"In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. . . . In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"
Now that even Republicans are gagging on the war on terror, as lavish descriptions of psychosis-level torture seep into the mainstream - and as a flailing, unpopular president clings in the face of reason to his right to maintain a gulag of "enemy combatants" (for God's sake, George, most of them are innocent) - Americans are finding themselves on the brink of the moral debate they've been trying to avoid for the last, oh, 50 years or so. It's been brewing my whole lifetime.
