Wrong Things Getting Done Anyway

The difference between right and wrong is obvious to almost everyone by the end of kindergarten. Temptations persist and everyone does things great and small known to be wrong when enticements and advantages outweigh punishments. C’mon, you know you do it. I do, too. Only at the conclusion of a law degree or the start of a political career (funny how those two often coincide) do things get particularly fuzzy. One might add military service to those exceptions except that servicemen are trained not to think, simply do (i.e., follow orders without question). Anyone with functioning ethics and morality also recognizes that in legitimate cases of things getting unavoidably fuzzy in a hypercomplex world, the dividing line often can’t be established clearly. Thus, venturing into the wide, gray, middle area is really a signal that one has probably already gone too far. And yet, demonstrating that human society has not really progressed ethically despite considerable gains in technical prowess, egregiously wrong things are getting done anyway.

The whopper of which nearly everyone is guilty (thus, guilty pleasure) is … the Whopper. C’mon, you know you eat it do it. I know I do. Of course, the irresistible and ubiquitous fast food burger is really only one example of a wide array of foodstuffs known to be unhealthy, cause obesity, and pose long-term health problems. Doesn’t help that, just like Big Tobacco, the food industry knowingly refines their products (processed foods, anyway) to be hyperstimuli impossible to ignore or resist unless one is iron willed or develops an eating disorder. Another hyperstimulus most can’t escape is the smartphone (or a host of other electronic gadgets). C’mon, you know you crave the digital pacifier. I don’t, having managed to avoid that particular trap. For me, electronics are always only tools. However, railing against them with respect to how they distort cognition (as I have) convinces exactly no one, so that argument goes on the deferral pile.

Another giant example not in terms of participation but in terms of effect is the capitalist urge to gather to oneself as much filthy lucre as possible only to sit heartlessly on top of that nasty dragon’s hoard while others suffer in plain sight all around. C’mon, you know you would do it if you could. I know I would — at least up to a point. Periods of gross inequality come and go over the course of history. I won’t make direct comparisons between today and any one of several prior Gilded Ages in the U.S., but it’s no secret that the existence today of several hundy billionaires and an increasing number of mere multibillionaires represents a gross misallocation of financial resources: funneling the productivity of the masses (and fiat dollars whiffed into existence with keystrokes) into the hands of a few. Fake philanthropy to launder reputations fail to convince me that such folks are anything other than miserly Scrooges fixated on maintaining and growing their absurd wealth, influence, and bogus social status at the cost of their very souls. Seriously, who besides sycophants and climbers would want to even be in the same room as one of those people (names withheld)? Maybe better not to answer that question.

Wrong Things Wrong (redux)

Cynics knew it was inevitable: weaponized drones and robots. Axon Enterprises, Inc., maker of police weaponry (euphemistically termed “public safety technologies”), announced its development of taser equipped drones presumed capable of neutralizing an active shooter inside of 60 seconds. Who knows what sorts of operating parameters restrict their functions or if they can be made invulnerable to hacking or disallowed use as offensive weapons?

A sane, civilized society would recognize that, despite bogus memes about an armed society being a polite society, the prospect of everyone being strapped (like the fabled Old American West) and public spaces (schools, churches, post offices, laundromats, etc.) each being outfitted with neutralizing technologies is fixing the wrong problem. But we are no longer a sane society (begging the question whether we ever were). So let me suggest something radical yet obvious: the problem is not technological, it’s cultural. The modern world has made no progress with respect to indifference toward the suffering of others. Dehumanizing attitudes and technologies are no longer, well, medieval, but they’re no less cruel. For instance, people are not put in public stocks or drawn and quartered anymore, but they are shamed, cancelled, tortured, terrorized, propagandized, and abandoned in other ways that allow maniacs to pretend to others and to themselves that they are part of the solution. Hard to believe that one could now feel nostalgia for the days when, in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting, calls for gun control were met with inaction (other then empty rhetoric) rather than escalation.

