Sometime this month -the exact date is not important, because everything is relative- we are celebrating Albert Einstein and his breakthrough “Theory of relativity.” This may have very little to do with what's happening now in the world, but it also may be pivotal, since time and space are not fixed and everything connects with everything else.

The theory of relativity has been oft-misused, especially in the common language, to express the impermanence of any notion, the relativity of our perceptions, the conditioning factors that help us land on a certain set of believes. One of the mantras of the popular view of relativity is that context is everything, nothing could be analysed out of context unless one wants to hinder the validity of one's rational.

Since context is everything, the Media – that manifestation of everything – has learned to try to use it well, including techniques to in fact create the context, the news and the spin.

But the Bush Administration has won any potential award on terms of “contextualizing the context” of things. For instance, a few weeks ago we heard every person from the Administration expressing outrage, and personal offense against Amnistia International because the organization compared Guantanamo Bay's naval base to the Soviet's Gulag.

The interesting part is to hear why that's not a Gulag: it's not so because America stands for freedom around the world, America defends human rights, and America always has good intentions. None of those reasons address the fundamental problem of a continuos stream of revelations, one worst than the previous one, coming out from the razor wired fences of that islandish setting.

The President and the rest mention America as if they were mentioning a vaccine against all evil, as if anything that comes from America is inherently good, and they don't plan on bothering themselves with those ridiculous things called evidence.

But this spin does seem to work, because regardless of all the ugly pictures we have seen, and the many more they spared us, regardless of new documents showing that a prisoner was tortured with express authorization from the highest spheres, in fact, from Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld himself, the American people still believe that the thousands of pictures, and the many stories are just isolated incidents.

Let alone the Downing Street memo that openly admits a scheme of deception, to go to the Iraq war regardless of where the intelligence was about to lead us. But who can pay attention to that in the context of the latest Michael Jackson's saga?

Indeed, everything is relative. Probably the Soviets may find offensive to be compared with Guantánamo's system. While the ones suffering and being tortured should realize that in the context of all the atrocities in the world, they are not all that bad.

There is a very clear difference in having the Koran flushed down the toilet and having it splashed with urine. Which you would prefer for your children's pictures, for instance, or your Bible?