Nevsky, two ways

Walking down Nevsky in one direction: There are a couple of sketchy-looking people on the corner, and another coming toward me. I cross the street, thinking: If I get mugged, it's just going to happen. There will be no police report, and it will be as if there were no crime. Isn't the state's first duty to provide for the security of its citizens? Walking down Nevsky, dreaming of fascism.

Walking down Nevsky in the other direction: I've just come from a discussion of human rights abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. For one hour, we listened to a reasoned argument, supported with ample evidence, that the abuse of prisoners in the "war on terror" was not the result of a few "bad apples" but that orders to violate nearly-universally recognized human rights protocols in the interrogation of prisoners came down from Rumsfeld and even from Bush. The evidence is in, and it's overwhelming. There's a reason Bush won't sign international treaties or participate in world courts - he's afraid of getting a one-way ticket to the Hague. My biggest question, now, is this: Why is it necessary to go 5000 miles to a former Soviet country in order to have this sort of conversation? In order to be presented with this evidence and these reasons? In order to develop this kind of reasoned, empirical skepticism?

Because at home, we're lulled by something -- ease, familiarity, the feeling way out there in the heartland that the war doesn't really concern you and me. And it occurs to me, walking the other way down Nevsky, that restarting the heart of the heartland is gonna take something that's been unimaginable til now. A draft might do it, but probably not.

Walking down Nevsky, dreaming of revolution.