The problem with diagnosing the problem as cultural is that no one is in control. Like water, culture goes where it goes and apparently sinks to its lowest ebb. Attempts to channel, direct, and uplift culture might work on a small scale, but at the level of society — and with distorted incentives freedom is certain to deliver — malefactors are guaranteed to appear. Indeed, anything that contributes to the arms race (now tiny, remote-controlled, networked killing devices rather than giant atomic/nuclear ones) only invites greater harm and is not a solution. Those maniacs (social and technical engineers promising safety) have the wrong things wrong.

Small, insular societies with strict internal codes of conduct may have figured out something that large, free societies have not, namely, that mutual respect, knowable communities, and repudiation of advanced technologies give individuals something and someone to care about, a place to belong, and things to do. When the entire world is thrown open, such as with social media, populations become atomized and anonymized, unable to position or understand themselves within a meaningful social context. Anomie and nihilism are often the rotten fruit. Splintered family units, erosion of community involvement, and dysfunctional institutions add to the rot. Those symptoms of cultural collapse need to be addressed even if they are among the most difficult wrong things to get right.

Bad as You Wanna Be

The end of every U.S. presidential administration is preceded by a spate of pardons and commutations — the equivalents of a get-out-of-jail-free card offered routinely to conspirators collaborators with the outgoing executive and general-purpose crony capitalists. This practice, along with diplomatic immunity and supranational elevation of people (and corporations-as-people) beyond the reach of prosecution, is a deplorable workaround obviating the rule of law. Whose brilliant idea it was to offer special indulgence to miscreants is unknown to me, but it’s pretty clear that, with the right connections and/or with enough wealth, you can essentially be as bad as you wanna be with little fear of real consequence (a/k/a too big to fail a/k/a too big to jail). Similarly, politicians, whose very job it is to manage the affairs of society, are free to be incompetent and destructive in their brazen disregard for needs of the citizenry. Only modest effort (typically a lot of jawing directed to the wrong things) is necessary to enjoy the advantages of incumbency.

In this moment of year-end summaries, I could choose from among an array of insane, destructive, counter-productive, and ultimately self-defeating nominees (behaviors exhibited by elite powers that be) as the very worst, the baddest of the bad. For me, in the largest sense, that would be the abject failure of the rule of law (read: restraints), which has (so far) seen only a handful of high-office criminals prosecuted successfully (special investigations leading nowhere and failed impeachments don’t count) for their misdeeds and malfeasance. I prefer to be more specific. Given my indignation over the use of torture, that would seem an obvious choice. However, those news stories have been shoved to the back burner, including the ongoing torture of Julian Assange for essentially revealing truths cynics like me already suspected and now know to be accurate, where they general little heat. Instead, I choose war as the very worst, an example of the U.S. (via its leadership) being as bad as it can possibly be. The recent election cycle offered a few candidates who bucked the consensus that U.S. involvement in every unnecessary, undeclared war since WWII is justified. They were effectively shut out by the military-industrial complex. And as the incoming executive tweeted on November 24, 2020, America’s back, baby! Ready to do our worst again (read: some more, since we [the U.S. military] never stopped [making war]). A sizeable portion of the American public is aligned with this approach, too.

So rule of law has failed and we [Americans] are infested with crime and incompetence at the highest levels. Requirements, rights, and protections found in the U.S. Constitution are handily ignored. That means every administration since Truman has been full of war criminals, because torture and elective war are crimes. The insult to my sensibilities is far worse than the unaffordability of war, the failure to win or end conflicts, or the lack of righteousness in our supposed cause. It’s that we [America, as viewed from outside] are belligerent, bellicose aggressors. We [Americans] are predators. And we [Americans, but really all humans] are stuck in an adolescent concept of conduct in the world shared with animals that must kill just to eat. We [humans] make no humanitarian progress at all. But the increasing scale of our [human] destructiveness is progress if drones, robots, and other DARPA-developed weaponry impress.

