Midlife Meditation

The worst part of it is that I still kind of like 24. The Fox action drama that spins out a very bad day in the life of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer distinguished itself from the beginning with the extremes he would go to to extract information not just from obvious villains, but from well-meaning but misguided innocents. Shouting, threatening, torturing, even shooting one in the head to get his crony to talk--no action was too atrocious if it got Bauer the intel he needed to avert a far greater catastrophe. He was the ultimate pragmatist, doing whatever it took to defend his country, even as his friends, colleagues and superiors cried out in protest. He became a patriotic martyr whose actions, even though they had saved countless lives, rendered him an outcast, rejected by the country he loved. In the process, he endured torture, abuse, gunshots, even death (CLEAR!), not to mention the loss of every friend and family member he had. With its compressed storytelling, each...

An iconic image from Abu Ghraib. Eric Garner dies in a choke hold. Two press releases that came within days of each other lead me to wonder: how far does it have to go before we realize what we've become? Americans have long known about the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where US Army and CIA personnel subjected prisoners of war to treatment Americans normally assume is the province of demented fascist regimes. Two days ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report detailing abuses committed by the CIA that go far beyond the stories we've heard from that hell hole. This came just four days after a grand jury failed to indict an NYPD officer for killing an asthmatic African-American using a department-prohibited choke hold. At first glance, these two stories have little in common: Abu Ghraib was in Iraq, while Eric Garner died on Staten Island. The prisoners abused at Abu Ghraib were believed to be war criminals; Eric Garner was detained ...