Mad that hundreds of men and women are being held and tortured without legal recourse;

Mad that such actions only make the rest of the world angrier at America and therefore more likely to attack us in the future;

Mad that a handful of powerful men are destroying our chances to bring about resolution in the Middle East.

And mad that at one point I dreamed of being a part of it all. Seriously.

I was a junior in high school when 9/11 happened. I waved the flags, prayed for our troops, and supported the Patriot Act. I even went a step further—I decided that I wanted to join the CIA. Already fascinated by international affairs and politics, I was enchanted by the thought of accessing/gathering raw data, traveling, and serving my country.

It wasn’t until spring semester of my sophomore year that I changed my mind. I was meeting with a ret. Marine Captain to plan my course into the agency, via military intelligence. Near the end, I told him how excited I was at the prospect of developing my analytical skills in combination with physical ability. He paused.

“Um… actually you probably won’t be analyzing much, per say. Why don’t we focus on getting you physically prepared?”

That was all he had to say. It suddenly struck me. As an operative I would be a tool. Thinking isn’t a skill you want in a tool. (Imagine a hammer looking up at you saying “Um, are you sure you want to hit the nail again?”) I valued my capacity for individual thought too much to be reduced to someone else’s tool.

Three years later, I am so incredibly thankful I changed my direction when I did. It has since become clear to me that the CIA, military, and Bush administration were not who I, in my teenage naïveté, supposed them to be. Silly me. I thought that only the “bad guys” tortured their prisoners. They were the ones with secret prisons and sensory deprivation techniques. I was wrong.

Yesterday’s BBC headline says it all:“US Interrogation Policy Condemned”. The adjacent BBC side panel reads, “CIA ‘Secret War’”, listing key stories over the past few months: “CIA admits water-boarding” reads one. “Inquiry into destroyed CIA tapes” reads another. And, my personal favorite, “US ‘may’ use waterboarding again”.

Yet everyone tries to pretend that we are still the “good guys.” The US Senate Armed Services Committee’s 18-month investigation continuously illustrates this duality:

On the one hand someone admits that yes, water-boarding has been used and may be used again,

then on the other hand, the Bush administration says that all detainees have been treated humanely.

There is no such thing as humane abuse.

Luckily I decided to follow my own path. But I often think of those who choose to follow their patriotism and idealism– those who perhaps discovered too late that Americans do torture, that presidents lie, and that wars are not just. And that makes me mad.

[photo courtesy of www.ongoing-tales.com]

Diablo Cody: She stripped…and no one wants to forget that

Gas has almost doubled in a year. I smell the fumes of a conspiracy…

Blohan is poor and boring.

The Pentagon wanted Guantanamo Bay interrogation notes destroyed. Conspiracy #2?

Rupert Everett isn’t a fan of America. That’s okay. I can’t remember ever being a fan of him.

The dreaded College Wait List just got more confusing.

Midwesterners are drenched. But if you live there…your basement has already told you this.

Man, do I love the Golden Girls

This is pretty much the scariest picture that has ever been burned into my rentas

I’m not a stoner, and I don’t really find big boob jokes/pot jokes/fart jokes/beer jokes particularly funny. So why the heck did I like this film? Well, besides Neil Patrick Harris (fantastic) and White Castle (yum), I think the creators, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, are on to something here. The New York Times reviewed the new film recently, calling it a “stoner protest film”, due to the combination of drug humor and sharp political satire–what’s more, the review was actually quite positive.

For those of you who don’t know, Harold and Kumar’s first film involved two stoners determined to make it to White Castle in order to satisfy their munchies. The second film, however, as the name suggests, involves the ultimate stoner vacation (Amsterdam) gone horribly wrong. Harold, a Korean-American, and Kumar, an Indian-American are thrown off their flight after trying to light up in the bathroom. An overzealous Homeland Security officer draws the conclusion that North Korea and Al Quada have teamed up, and throws both of them in Guantánamo Bay. Hyjinks ensue, of course, but so does a very interesting treatment of race in the post-9/11 era.

Think back to all the classic boy-humor movies: where are the non-whites? They aren’t there, for the most part, and if they are, they are reduced to a comedic stereotype. Not only do Harold and Kumar buck conventional racial stereotypes (which are instead replaced by classic stoner stereotypes), but they are also not, as often happens with non-white leads, forced to actively address those stereotypes either. Take The Namesake for example, a recent film starring Kal Penn (the actor who plays Kumar), in which Penn’s character struggles between honoring his culture and fitting in with those around him. Neither Kumar nor Harold are struggling with much besides the desire for more pot.

The goal, the writers argue in the New York Times article, is to present two characters who are “beyond racism but live in a world that isn’t”. That the Harold and Kumar franchise is humor for the bong-loving set is exactly the point–the focus is shifted from the “moral outrage” that accompanies most treatments of race and onto the sheer stupidity of racism.

So even if you’ve long since moved on from frat humor, you may want to reconsider your stance on Harold and Kumar: there is more to their pot-fueled journey than you might think.