Vulnerability Roulette

/rant on

Had a rather dark thought, which recurs but then fades out of awareness and memory until conditions reassert it. Simply put, it’s that the mover-shaker-decision-maker sociopaths types in government, corporations, and elsewhere (I refuse to use the term influencer) are typically well protected (primarily by virtue of immense wealth) from threats regular folks face and are accordingly only too willing to sit idly by, scarcely lifting a finger in aid or assistance, and watch dispassionately as others scramble and scrape in response to the buffeting torrents of history. The famous example (even if not wholly accurate) of patrician, disdainful lack of empathy toward others’ plight is Marie Antoinette’s famous remark: “Let them eat cake.” Citing an 18th-century monarch indicates that such tone-deaf sentiment has been around for a long time.

Let me put it another way, since many of our problems are of our own creation. Our styles of social organization and their concomitant institutions are so overloaded with internal conflict and corruption, which we refuse to eradicate, that it’s as though we continuously tempt fate like fools playing Russian roulette. If we were truly a unified nation, maybe we’d wise up and adopt a different organizational model. But we don’t shoulder risk or enjoy reward evenly. Rather, the disenfranchised and most vulnerable among us, determined a variety of ways but forming a substantial majority, have revolvers to their heads with a single bullet in one of five or six chambers while the least vulnerable (the notorious 1%) have, in effect, thousands or millions of chambers and an exceedingly remote chance of firing the one with the bullet. Thus, vulnerability roulette.

In the midst of an epochal pandemic and financial crisis, who gets sacrificed like so much cannon fodder while others retreat onto their ocean-going yachts or into their boltholes to isolate from the rabble? Everyone knows it’s always the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder who unjustly suffer the worst, a distinctly raw deal unlikely ever to change. The middle rungs are also suffering now as contraction affects more and more formerly enfranchised groups. Meanwhile, those at the top use crises as opportunities for further plunder. In an article in Rolling Stone, independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who covered the 2008 financial collapse, observes that our fearless leaders (fearless because they secure themselves before and above all else) again made whole the wealthiest few at the considerable expense of the rest:

The $2.3 trillion CARES Act, the Donald Trump-led rescue package signed into law on March 27th, is a radical rethink of American capitalism. It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss.

This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.

Why is this a “radical rethink”? We’ve seen identical behaviors before: privatization of profit, indemnification of loss, looting of the treasury, and refusal to prosecute exploitation, torture, and crimes against humanity. Referring specifically to financialization, this is what the phrase “too big to fail” means in a nutshell, and we’ve been down this stretch of road repeatedly.

Naturally, the investor class isn’t ordered back to work at slaughterhouses and groceries to brave the epidemic. Low-wage laborers are. Interestingly, well compensated healthcare workers are also on the vulnerability roulette firing line — part of their professional oaths and duties — but that industry is straining under pressure from its inability to maintain profitability during the pandemic. Many healthcare workers are being sacrificed, too. Then there are tens of millions newly unemployed and uninsured being told that the roulette must continue into further months of quarantine, the equivalent of adding bullets to the chambers until their destruction is assured. The pittance of support for those folks (relief checks delayed or missing w/o explanation or recourse and unemployment insurance if one qualifies, meaning not having already been forced into the gig economy) does little to stave off catastrophe.

Others around the Web have examined the details of several rounds of bailout legislation and found them unjust in the extreme. Many of the provisions actually heap insult and further injury upon injury. Steps that could have been taken, and in some instances were undertaken in past crises (such as during the Great Depression), don’t even rate consideration. Those safeguards might include debt cancellation, universal basic income (perhaps temporary), government-supported healthcare for all, and reemployment through New Deal-style programs. Instead, the masses are largely left to fend for themselves, much like the failed Federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

Some of this is no doubt ideological. A professional class of ruling elites are the only ones to be entrusted with guiding the ship of state, or so goes the political philosophy. But in our capitalist system, government has been purposefully hamstrung and hollowed out to the point of dysfunction precisely so that private enterprise can step in. And when magical market forces fail to stem the slide into oblivion, “Welp, sorry, th-th-that’s all folks,” say the supposed elite. “Nothing we can do to ease your suffering! Our attentions turn instead to ourselves, the courtiers and sycophants surrounding us, and the institutions that enable our perfidy. Now go fuck off somewhere and die, troubling us no more.”

