A New Look at Abu Ghraib Prison
by Steve Golay

What the Iraqis may not quite see, and liberal Americans are frankly blind to, is the religious foundation (dare we say religious fundamentals) of democracy. This lack of sight, or willful blindness, is especially acute regarding our nation's genesis story and the revelation of the religious nature of its founding ideas, even within the most secular of those sources, the Scottish Enlightenment and its adaptation of Greece and Rome as earlier ideals.

President Bush understands this story because it is his own life. But he needs to teach it in Iraq. President Bush ough to spread his tent in the squares and along the byways of Iraq, invite the people in for hospitality and coffee, sit down as guest with guest and tell that story, his own and America's. It is one the Iraqi people would listen too, the one that has been missing in all this chatter about blame, proof and keeping something safe somewhere for somebody.

Yes, Mohammed, there may, in a democracy, be a separation of this and that, but not of a nation's public square and its people's spirit and heart. It is one that we can recognize as Americans, if only we pay more heed to our own founding story, even if this democracy of ours is now being sorely tested.

Indeed, if you can, Iraq, take up the challenge of democracy, religious foundations and all, and do us one better. Build a democracy upon a religious people and show us how we can recover what we, in America, are about to loose.

The thought has occurred that maybe the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison ran to rot because we (some) had confused democracy with the unfettered freedom of original sin, and the “culture of death” that must have laid upon the souls of those men and women even before they went to Iraq, or put on a uniform.

The big question under the President's pitched tent (it's one we'll be answering in November): for liberty to be rightly free, and peace to be rightly defended, where does that order come from? Who or what calls it into being among a people and for a nation? Under your pitched tent, speak truth to the founding spirit of our nation and, as we say in America, they'll be on board.

Once they see that the President's personal testimony reflects the story of America's undeniable religious democracy, they will want one of their own. We're not talking Taliban here, or those tyrant clerics in Iran. We are, first, listening to the voices that spoke truth to our own founding, and then, with evangelical zeal, giving witness to what was handed down to us. Listening to and speaking about the voice of our founding is our first duty, even if, at times, in our current confusion we seem to babble truth into heresy.

Could it be that Moslems are saying no to our heresy and not to our democracy?

Isn't this what the first week of November is all about: that a vision of democracy rooted in the spiritual and religious life of a nation is possible in the Middle East, and recoverable here in America? Maybe liberal America does see, and fearfully understands the question put to us. Under all the Bush-bashing maybe this is what is frothing and simmering. If Bush wins in November so does the religious and spiritual foundations of democracy and its testimony to the rest of the world. Hold it high, this shimmering story of ours, and let it reflect the lighted torch of that tireless lady in the harbor.

Invite all the pople to the tent up and down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. And even those tired and poor Americans, who need to recall the stopry too. They need to hear the story again and reclaim it as their own. And if they spill the coffee, and bitch and shout, there are enough Iraqis inside to hush down any rudeness toward the hospitality of the host.

Go on Mr. Bush, cast out all fear, a crusade truly is needed. But who said anything about the Middle East? The crusade is needed not there, but here, in America.

As they say in America, God bless.

Steve L. Golay writes from Santa Cruz, CA. Too many years in the publishing industry. Now taking the plunge with occasional pieces and a quartet of novels about California and Abortion, California and Homosexuality, California and Marriage and California and the City of God.