Before the War

Still comfortably shy of 30, I am nonetheless already old enough to speak nostalgically of "before the war", a recent yet impossibly distant time when "fellatio" and "lockbox" were the watchwords of government excess.

Four years ago, the above pictures were released to the world. More than any other images, the photographs from Abu Ghraib illustrated to me the real cost to the American psyche of perpetual war and perpetual fear.

It is one of the singular examples of the slippery slope; we begin by torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, responsible for 9/11 and just two years later we are torturing Omar Rahman, age 14, because somebody claimed that his cousin knew where a mortar casing is buried.

Thanks to the inquisitive, though never cynical, influence of my parents, I am less given to shock when government scandals surface. But 4 years ago, when I first saw these pictures, I was shocked.

In retrospect I am shocked that I was shocked. I was still managing to live in a world that had been abruptly snuffed out. I was still living before the war.