Carl Kassell Is Still In Egypt

In this morning's NPR newscast, while reporting on the Supreme Court's refusal to hear appeals from prisoners at Guantanamo, Carl Kassell said that this was a victory for the Bush administration in "its" war on terrorism.

Today, this inevitably reminds me of a portion of the Haggadah, the book setting for the ritual of the Passover seder. The point of the seder is to retell the story of Passover in several different ways. One way is the story of the four children, the wise child, the wicked child, the simple child and the child who is too young to ask. Each asks about the Passover story in a different way and each gets a suitable response. The wicked son asks "What does this ritual mean to you?" and, by saying "you" instead of "us" he has taken himself out of the Jewish people. The response is that "This is the feast commanded by G-d when he took me out of Egypt." The implication is that not only were we personally redeemed from Egypt when our ancestors were redeemed, but that, because he has separated himself from the Jewish people, the wicked son would not have been redeemed.

Similarly, NPR does not see itself as part of the war on terror and, implicitly, as part of the American people.