Haunted House

Sorry to have been silent for a few days. I've been contemplating the future of America, and also the ambiguous numbers in the competitive Senate races, and thinking about the relationship between liberals and business. And I'll talk about that subject one of these days, but right now, I have to tell you, I've got the blues.

Why, you ask? Why the blues? Look at the excellent polling numbers! Webb has tied up the race in Virginia! Smile, smile! Well, yes, those are good things. But I have papers to grade, and when you have papers to grade you can't ever really be happy. I worry about my students, I have to say. The other day, one of them mentioned, before class started and by way of chit-chat, that he didn't think sensory deprivation constituted torture. I explained that he might feel differently if it were inflicted upon him with an unknown duration of, you know, months, as opposed to being an imagined experience that he was conjecturing with an idea of knowing how long it would last, and implicitly with the idea of trying it out voluntarily. There is nothing worse, I said, than being left completely alone with one's thoughts; and you could consider the entirety of human history as the single-minded avoidance of exactly this condition. Why else do we consider hermits to be such freaks? Why else do I have my TV, cell phone, radio, and computer on at all times, and a book always at my elbow? Because I'm afraid of myself, like any right-thinking person.

So I asked the students about waterboarding, and was met with a blank stare. No one had ever heard of it. Well, I said, we're doing it, so you'd better know what it is. And I explained, with an emphasis on what I consider to be the scariest part of the whole thing: the emphasis on technology; the slow, deliberative, methodical inflicting of the most immediate kind of pain. Look at the picture above, and shudder.

We produce sensory deprivation by putting people in a smothery suit. We waterboard people with some ghoulish device over their faces, a kind of SaranWrap, that keeps them from actually drowning. When we send people off to Syria and Egypt to be tortured, those prisons helpfully construct little mini-cells, the size of a coffin, to hold them for years. Just ask the completely innocent Canadian guy who was just released after 10 months in one. There is, as there has always been, a deliberate technology to the administering of torture; and that technology has an interesting relationship to the public discourse.

Consider, for example, the wise words of Steve Moore from the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth, who said on Bill Maher's show the other week that he would like Jack Bauer to head the CIA. You know, Jack Bauer. The guy Kiefer Sutherland plays on 24. He beats people up, I gather. So for Moore, what we need is a guy who knows how to throw a punch. The idea of the mechanisms of torture is nowhere to be seen.

Or, take John Yoo's new book, which I have not and will not read. In the review of it in the Times today, we see Yoo's wisdom on the subject of Abu Ghraib:

Of the Schlesinger report on the Abu Ghraib prison, Mr. Yoo says it found that the abuses there "resulted not from orders out of Washington, but from flagrant disregard of interrogation and detention rules by the guards." He does not grapple with those portions of the report that found "there is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels."

John Yoo can say this because the Abu Ghraib abuses were so low-tech, not because they were uncoordinated (which they quite obviously weren't); it's the same explanation Rush Limbaugh gave for these events: frat house hazing, Middle East prison-style. Totally unpremeditated, completely impromptu. Our failure to face how we administer torture when we are doing it as part of a deliberate plan allows Yoo and Limbaugh and everyone on the right to perform a placatory double-speak, simultaneously saying that torture is ok, and, in the instances where we actually get to see it, that it didn't happen and would be unacceptable if it did. Everyone can feel ok, and still permit these things to happen.

And that, in turn, brings us to Cheney, where all roads eventually seem to lead. You probably heard about Cheney's gaffe on Hannity's show, where he said that dunking someone in a little water was a "no-brainer" from his point of view if it would lead to busting up a terrorist plot. And you probably heard about it because Tony Snow immediately had to play a stupid game of pretending that Cheney wasn't talking about waterboarding, but was instead, preposterously, talking about just, you know, dunking someone in water. Like at the fair. Maybe they even throw a baseball at a target.

Look. Of course Cheney was talking about waterboarding. But that's not the point. The point is that the Right will push us toward torture by never specifying what they mean by it -- precisely because it would then materialize from a vague concept to a list of highly imaginable, and terrifying, methods. So the question for Cheney isn't "did you mean waterboarding?"; it's "how can you possibly make light of a technique that involves deliberately tying a person to a table with his head lower than his feet, and covering his face with a plastic device that prevents him from breathing, and then pouring water onto his face such that he has the sensation of drowning and can't get his breath, and giving him the impression that you will not let him get his breath, so much so that he may actually pass out or even die; well, whatever that is, Mr. Vice-President, surely it is not a no-brainer?"

If the Dems take a House on November 7th, there will be a lot of talk about exactly what to have hearings on first. And there's a long list, and it should be used wisely. And I'm not sure the torture thing will play as well as hearings on, say, war profiteering in Iraq. But I am sure that this little rhetorical game needs to end. We'd better get clear about what we're doing to other people. And we need to get clear by getting graphic. So Dems, do me a favor: get so graphic that even my lackadaisical students will know about it.