A beloved uncle, now 93 years old, helped to sate my and my siblings’ voracious appetite for reading by regularly giving us books purchased at a second-hand bookstore near his place of business.

But he didn’t just pick up the first armful of books he saw; he himself was a fan of “ripping yarn” historical adventure stories, including the works of Samuel Shellabarger and Alexandre Dumas, and added them to the Hardy Boys mysteries.

Thus began what may be called a serendipitous indoctrination into a thread of “secular humanity”. These works contained a pervasive theme: a cruel, wicked, despotic, oppressive, corrupt, and ultimately illegitimate government of oligarchs wrongfully detaining and imprisoning the innocent– or the righteously rebellious– in horrific, monstrous prisons.

The Bastille; the Château d’If.

And parochial school imparted tales of Christian martyrs, cast into dungeons and eventually barbarically tortured and executed– again, by cruel, wicked, despotic, etc. governments.

Eventually, I was introduced to the worldwide wealth of literature touching upon forcible unjust imprisonment in physically and psychologically ruinous conditions without any process of law, or even rationality: Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, Vonnegut; Andersonville, “The Ox-Bow Incident”…

The cumulative effect of this reading imparted a fundamental morality, or at least nurtured a moral sensibility that can be summed up here as: it’s always the Barbarians, the Bad Guys, the Villains, the Black Hats who build the damned Bastilles! More precisely, Bastilles FOR the damned.

Conversely, the proliferation of such atrocities is a reliable indicator that the proliferators are not civilized persons and governments of humanity, compassion, and decency.

Yes, yes– there’s no black and white, it’s shades of gray, stereotypes and generalizations are not helpful, there are two sides to every story. I know about relativism, thanks. I also know that the “it’s all shades of gray” perspective cuts both ways, insofar as it can be just as easily invoked to obscure and mislead such black or white bits as can be discerned in our multiplex, fluid existence.

Well, obviously Amerika has long been a nation so bankrupt in political solutions that we have settled on a default option of criminalizing everything in sight, and creating a service-delivery system for incarceration that hangs like a hundred-pound malignant tumor from the tip of Uncle Sam’s nose.

So it’s not exactly a shock that our politicians take a “more of the same” approach by fusing our proclivity to warehouse humans who lack the means and status to ignore the law with impunity.

Still, on Bastille Day I couldn’t help but marvel, if that’s the right term, over how the US has sown a crop of a thousand little Bastilles around the world, and how our government has utterly dehumanized their “content” in every way possible.

Not least of which is reducing the prisoners to abstractions, elements in a tricky Rubik’s Cube of jurisprudence being endlessly rotated with no honest solution.

A similar operational ruthlessness exists in the ascendancy of the banksters and the political elite’s “No Insurance Company Left Behind” approach to health care. The present Unitary Executive is no different from his malevolent predecessor. Indeed, I apply the term to Mr. Obama because his own maladministration has substantially, if not entirely consistently, adopted the authoritarian, anti-Constitutional policies and practices devised and rationalized by Team Bush that effectively displaced political power and authority from the Constitutional trinity of power-sharing branches to the Executive Branch alone.

This circumstance, for better or worse, reveals that these depredations to the rule of law cannot be attributed to one “rogue” administration or group of ideologues; rather, it arises from a modern mind-set given over to amoral pragmatism, and a Möbius Strip of a corporatized duopoly in which our so very “electable” leaders put their (remaining) humanity into cryogenic suspension. Such hearts as they have may as well be immersed in liquid nitrogen.