Already, in his obituaries, he is being remembered more as a poet than as a politician, as a phenomenon more than a man. Poets are useful, even in politics. Phenomena can be beautiful. But the marginalization of Mario Cuomo was a deliberate political act, a bipartisan one, truth be told. It was a way to shuffle what he stood for off into decorous irrelevance. The people who sidelined Mario Cuomo from our national discussion did not include Ronald Reagan. It was Bill Clinton who did that and, sadly, Mario Cuomo himself, who, by the end of it, was so politically feeble that he lost to an unremarkable hack like George Pataki. Now Mario Cuomo is dead, and George Pataki is (seriously) contemplating a run for president of the United States. Now Mario Cuomo is dead, and his absence from our national discussion is being used in some quarters as a cautionary tale to the rising progressive movement within the Democratic party. The same forces that worked to marginalize him will be brought to bear at some point against Elizabeth Warren… You can count on that. Now Mario Cuomo is dead, and that seems like little more than confirmation of something we all suspected for decades.

—Charlie Pierce
Mario Cuomo, RIP

We are a little lost here in America. Too many of us have tuned out, and too many of us are deeply tuned in to the wrong things. Our eccentricities have curdled into crochets. Our love for the strange and deeply weird has soured into a devotion to the mean and deeply angry. Our renegade national soul has given itself up to petty outlawry. We have tailored the principles of our founding documents — flawed though their authors were — into cheap camouflage for our boring traditional grudges. None of these things are good things. But none of those things is permanent, either. Imagination always has been the way out — a faith in that which seems impossible, a trust that not every mystery is a murder mystery, and that not every mysterious creature is a monster. Imagination is the way out — a belief that safety is not necessarily the primary (or even the secondary) goal of democratic citizenship, and that a self-governing political commonwealth does not always come with a lifetime guarantee. Yes, we are a little lost here in America, but we can find our way, and the best way that we can find is the one that seems like the least secure, the darkest trail, the one with the long, sweeping bend in the road that leads god knows where. We must trust what we can imagine, and we must trust that what we can imagine is the product of what is the best of us. And, whether we imagine it or not, it’s going to happen anyway.

—Charlie Pierce
Goodbye to All That

The fact is that torture is still continuing today — both in the so called war on terror and also in plain sight in our own jails and prisons in this country. I mentioned in the piece you were referring to a number of ways that torture is still going on. And one of these involved the forced feeding that’s still happening at Guantanamo. This is what happens twice a day to those people who are on hunger strike. A cell extraction team of six people arrives in their cell and forcibly removes them from the cell. And then, as one of the people who’s suffered this describes, what they do is they actually strap the person down to a feeding chair — which they call a torture chair — but in order to make the process more painful, instead of attaching the prisoner’s arms to the arms of the chair they’re handcuffing them behind the person’s back and then strapping the person into the chair that way so it puts terrible pressure on the shoulder joints. And so there’s pain not only involved in the feeding itself but also in the physical restraint that’s going on when they shove a tube up someone’s nose and pump food into their stomach.

One of the people who wrote about it this for The New York Times said it this way:

It’s interesting to know that at the very same time this kind of force feeding has been going on — and as far as we know is still happening — exactly the same procedure was being used on prisoners in California in May of 2013 — so only a year and a half ago — when they also went on hunger strike. And they were striking about exactly the same issues. The two issues were indefinite detention — in other words in US prisons having prison sentences that last an undetermined number of years — 15 to life, 25 to life. And secondly, solitary confinement — being held in complete isolation from other human beings. And in May 2013 30,000 prisoners in California went on hunger strike, and when they did it they did it in direct solidarity and awareness that people in Guantanamo were doing the same over exactly the same two issues. So the connection between the US prisons and the war on terror is not a hard one to make — it’s a direct connection.

—Rebecca Gordon
Interview with CounterSpin

You are afraid all the time, and there is good reason to fear. You are alone with enemies all around you. No one cares about you. You can be attacked where you are, but it is more dangerous when you must move in the open. Groups roam the territory looking for victims. You cannot hide. Your only weapon is yourself. There is no authority to call on that you trust. Over and over you ask, “How did it come to this?” But it has come to this and for the foreseeable future.

Who are you? Where are you? You are not a soldier or a spy on some mission in a foreign land. You are not an undercover agent. You are not under siege. You are not a survivor of a civil war. You are not an explorer in some alien jungle, though in some ways you are. You are an inmate in an American prison. You belong to a peculiar version of hell, one that the American separation of church and state has imagined for you.

