Notebook: The Brutalizing of America

We Americans have always been a violent people, quick to flare up in self-righteous anger and lash out at our enemies. We are brutal, too. But the kind of brutality to which I am referring is not primarily physical, although often its consequences are. Rather, I am concerned with the passive brutality of men who seem not to possess reason; men who are irrational, unthinking, without life or sensibility; men without souls. Sometimes such men jab electrified cattle prods into people, let loose ...