/rant off

Everything and Nothing

In the introduction to an article at TomDispatch about anticipated resumption of professional sports currently on hiatus like much of the rest of human activity (economic and otherwise), Tom Engelhardt recalls that to his childhood self, professional sports meant so much and yet so little (alternatively, everything and nothing). This charming aspect of the innocence of childhood continues into adulthood, whether as spectator or participant, as leisure and freedom from threat allow. The article goes on to offer conjecture regarding the effect of reopening professional sports on the fall presidential election. Ugh! Racehorse politics never go out of season. I reject such purely hypothetical analyses, which isn’t the same as not caring about the election. Maybe I’ll wade in after a Democratic nominee is chosen to say that third-party candidates may well have a much larger role to play this time round because we’re again being offered flatly unacceptable options within the two-party single-party system. Until then, phooey on campaign season!

Still, Engelhardt’s remark put me in mind of a blog post I considered fully nine years ago but never got around to writing, namely, how music functions as meaningless abstraction. Pick you passion, I suppose: sports, music (any genre), literature, painting, poetry, dance, cinema and TV, fashion, fitness, nature, house pets, house plants, etc. Inspiration and devotion come in lots of forms, few of which are essential (primary or ontological needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy) yet remain fundamental to who we are and what we want out of life. Accordingly, when one’s passion is stripped away, being left grasping and rootless is quite common. That’s not equivalent to losing a job or loved one (those losses are afflicting many people right now, too), but our shared experience these days with no bars, no restaurants, no sports, no concerts, no school, and no church all add up to no society. We’re atomized, unable to connect and socialize meaningfully, digital substitutes notwithstanding. If a spectator, maybe one goes in search of replacements, which is awfully cold comfort. If a participant, one’s identity is wrapped up in such endeavors; resulting loss of meaning and/or purpose can be devastating.

It would be easy to over-analyze and over-intellectualize what meaningless abstraction means. It’s a trap, so I’ll do my best not to over-indulge. Still, it’s worth observing that as passions are habituated and internalized, their mode of appreciation is transferred from the senses (or sensorium) to the mind or head (as observed here). Coarseness and ugliness are then easily digested, rationalized, and embraced instead of being repulsive as they should be. There’s the paradox: as we grow more “sophisticated” (scare quotes intentional), we also invert and become more base. How else to explain tolerance of increasingly brazen dysfunction, corruption, servitude (e.g., debt), and gaslighting? It also explains the attraction to entertainments such as combat sports (and thug sports such as football and hockey), violent films, professional wrestling (more theater than sport), and online trolling. An instinctual blood lust that accompanies being predators, if not expressed more directly in war, torture, crime, and self-destruction, is sublimated into entertainment. Maybe that’s an escape valve so pressures don’t build up any worse, but that possibility strikes me as rather weak considering just how much damage has already been done.

Hot Mic

Much ado over nothing was made this past week regarding a technical glitch (or control room error) during the first of two televised Democratic presidential debates where one pair of moderators’ mics was accidentally left on and extraneous, unintended speech leaked into the broadcast. It distracted the other pair of moderators enough to cause a modest procedural disruption. Big deal. This was not the modal case of a hot mic where someone, e.g., a politician, swears (a big no-no despite the shock value being almost completely erased in today’s media landscape) or accidentally reveals callous attitudes (or worse) thinking that no one important was listening or recording. Hot mics in the past have led to public outrage and criminal investigations. One recent example that still sticks in everyone’s craw was a novice political candidate who revealed he could use his fame and impudent nerve to “grab ’em by the pussy.” Turned out not to be the career killer everyone thought it would be.