What did you do to get here? Perhaps you had too much dope on you when stopped or sold some of it to the wrong person to feed your habit. You have never been violent, but now you are surrounded by vicious inhabitants who enjoy hurting other people. Your chances of getting out of here in one piece are limited. They will depend on your wits and some luck, not the help of others, and if you do get out, there is nothing waiting for you — no job, no family likely to help, no skill set for use in an economy that has passed you by and that will reject you anyway for what you have become. There is nothing to do where you are, but if you try to do something useful, predators will come after you. The lowest common denominator rules here. Most of all, you should not be the only person asking, “How did it come to this?” — a question with many answers.

—Robert Ferguson
Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment

Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one. The same is true of the force which drives them on to expansion and world dominion. There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self-sacrifice. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective. He who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

—Eric Hoffer
The True Believer

Now consider the people who actually work in this environment. Do they feel like joining in the hymn to the market system? Well, there are the flight attendants, whose job was once widely thought to be glamorous but who are in fact notoriously overworked and who took a huge hit to their pensions in the big airline restructuring after 9/11.

Matters worsen as you descend from there, taking into account the people who handle the baggage, who help with the wheelchairs, and who mop up the platinum puke in the bathrooms. Years ago, according to a report issued by the Berkeley Labor Center, such work often paid a middle-class salary; today, thanks to outsourcing and other ingenious techniques of wage-suppression, the people who toil at these occupations can expect to spend their lives in a condition of near-poverty. There is a reason residents of SeaTac, Washington, the municipality that surrounds Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport and its several first-class lounges, voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour — and there’s a reason the entity leading the opposition to them was Alaska Airlines.

—Thomas Frank
First we kill All the Diamond-Class Five-Million Milers

It’s not just that Americans want a system that metes out punishment, it’s that — despite our Eighth Amendment — we are accepting of the cruelest punishment. And while it’s not legal, it exists and it’s pervasive. In theory, our prisons are holding cells for the worst offenders and centers for rehabilitation for the others. Inmates can work, learn, and prepare themselves for a more productive life in society. In reality, they are hellscapes of rape, abuse, and violence from gangs and guards.

At the for-profit East Mississippi Correctional Facility, for example, prisoners lacked functioning toilets and were forced to “defecate into Styrofoam trays or plastic trash bags” without any way of “ridding their cells of the waste other than tossing it onto the housing unit through the slots in their doors.” Mentally ill prisoners were left to their own devices, with terrible consequences. “Prisoners engage in gross acts of self-mutilation, including electrocution, swallowing shards of glass and razors, and tearing into their flesh with sharp objects.”

These kinds of stories aren’t hard to find. Nor is evidence of our epidemic of prison sexual assault. “Roughly 200,000 men, women, and children reported being sexually abused in detention facilities in 2011, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has anonymously self-reported data from inmates,” writes Carla Murphy for Colorlines. Because of shame from the assault and fear of their assailants, the actual number is almost certainly higher, as many victims don’t report their abuse to the authorities, in part because guards are often as responsible for rape as other inmates.

Americans know this. They know that prisons are horrible. They know that going to jail vastly increases your odds of being raped, attacked, or worse. And yet, this does nothing to shift the overwhelming punitiveness of American public opinion. Indeed, prison rape is a punch line, summed up in don’t drop the soap or watch out, you might become a punk. Americans don’t recoil from assaults in our jails and prisons; they welcome them as deserts for people who commit crimes.

Our prisons, then, are sites for retribution. As Robert A. Ferguson, professor of law and literature at Columbia University, notes in his book Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment, Americans routinely transition from a rational view of criminals (“because your act and your mental state at the time were blameworthy, you deserve punishment”) to a moralized one (“you have a hardened, abandoned and malignant heart” and “you are evil and rotten to the core”), to a scornful one, where the criminal is “scum” and deserves “whatever cruel indignity I choose to inflict on you.” You see this most vividly in the reactions to police shootings of black Americans. It’s not enough for the shooting to be justified, as a grand jury decided in the case of Ferguson’s Officer Darren Wilson. No, the victim must be demonized, hence the chorus of critics against Michael Brown: He was a thug who deserved his fate.

—Jamelle Bouie
Dick Cheney’s America

I have a close friend on permanent disability. He votes reliably for the most extreme conservative in every election. Although he’s a Nevadan, he lives just across the border in California, because that progressive state provides better social safety nets for its disabled. He always votes for the person most likely to slash the program he depends on daily for his own survival. It’s like clinging to the end of a thin rope and voting for the rope-cutting razor party.

The people who most support the Republicans and the Tea Party carry a secret burden. Many know that they are one medical emergency or broken down car away from ruin, and they blame the government. They vote against their own interests, often hurting themselves in concrete ways, in a vain attempt to deal with their own, misguided shame about being poor. They believe “freedom” is the answer, even though they live a form of wage indenture in a rigged system.

—Edwin Lyngar
I Was Poor, but a GOP Die-Hard: How I Finally Left the Politics of Shame

There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of governmental power, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power.

—Theodore Roosevelt
Limitations on Governmental Power (pdf) — 9 September 1912