The Editors

Over at The Poor Man, The Editors is angry that a whole lot of people are now blaming the Democrats for torture. That's an odd category error for the writers on such a smart and funny site, but my respect for Poor Men, one and all, compels me to make a correction.

We do not blame the Democrats for the toture and anti-habeus bill, we blame them for not opposing it. The supposedly exculpatory statistics printed in The Editors' post achieves the opposite of its intended effect, which is presumably to show that 70-80% of Democrats did indeed vote against the bill, therefore the party is unified. Except that almost 100% of Republicans voted for it! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you get for, lord help us, "emphasizing divisions among Republicans." You get 97% of them in the House and 98% of them in the Senate (including one curious abstention or absence) voting to deprive Americans of a right enjoyed before any gringo but a Viking had even stepped on the soft soil of the New fucking World. How do you like thems apples?

We blame the Democrats for being "a worthless passel of cowards . . . [who] allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party."

We blame the Democrats because they could band together to "save Social Security"--to preserve a decades-old government pension program that doesn't even do what it's intended to do, which is keep the elderly from poverty (but at least they can eat shitty food instead of cat food!)--but they can't hold it together for the defining moral debate of our time. They can preserve a 50-year-old entitlement but they can't preserve a basic right of free peoples with roots going back nine centuries to the writs of Henry II. I don't think that's unfair sniping. In fact, I think it's very fair. It displays all the callow electoralism of the party, which would cut out its own guts if it meant another senescent lawn-bowler would shuffle to the polls and pull the D lever, but sits idly by while McCain and Warner play Dogberry and Verges all over Washington.

Now we're asked to forgive--worse, to applaud them because Barack Obama gave a speech and because they marshalled 33 votes against the most craven and venal political act of our times. The Editors throws up his hands:

From our history: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the internment of Japanese-Americans. Now the McCain Torture Bill - and this, too, shall pass.

You don't have to be Davey Hume to know that just because you see the sun rising every morning, that ain't hardly proof it's gonna rise again tomorrow. Who will roll back the torture vote? Who will disavow the evisceration of habeus protections? The Democrats will not win, and if they do, they will not do it.

If we continue to reward them, they will never learn.

First, kill the Democrats.

Sorrow. Pathos. Bathos.

Bathetic Mark Kleiman asks:

But is it really a good idea to spread the "Democrats are cowards" meme six weeks before an election that might restore the system of checks and balances? Would it be intolerably rude of me to note that you're doing Karl Rove's work for him?

Karl Fucking Rove's work?

I'd give a testicle to ban the word "meme" from conversation for the duration of my increasingly black-comic lifetime, a small sacrifice admittedly since the prostheses are so good these days, but still. I'd give 'em both to eradicate forever the Mark Kleimans of this world, so thick are they with self-congratulation over having figured out that yes, the President has a hatchet man named Karl Rove and yes, the War Department is run by an agèd haikuist named Donald Rumsfeld. Karl Rove didn't invent the dirty trick; he's not even that good at it. It's just that Democrats are too craven, to venal, to (my female readers, if any, will pardon me) pussified and Pavlovian to do anything about it. Oppo research didn't spring full-grown and well-armed from Rove's sweaty pate like Athena from the head of Zeus. Donald Rumsfeld didn't decide to chuck common law and common decency while gumming down his well-milked metamucil cereal and cutting coupons from the latest AARP newsletter.

Kleiman's commenters aren't so easily blinkered, and he's forced to add a non sequitur about the fact that 35 Dems voted against the torture bill, a pretty standard trope among committed Dems and hopeless liberals these days that I'll address below. Commenters almost uniformly note that Democrats are accused of cowardice because they're cowards, and that whatever else the rank and file may be, they ain't gettin' paid to act like PR shills for the Ass Party.

In any case, I keep reading (see the links above) that, substantively, there's value to holding the Donkey Line because, hey, some of them thought it imprudent to tear the most important and enduring contribution to justice since the golden fucking rule from the books, ball it up, and toss it into the garbage cart pushed past by the Mexicano janitor, and they expressed it in their vote. And made some floor speeches. And provided a bit of support for a so-called compromise by which the psychotic Talmudists of the Senate parsed out allowable torture with all the gleeful technicality of a municipal zoning board. No higher than three stories. Set back at least 40 feet. No pulling out of nails. Water dungeon's good. Don't excavate over the utility lines. Permit for sewer hook-up. Naked for 48 straight hours. That's good too.

Kleiman wants to know why it's wise "for the anti-Bush forces to spend all their fury on their own side." Is he so sectarian, are the Dems so sectarian, that they really believe elected Democrats are on their side? It is true that Republicans authored this trash and Republicans voted for it, and damn them all for it, but so long as this country is still nominally a Republic, and so long as the Dems are still nominally a functional political party, then by God do something. Don't sit on your incumbentized asses "emphasizing divisions in the Republican Party" while they dismantle a legal principle more foundational, more essential, more necessary to the existence of our much-vaunted, little-used free society than all the rest of the Bill of Rights combined, only to throw up your hands when your natural constituency (as well as your unnatural libertarian and classic conservative constituency, small though these are) asks why you did nothing and say, "Hey, I voted against it." That's not enough. You're the minority party. Voting against it isn't enough!

