We were late for a dinner party.
My wife and kids were in the back seat, and I was motoring over the 101 Freeway through the Cahuenga Pass.
And then I saw it, silhouetted on a hilltop.
A giant cross, radiating its silver light.
It was as if someone had cut a big round silvery moon into two ribbons, pasted them athwart each other, and stuck it in the night sky.
For an instant I thought, “How pretty.”
And then the significance of what I was seeing sank in, and I felt invaded.
Here it was a beautiful night. The sky was cloudless with a star glimmering here and there.
And there was this shape garishly plastered against the sky.
And it was the shape of a grisly apparatus of torture.
What the hell!
Who ever thought it was OK to shove this thing into my field of vision?
A grim instrument of capital punishment.
A barbaric artifact from a time when lawbreakers were publicly crucified and left to die a lingering, excruciating death.
Why was I being reminded of this spectacle - this - this grotesque obscenity?
Here I was, driving to a nice dinner on a tranquil night. The car was filled with the strains of the Pastoral Symphony. The wife and kids were quietly enjoying the ride.
Why did this stomach-turning thing have to raise its ugly head?
Was I the only one to grasp the significance of what I was seeing?
Was no one else outraged?
If this were a neon replica of a giant female breast, people would be up in arms.
If this was a neon model of a giant middle finger thrust into the sky, people would be pulling over in droves and sputtering into their cell phones.
But here was this ghastly testament to the savagery of a bygone era.
And people drove on as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
How come they didn’t realize that they were looking at an ancient version of a gas chamber or electric chair?
Didn’t they realize they might as well be staring at a syringe for a lethal injection, blown up larger than life and illuminated against the heavens?
And then I thought of all the other places where this obscene image was found.
Places of public worship.
Buildings where people go on Sundays to commune with the intelligent being that created life on earth.
At least the CIA has the decency to practice torture in remote places known as dark sites. No one is even supposed to know where they are.
Why are we still flaunting this grisly instrument of torture and death on our most hallowed structures?
Why is it that I cannot pass a place to do reverence to a higher power without finding it decorated with a shameful instrument that was designed to inflict excruciating pain and humiliation?
Isn’t it time we refined our sensibilities?
Isn’t it time that every time we see one of these things, we see an innocent man of Middle Eastern origin being strapped to a waterboard, or having his testicles hooked up to electrodes, or subjected to any of the degrading practices that meet the legal definition of torture?
If we could just recover the power of imagination, would we ever allow such a thing from the Dark Ages to deface our landscape?
And then I remembered the times we were living in.
It was just a few decades ago that the CIA fought Communism by recruiting barbaric warlords who were throwbacks to the Dark Ages.
The medieval wing of Islam was found to be a most useful ally in beating back a liberal, progressive agenda, the way that a mullah beats back a woman with the audacity to bare her face or drive a car.
Just look at how our homegrown Christian Taliban are mobilized to thwart enlightened reforms that would bring the U.S. into line with industrialized democracies in Europe and elsewhere.
I mean, come on. Who did I think I was fooling?
The problem wasn’t a silver cross in the sky.
It was humanity hanging from Old Ike's cross of iron.
It was the supreme rulers of the planet hung up on the bloodthirsty logic of human sacrifice.
It was a belief system that the sons of man had to be scapegoated and crucified en masse - whole economies bled to death, millions stripped of their livelihoods, turned out of their homes with no place to lay their heads, buried under mountains of collective debt, and left to die in godforsaken alleys and tent cities of hunger, illness and neglect.
And all for what? So that a tiny elect can be enthroned in its material idea of heaven?
No wonder ours is an age in which torture has made a comeback as the latest tool in the counterterrorist arsenal.
Really, when you come right down to it, it isn’t that much of a stretch to believe that torture keeps America safe.
It isn’t that far out of line to believe that torture saves American lives.
Not if you believe that an act or torture culminating in death can save the entire human race!