The latest minor furor over a hot mic got me thinking, however, about inadvertent revelation of matters of genuine public interest. Three genres spring to mind: documentary films, whistle-blowing, and investigative journalism, that last including category outliers such as Wikileaks. Whereas a gaffe on a hot mic usually means the leaker/speaker exposes him- or herself and thus has no one else to blame, disclosures occurring in the other three categories are often against the will of those exposed. It’s obviously in the public interest to know about corruption, misbehavior, and malfeasance in corporate and political life, but the manner in which such information is made public is controversial. Those who expose others suffer harassment and persecution. Documentarians probably fare the best with respect to being left alone following release of information. Michael Moore, for all his absurd though entertaining theatrics, is free (so far as I know) to go about his business and do as he pleases. However, gestures to protect whistle-blowers are just that: gestures. Those who have leaked classified government information in particular, because they gained access to such information through security clearances and signed nondisclosure agreements (before knowing what secrets they were obliged to keep, which is frankly the way such obligations work), are especially prone to reprisal and prosecution. Such information is literally not theirs to disclose, but when keeping others’ secrets is heinous enough, some people feel their conscience and moral duty are superior to job security and other risks involved. Opinions vary, sometimes passionately. And now even journalists who uncover or merely come into possession of evidence of wrongdoing and later publish it — again, decidedly in the public interest — are subject to (malicious?) prosecution. Julian Assange is the current test case.

The free speech aspect of revealing someone else’s amoral and criminal acts is a fraught argument. However, it’s clear that as soon as damaging information comes to light, focus shifts away from the acts and their perpetrators to those who publish the information. Shifting the focus is a miserable yet well-established precedent by now, the result being that most folks who might consider coming forward to speak up now keep things to themselves rather than suffer entirely foreseeable consequences. In that light, when someone comes forward anyway, knowing that they will be hounded, vilified, arrested, and worse, he or she deserved more respect for courage and self-sacrifice than generally occurs in the aftermath of disclosure. The flip side — condemnation, prosecution, and death threats — are already abundant in the public sphere.

Some time after reports of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram went public, a handful of low-level servicemen (“bad apples” used to deflect attention down the command hierarchy) were prosecuted, but high-level officials (e.g., former U.S. presidents Bush and Obama, anyone in their respective administrations, and commanding officers on site) were essentially immunized from prosecution. That example is not quite the same as going after truth-tellers, but it’s a rather egregious instance of bad actors going unprosecuted. I’m still incensed by it. And that’s why I’m blogging about the hot mic. Lots of awful things go on behind the scenes without public knowledge or sanction. Those who commit high crimes (including war crimes) clearly know what they’re doing is wrong. Claims of national security are often invoked and gag laws are legislated into existence on behalf of private industry. When leaks do inevitably occur, those accused immediately attack the accuser, often with the aid of others in the media. Denials may also be issued (sometimes not — why bother?), but most bad actors hide successfully behind the deflecting shift of focus. When will those acting in the shadows against the public interest and in defiance of domestic and international law ever be brought to justice? I daresay the soul of the nation is at stake, and as long as officialdom escapes all but temporary public relations problems to be spun, the pride everyone wants to take as Americans eludes us. In the meantime, there’s a lot to answer for, and it keeps piling up.

Populism and Elitism, pt. 2

This is a continuation from part 1.

A long, tortured argument could be offered how we (in the U.S.) are governed by a narrow class of plutocrats (both now and at the founding) who not-so-secretly distrust the people and the practice of direct democracy, employing instead mechanisms found in the U.S. Constitution (such as the electoral college) to transfer power away from the people to so-called experts. I won’t indulge in a history lesson or other analysis, but it should be clear to anyone who bothers to look that typical holders of elected office (and their appointees) more nearly resemble yesteryear’s landed gentry than the proletariat. Rule by elites is thus quite familiar to us despite plenty of lofty language celebrating the common man and stories repeated ad naseum of a few exceptional individuals (exceptional being the important modifier here) who managed to bootstrap their way into the elite from modest circumstances.

