say this: Sooner or later, we Americans will end torture. And we'll end it for the same reasons that we eventually ended so many other supposedly natural or necessary evils, like slavery and Jim Crow and the legal subjugation of women -- because it's wrong and it's unamerican.

And because millions of good people like digby aren't about to let us forget that.