"This is the last stage of inequality ... It is here that all individuals become equal again because they are nothing." --Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality

So again it came to pass: The President mouthed the rhetoric of his speechwriters while the assembled members of House and Senate supplied punctuation with their scripted applause, in what has become for them a ritual of self-abasement second only to the act of legislating. When did courtesy, much less critical thought, demand such fealty--the fealty, indeed, of minions? When did this chamber bar from its polished, well-lit surfaces and leather-backed chairs the contemplative silence with which a free people protects itself from error, tokenism and demagoguery? To our shame, the chamber resonated with applause and not with outraged silence. Instead, the silence of our outrage will be the disgrace that each of us bears before history.

(applause)

It is tragic, not comical, that this President used his final State of the Union address to make a pitch for his legacy; mad, not absurd, that much of the mainstream media dignified that pitch; and as contemptuous as it was contemptible that either group expected us to believe it.

(applause)

What can the state be of a union inured to such dissimulation, hypocrisy and scorn? What has become of us as a people that, without objection, the events of seven years should be reduced to a single man's legacy, to an up or down vote, with us or against us, good or evil? How many lives are forgotten, thrown away, in the figure of one man?

(applause)

Bush cannot be our alibi or our scapegoat.

(applause)

Yes, he led us into a war of choice, based on lies; but we knew then that they were lies, and we followed him. We can hardly disgrace ourselves further; but let us not add to the terror and injustice of over a million deaths the cowardice of blame and self-absolution.

(applause)

Yes, it was under Bush that indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition and torture were made to seem palatable; but we swallowed. It is we as much as he who pretend that waterboarding is simulated, rather than real, drowning; that torture only counts if it approaches the intensity of pain associated with organ failure or death; that writhing, naked men piled one atop another are a reflection of only a few rather than of all of us.

(applause)

It is we as much as he who have accepted the limbo of men in orange jumpsuits kept forever in cages in Cuba, or parceled out to nominally secret prisons in eastern Europe, or passed like batons to surrogates less encumbered by law and humanity than even ourselves.

(applause)

Yes, Bush denied Jose Padilla habeas corpus and, through solitary confinement, drove him mad; but the madness of a mere man each of us acquiesced to bear. Yes, men have preferred to hang themselves rather than endure our treatment of them; but what is that compared to a million deaths?

(applause)

When will imprisonment and torture trouble the nation of Supermax prisons, of capital punishment, of Rodney King and Amadou Diallo, of 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population? We are a nation that sleeps well at night.

(applause)

May Haditha and Fallujah and Nisour Square be forgotten; may white phosphorus and cluster bombs be forgotten; may decapitation strikes and the bombardment of wedding parties be forgotten. Forget as well habeas corpus, the Fourth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions. Imagine nothing; accept the solitary confinement of a nation. We have agreed to this.

(applause)

May Hurricane Katrina be forgotten. May those drowned in attics, abandoned in nursing homes, exposed on rooftops and expired in the Superdome--those who hadn't the nobility to be killed by enemies--be forgotten. Instead, let the poor and the black find good homes elsewhere. Let New Orleans rise from the ashes, polished, well-lit, applauded, without them.

(applause)

Bush alone isn't building a wall along our southern border. Bush alone isn't responsible for a nation whose presidential candidates are afraid to be misidentified as Muslim or correctly identified as Mormon; or a nation in which one candidate is dismissed as "that bitch" in a televised "debate" without comment. No, we as much as he assented to such xenophobia, racism, and misogyny--and to the coarse manipulation of our bigotry.

(applause)

We did not protest when, instead of "citizens," Bush called us "consumers"; when a war was sold to us with a marketing campaign; or when candidates succeeded or failed in primaries according to their "branding strategy." We were willing to dress up as snowmen to ask questions of those who would lead us.

(applause)

We have not held the President accountable, neither trying him for the laws and oaths he has broken, nor challenging the signing statements by which he has claimed exemption. Why should we in turn expect him to hold accountable a predatory elite represented by the likes of Enron, Halliburton, and subprime mortgage usurers--though together with the President's fiscal policies they have brought our economy to the brink of a second Great Depression?

(applause)

We have accepted blatant election fraud. We have watched citizens be disenfranchised. We have stood by while, in our country, free speech was cordoned off in zones; while democratically elected governments in Venezuela and Palestine have been subverted by our own government; and while our leaders have supported dictators in Egypt and Pakistan, puppets in Iraq and Afghanistan and the apartheid regime of Israel.

(applause)

"Democracy" is as "civilization" once was: the white man's burden and shibboleth.

(applause)

What then is the state of such a union as this?

(applause)

How can Bush's negligence and culpability be commensurate to this mournsome travesty, this unfolding disaster?

(applause)

Condemn him we must.

(applause)

As for ourselves? The applause, supine, sycophantic, surreal, will die down and eventually be forgotten. Then will the chamber be left, filled with our hollow, our awful, our shameful silence. For us there can be no exoneration; only disgrace and the undeserved hope of pardon.