Part 1 started with deGrasse Tyson’s recommendation that experts/elites should pitch ideas at the public’s level and ended with my contention that some have lost their public by adopting style or content that fails to connect. In the field of politics, I’ve never quite understood the obsession with how things present to the public (optics) on the one hand and obvious disregard for true consent of the governed on the other. For instance, some might recall pretty serious public opposition before the fact to invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the 9/11 attacks. The Bush Administration’s propaganda campaign succeeded in buffaloing a fair percentage of the public, many of whom still believe the rank lie that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and represented enough of an existential threat to the U.S. to justify preemptive invasion. Without indulging in conspiratorial conjecture about the true motivations for invasion, the last decade plus has proven that opposition pretty well founded, though it went unheeded.

Traffic Report No. 11

Today is the 10-year anniversary of the opening of this blog. As a result, there is a pretty sizeable backblog should anyone decide to wade in. As mentioned in my first post, I only opened this blog to get posting privileges at a group blog I admired because it functioned more like a discussion than a broadcast. The group blog died of attrition years ago, yet here I am 10 years later still writing my personal blog (which isn’t really about me).

Social media lives and dies by the numbers, and mine are deplorable. Annual traffic has ranged from about 6,800 to about 12,500 hits, much of which I’m convinced is mere background noise and bot traffic. Cumulative hits number about 90,140, and unique visitors are about 19,350, neither of which is anything to crow about for a blog of this duration. My subscriber count continues to climb pointlessly, now resting at 745. However, I judge I might have only a half dozen regular readers and perhaps half again as many commentators. I’ve never earned a cent for my effort, nor am I likely to ever put up a Patreon link or similar goad for donations. All of which only demonstrate that almost no one cares what I have to write about. C’est la vie. I don’t write for that purpose and frankly wouldn’t know what to write about if I were trying to drive numbers.

So if you have read my blog, what are some of the thing you might have gathered from me? Here’s an incomplete synopsis:

• Torture is unspeakably bad. History is full of devices, methodologies, and torturers, but we learned sometime in the course of two 20th-century world wars that nothing justifies it. Nevertheless, it continues to occur with surprising relish, and those who still torture (or want to) are criminally insane.
• Skyscrapers are awesomely tall examples of technical brilliance, exuberance, audacity, and hubris. Better expressions of techno-utopian, look-mom-no-hands, self-defeating narcissism can scarcely be found. Yet they continue to be built at a feverish pace. The 2008 financial collapse stalled and/or doomed a few projects, but we’re back to game on.
• Classical music, despite record budgets for performing ensembles, has lost its bid for anything resembling cultural and artistic relevance by turning itself into a museum (performing primarily works of long-dead composers) and abandoning emotional expression in favor of technical perfection, which is probably an accurate embodiment of the spirit of the times. There is arguably not a single living composer who has become a household name since Aaron Copland, who died in 1990 but was really well-known in the 1940s and 50s.
• We’re doomed — not in any routine sense of the word having to do with individual mortality but in the sense of Near-Term (Human) Extinction (NTE). The idea is not widely accepted in the least, and the arguments are too lengthy to repeat (and unlikely to convince). However, for those few able to decipher it, the writing is on the wall.
• American culture is a constantly moving target, difficult to define and describe, but its principal features are only getting uglier as time wears on. Resurgent racism, nationalism, and misogyny make clear that while some strides have been made, these attitudes were only driven underground for a while. Similarly, colonialism never really died but morphed into a new version (globalization) that escapes criticism from the masses, because, well, goodies.
• Human consciousness — another moving target — is cratering (again) after 3,000–5,000 years. We have become hollow men, play actors, projecting false consciousness without core identity or meaning. This cannot be sensed or assessed easily from the first-person perspective.
• Electronic media makes us tools. The gleaming attractions of sterile perfection and pseudo-sociability have hoodwinked most of the public into relinquishing privacy and intellectual autonomy in exchange for the equivalent of Huxley’s soma. This also cannot be sensed or assessed easily from the first-person perspective.
• Electoral politics is a game played by the oligarchy for chumps. Although the end results are not always foreseeable (Jeb!), the narrow range of options voters are given (lesser of evils, the devil you know …) guarantees that fundamental change in our dysfunctional style of government will not occur without first burning the house down. After a long period of abstention, I voted in the last few elections, but my heart isn’t really in it.
• Cinema’s infatuation with superheros and bankable franchises (large overlap there) signals that, like other institutions mentioned above, it has grown aged and sclerotic. Despite large budgets and impressive receipts (the former often over $100 million and the latter now in the billions for blockbusters) and considerable technical prowess, cinema has lost its ability to be anything more than popcorn entertainment for adolescent fanboys (of all ages).

