Digby - Read It All

I've been feeling this sort of melancholy(?), I'm not sure that is the correct word. But the country I thought I lived in as a young man, a country of possibility, of good-hearted people, of an idea that people counted, of torture as completely beyound the pale, well, maybe it was always just a delusion.

"At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them. "