Dr. Hibbert: Now, a little death anxiety is normal. You can expect to go through five stages. The first is denial.

Homer: No way! Because I’m not dying! [hugs Marge]

Dr. Hibbert: The second is anger.

Homer: Why you little! [steps towards Dr. H]

Dr. Hibbert: After that comes fear.

Homer: What’s after fear? What’s after fear? [cringes]

Dr. Hibbert: Bargaining.

Homer: Doc, you gotta get me out of this! I’ll make it worth your while!

Dr. Hibbert: Finally, acceptance.

Homer: Well, we all gotta go sometime.

Dr. Hibbert: Mr. Simpson, your progress astounds me.

Frank Rich has been to see the latest Errol Morris film, “Standard Operating Procedure”. In fact he was part of a “goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment” at a Museum of Modern Art screening.

One thing that struck him was the contrast between the opulent setting and the subject of the film: torture committed with official complicity at the White House level. Do we really care about that, still? It all seems so 2005…

Rich thinks that George Voinovich, Senator from Ohio, points to the central issue.

“The truth of the matter,” Mr. Voinovich said, is that “we haven’t sacrificed one darn bit in this war, not one. Never been asked to pay for a dime, except for the people that we lost.”

This is how the war planners wanted it, of course. No new taxes, no draft, no photos of coffins, no inconveniences that might compel voters to ask tough questions. This strategy would have worked if the war had been the promised cakewalk. But now it has backfired. A home front that has not been asked to invest directly in a war, that has subcontracted it to a relatively small group of volunteers, can hardly be expected to feel it has a stake in the outcome five stalemated years on.

The original stakes (saving the world from mushroom clouds and an alleged ally of Osama bin Laden) evaporated so far back they seem to belong to another war entirely. What are the stakes we are asked to believe in now? In the largely unwatched House hearings on Wednesday, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, tried to get at this by asking what some 4,000 “sons and daughters” of America had died for.

General Petraeus replied in terms of national interest, apparently without irony. This is certainly not in Iraq’s national interest. It’s in our national interest, if you’re the sort who thinks that what’s good for ExxonMobile is good for the country. Personally, I’m not so sure. Prices at a gas station in Belmont I pass once a week have been ten cents higher each Friday; this week premium was $4.15, regular $3.95.

Which, I’m sorry to admit, hits most of us harder than the collective guilt of having allowed our officials to order our interrogators to torture people in the obviously ridiculous hope that some useful information could be gathered. And then done nothing about it when we caught them.

Or is it really that Americans feel justified in torturing people? Because after all we’re good. Thus, by definition, whatever we do had to be done. It’s not our fault torture was called for. It’s not our fault Iraq appears to be on the brink of chaos, just because we helped Saddam take over, then armed him, and finally attacked him as one in our string of endless enemies. It’s not our fault Iran hates us, just because we overthrew a duly elected government and substituted a repressive and brutal regime, which they finally managed to throw out. What, after all, should have been our preferred method? It’s not like we were going to leave them and their oil in peace; it’s not like we were going to consider their interests in any serious way whatsoever. What tools remain other than brutal repression?

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.