This is admittedly a pretty sour list. Positive, worthwhile manifestations of the human experience are still out there, but they tend to be private, modest, and infrequent. I still enjoy a successful meal cooked in my own kitchen. I still train for and race in triathlons. I still perform music. I still make new friends. But each of these examples is also marred by corruptions that penetrate everything we do. Perhaps it’s always been so, and as I, too, age, I become increasingly aware of inescapable distortions that can no longer be overcome with innocence, ambition, energy, and doublethink. My plan is to continue writing the blog until it feels like a burden, at which point I’ll stop. But for now, there’s too much to think and write about, albeit at my own leisurely pace.

The Candidates’ Inhumanity

I don’t watch political debates. Being of sound mind and reason, I’m not part of the target audience. However, I do catch murmurs of the debates from time to time. Because torture is a sore subject with me, this excerpt (full transcript here) from the Feb. 6 debate moderated by World News Tonight anchor David Muir perked up my ears:

MUIR: … we’re going to stay on ISIS here and the war on terror, because as you know, there’s been a debate in this country about how to deal with the enemy and about enhanced interrogation techniques ever since 9/11.

So Senator Cruz, you have said, quote, “torture is wrong, unambiguously, period. Civilized nations do not engage in torture.” Some of the other candidates say they don’t think waterboarding is torture. Mr. Trump has said, I would bring it back. Senator Cruz, is waterboarding torture?

CRUZ: Well, under the definition of torture, no, it’s not. Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, it is not. It is enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.

MUIR: If elected president, would you bring it back?

CRUZ: I would not bring it back in any sort of widespread use. And indeed, I joined with Senator McCain in legislation that would prohibit line officers from employing it because I think bad things happen when enhanced interrogation is employed at lower levels.

But when it comes to keeping this country safe, the commander in chief has inherent constitutional authority to keep this country safe. And so, if it were necessary to, say, prevent a city from facing an imminent terrorist attack, you can rest assured that as commander in chief, I would use whatever enhanced interrogation methods we could to keep this country safe.

Cruz is obviously squirming to avoid answering the simple questions directly and unambiguously. Whose definition has Cruz cited? Certainly not one of these. Another page at the previous link says plainly that waterboarding is “torture plus” precisely because of its ability to inflict “unbearable suffering with minimal evidence” repeatedly. Relying on some unsubstantiated definition to keep waterboarding among available interrogation options and then invoking the ticking time bomb scenario is callous and inhumane. Cruz is unfit as a presidential candidate for lots of reasons, but his stance on torture is an automatic disqualification for me.

Muir then turns the same question(s) over to Trump:

MUIR: Senator Cruz, thank you. Mr. Trump, you said not only does it work, but that you’d bring it back.

