So right before the inauguration, I noticed that I was doing something I hadn't done in a long, long time. I was listening to the radio. I used to be a turn off the alarm clock, turn on the radio sort of person. I mean decades of this. I'm not a newspaper reader and I don't watch much tv. And before there was the internet, I got my news off the radio, public radio to be specific. The radio was my link to the larger world and whenever I drove cross country, I'd basically surf from one public radio domain to the next.
But by start of the Iraq War I had given up on the radio completely. I couldn't stand to hear one more piece of bad news or another equivocation out of that lying sack of shit, Scott McClellan. I didn't want to hear about yet another erosion, landslide of rights in the US. And I didn't want to hear the reporters dutifully taking notes, asking none of the hard questions that needed to be asked, that no one seemed to be asking offline.
I had had enough.
But then, I found myself listening first to the all-liberal all-the-time celebration on Sunday before the inauguration. Then I turned on the news on Monday to hear what was going on in the preparations for the inauguration and for the first steps of this administration. Then there was the inauguration, which I streamed and listened to as well. And for the last week, every morning when I get up, I turn on the radio and move it from room to room as I start the day.
I feel like a citizen again.
Then I read this. This administration is getting ready to defend John Woo against a suit from Jose Padilla. A suit brought by a man who's been tortured, held without charges, finally charged with some BS against one of men who chewed up or ignored the law, who made it possible for Padilla to basically be picked up and dropped down a dark hole. I've been finding out more and more about the enabling radical lawyers like Woo and Addington did. How their memos made it possible for the Bush administration to make a world so horrible I couldn't bear to listen to it on the radio. And I was lucky. I didn't have to live with the consequences, like the people in Iraq or Afghanistan.
If this new administration can't bring some justice to the real crimes that the Bush administration committed, maybe I won't be enjoying the radio for very long after all.
