“You Can’t Handle the Truth”

It’s one of Jack Nicholson’s great scenes. In A Few Good Men (which was released in 1992 and set, eerily, at Guantanamo) Col. Nathan Jessup (Nicholson) responds to the Navy prosecutor’s (Tom Cruise) demand for “the truth” about the torture and murder of a Marine private. “You can’t handle the truth,” Jessup sneers, raging against those who “sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it.” Like we do with the CIA. We do not want to see what some do to protect us from others who would do far worse. We look the other way because we are afraid. But also, I think, because we are ashamed.

The dominant American myth is that we are different, special and by implication better than other nations. That is the basis of American exceptionalism. America is the city on a hill, the first new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to equality.

But our myths contain potent contradictions that we prefer not to confront:

• Slavery in the land of liberty and the legacy of inequality that endures long after emancipation.
• The frontier, which was not a vast and empty open space waiting to be settled by yeoman farmers, but the home of millions of native peoples.
• And now torture.

America, at first alone, insisted on accountability at Nuremburg after World War II. It's hard to imagine that we would not demand accountability now, were the crimes reported yesterday not our own.