TRUMP: Well, I’ll tell you what. In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians, we have people chopping the heads off many other people. We have things that we have never seen before — as a group, we have never seen before, what’s happening right now.

The medieval times — I mean, we studied medieval times — not since medieval times have people seen what’s going on. I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

Trump, in contrast to Cruz, doesn’t squirm at all (though he does struggle to complete a sentence, resorting instead to a stammering, repetitive word salad no one seems to mind). Instead, he goes full war criminal without hesitation (though at this point in time it’s only postulated). Trump’s polarizing, inflammatory style has earned him both severe disapprobation and earnest support. Like Cruz, Trump has a variety of automatic disqualifications as a presidential candidate. My thinking is that, even though I can’t peer into his mind and guess his true motivations (which may be as obvious as they appear) or anticipate his behavior should he attain office, his moral judgment vis-à-vis torture (and frankly, most other topics as well) is so impaired that I don’t trust him as a playground monitor.

In narrative, there are four essential types of conflict:

1. man against man
2. man against society
3. man against nature
4. man against self

One might argue that Cruz, Trump, and their supporters who applaud “get tough” rhetoric (add Hillary Clinton to this group) fall into the first category, ever battling enemies like besieged heroes. I would argue they fall into the fourth as well, battling their own inhumanity, though there is a notable lack of wrestling with anything approaching a conscience. But in truth, debate over torture might better be categorized as man against everything, considering who and what is destroyed even by entertaining the fantasy of torturing others. Some still argue that a strategic advantage can be retained using torture, whereas Trump (always the extremist) merely relishes the possibility of obliterating others. However, we become monsters by keeping the option alive.

We Torture, Obviously

A 528-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was made public about ten days ago, and the response was immediate, varied, and voluminous. However, no one could pretend to be surprised. I’ve blogged in the past about the willingness of U.S. agencies to allow and even relish unspeakable, inhumane, torturous interrogation and the blasé acceptance of such behavior by the American public. But I knew I was just screaming into a waterfall. Reopening the issue, which has never really gone away, provoked all the usual memes, ranging from (self-)condemnation to denunciation to rationalization. A few things ought to be clear, though, to all Americans:

1. We have institutionalized torture.
2. We have institutionalized lies, obfuscation, and outright denials about torture — even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
3. We have institutionalized rationalizations and refusals to prosecute torturers and their administrative supervisors — all the way up the chain of command.
4. We have no intention of stopping.
5. We are our own worst enemy.

Despite all the horseshit (please, just call it what it is) about dangerous regimes and terrorists threatening the U.S. (landing a couple blows in a fistfight doesn’t make someone a bully), it’s equally obvious that the U.S. is now a rogue state. So far, no one has issued a direct challenge to the biggest bully on the planet, but we’re asking for it. Rather, indignant response manifests at the fringes, where it’s marginally safer.

Ten years ago, a documentary film called The Corporation compared the psychology of business entities to human entities (corporate personhood having been enshrined in law) and concluded that, because of perverse incentives operating in the business world, corporations are essentially psychopaths. A similar comparison could be made with respect to nation-states and individuals, and the conclusion should be that the U.S. as a whole is criminally insane. We don’t know this about ourselves, really, and probably couldn’t admit it or deal with it even if we did. (Some might argue that we are dealing with it by self-destructing with ferocious speed.) The U.S. is certainly not the first or only nation to go criminally insane. Seems to migrate across time and space. So merrily we roll along.

I was surprised to learn last summer that June is Torture Awareness Month, so named because the United Nations Convention against Torture (CAT) came into force on June 26, 1987 (though it was adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1984). How odd. Wasn’t this already covered by the Geneva Conventions of 1864, 1906, 1929, and 1949? I had thought at the time to write a blog post denouncing (again) U.S. torture but ultimately felt I had nothing new or worthwhile to say. The past ten days reinforce that I can only hang my head in shame, knowing that my own country has run off the rails and that no additional screaming into waterfalls will change anything.