From this morning's (London) Times, obtained in a tiny little shop run by a tiny little woman whose pleasant accent I can zhoost bahrli oonershtahnt:

VIRTUALLY everybody is capable of the abuse committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, psychologists said yesterday.

The degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war was not the result of particular cruelty or evil on the part of the abusers, but was more heavily influenced by social processes to which all of us are susceptible.

This conclusion is drawn from a fairly massive meta-study of 25,000 studies involving about 8 million participants, and shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the famous Milgram experiment (dramatized, incidentally, in the 1975 William Shatner TV movie The Tenth Level, which I mention because it's a fond memory -- at age 12, watching Captain Kirk fooling with the dark side scared the hell out of me).

If you read down in the Milgram link, you'll find that a quarter of a century later, psychologist Thomas Blass collected results from similar experiments, and found that a frighteningly constant percentage of us -- 61 to 66 percent -- are willing to kill under the command of authority, independent of when or where the experiment is done.

I'm tempted to digress into Bush-era snark, but this is bigger than that.  I only wish more of us knew just how fragile and pliable all of our psyches truly are.  Any group of people, anywhere, properly conditioned, can be led kill, certain they are doing the right thing.

Deference to authority is the only real requisite condition.

And it's precisely how the word "patriotism" is actively being redefined.

Watching our leaders and media and half the damn country fool with the dark side... now, at age 41, that scares the hell out of me.