During an interview last week with television personality Charles Grodin, Fox News’ Sean Hannity agreed to be water-boarded for charity. A bold pledge no one is sure to hold him to, but it is an interesting one to think about. Perhaps after he is water-boarded, Hannity will learn the golden rule the rest of us learned as four-year-olds back in preschool: treat others as you would like to be treated.

It is not my typical fare to make such a simple point, but Hannity and his minions’ ignorance of this rule are threatening the American Dream. They approach torture the way most people approach fun runs: as if beating the hell out of people to get answers is a community reflex for solving problems.

Perhaps he is right. Perhaps we should start teaching our children from an early age (say six or seven) that they should shove their classmates’ heads in toilets and then flush them in order to find out who their playground crush is, and no matter what their answer is, we should assume it is the truth. And then at age 16, when they are about to graduate from high school, we should teach them to drive bamboo shoots under people’s fingernails as a way of finding out who cheated on the trigonometry final. Colleges should start allowing students to put courses on “enhanced interrogation” toward graduation so that they are prepared to compete as citizens of the nation and the world. This is, according to Hannity and his ilk, the ideal world—the world that will keep us safe from evil and terrorism.

Something tells me that Sean Hannity, the family man, would not actually agree to instilling these values in our children and creating that world, but therein lies the root of the issue. He does not understand the judicial disconnect that allowing torture—or “enhanced interrogation tactics”—has on broader society. He does not understand that the same arguments that OK torture would OK those lessons above. We are not a nation that tortures, nor are we a people that beats our enemies to get answers. We should be ashamed and demand that justice be brought to all those who tortured, even if they were just following orders.

This is the last time I will be writing for THE GUSTAVIAN WEEKLY, and I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the issues and purposes of my commentary. I was having a hard time figuring out what, exactly, my purpose was writing here for this publication until I saw this clip from Hannity’s show, just days after watching him and many others criticize President Obama for using Dijon mustard on a hamburger.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I voted for Obama, but that does not make me a blind loyalist. When I heard a few weeks ago that not a single American would be prosecuted for torturing our enemies, I was appalled. The mainstream media is criticizing Obama for taking a page from Chavez’ book and being respectful toward the people with whom we disagree, but since when are we a people that snubs those with whom we do not get along?

Obama’s willingness to talk and reason with other nations should be seen as a strength, but the media should be going after him for not prosecuting any of the people involved in approving and carrying out the “enhanced interrogations”—let’s also start being honest, it’s torture—that now weighs like a badge of shame on our nation. It makes us no better than our so-called enemies, and our war against them no more just. Ending these torture tactics without bringing to justice the people who blindly carried them out endorses and vindicates those tactics, and that threatens the integrity of our justice system.

In the last two years I never cared about readership. I write these columns for the same reason I do the weekly radio show you never listen to: because someone needs to put this insane world into perspective. I am not so naïve to think that anyone should care about what I say, but if I can give a voice to those with no other venue for expression, I have done my job.

When I see interviews like those with Hannity and Grodin, I feel a sense of responsibility to show how dangerous people like Hannity are to the American Dream.

I’ll close this final column with a quote that is as true today as it was in 1972 when Hunter S. Thompson so eloquently penned it: “The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time—and the only real difference now … is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.”