All throughout the land, hopeful Kossaks (and really, has ever a self-applied appellation been more gratuitously jingoistic about its totally lacking warrior fervor?) delight in thoughts of retaking the House, perhaps the Senate, with their brilliant plan to run against Donald Rumsfeld, promising that when they get their hands on the levers of power, they're gonna kick him to the curb faster than Rick Santorum dropping off a boy hustler on the side of the road in Rock Creek Park. It is quite possibly, as Ford Maddox Ford said about something else entirley, the saddest story I have ever heard.

As I write, the Times banner headline reads: Breaking News 10:49 AM ET: Senate Unanimously Approves Pentagon Spending Bill.

Soviet America

It's a shame that Jim Henley's a family man, because he keeps writing things that make me want to head south for a hot anarchofag make-out session (Who leads? No one leads? It's a self-organizing make-out phenomenon!) In this case:

There is, as they say, a lot of ruin in a nation. I expect the yoke of our weirdly Brezhnevite future to fall relatively mildly on most necks for quite awhile, including mine. People like me and all the other cranks with blogs are fundamentally unimportant, and the genius of one-party rule in this country is, so far, to let the unimportant slide.

You talk about Soviet America, or Fascist America, and people look at you like you're nuts because, after all, where are the bread lines? Where is the uniform drabness (well, okay, there's plenty of that)? Where is the oppressive misery?

We seem to believe that every single person in an oppressive regime or one party state spends his days smoking stale cigarettes and waiting to buy stale bread with his stale government paycheck on a dim street in atmospheric drizzle while the party newspaper blows by and a baby carriage rolls down the stairs, or whatever. But hey, there were plenty of Muscovites who lived high and fine during even the slender years of Soviet decline, and there were certainly plenty of Germans and Italians living fine and dandy pretty much until the bombs started falling on their cities. Repressive governments do not produce uniform misery; they produce class and caste like every other society on earth.

This is all to say that it will be a bad and very distant day in America when we're all drowning together. And because of that, it will be very easy for your basic suburban technocrat-salaryman to go right on believing that only terrorists get tortured, only black people go to jail, and if his little girl gets knocked up, well, there are ways, baby. There are ways.

Heart of Dumbness

I’d like to take a moment out of my blogging of Soviet America to swat Robert Farley at Crooks and Liars for quoting Chinua Achebe’s stupid, destructive, small-spirited critique of Heart of Darkness, in which he labels Conrad a “bloody racist” based on the words Conrad placed in the mouth of Marlow, a literary character, and proceeds to take an assertion of authorial intent grounded in the speech of a notably cranky and unreliable (and created!) narrator.

Even presuming Marlow does speak as a direct interlocutor for Conrad-the-author, he says plainly what he thinks of European colonialism, at very least the burtal Belgian variety:

[T]hese chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force-- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind--as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . .

So Marlow first dismisses the colonialists surrounding him as brutes, robbers, and murderers. (Ah but they tackle “a darkness”—that bloody racism!) Then he dismisses the entire enterprise with the cynical understatement of a good Englishman: “The conquest of the earth . . . is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” Then he says with equal cynicism and a self-deprecating irony that colonialism is redeemed as an ideated enterprise only, a statement he immediately undercuts with a plain assertion that the “unselfish belief in the idea” is itself mere idolatry.

The "Faithful Dems" - Michel Foucault - Confessions

Much angry twittering on torture. The internet left asks: Why will these democratic pols who prattle endlessly about the need to reconnect with the faithful not stand up and say that torturers shall not pass into heaven? In linking to the Digby post I linked above, Atrios says "there is some shit I will not eat." Were that it were true. I see a lot of "not another vote, not another cent" threats to Dems in Atrios' thread, but I harbor doubts. Come election day, the internalized choicelessness-as-destiny of the pathetic American left will impel them to the polling place, where they'll make their false choice for the party of acquiescence, thinking that perhaps a disempowered majority in one house of a disempowered congress will slow if not stop the Soveitization of American society. It won't, of course . . .

Foucault taught that as the monarch was the head of the body state in a literal sense that had largely passed away until the coronation of the Child-King, and as crime was conceived as injury to that body, thus was the spectacle of public torture both a literal and metaphorical act of mirrored vengeance carried out on the body of the condemned. Happy days are here again. We've come to understand that the stauncher supporters of the dauphin have conflated his person entirely with the entity of the United States. He, surely, is his own staunchest supporter. If rumors are true and he really did pace all around the oval office mouthing off about kicking Saddam's motherfucking ass up and down the Arab Street, then we shouldn't be surprised by his zealous advocacy of the necessity of torture: it's a literal extension of his ass-kicking power to those who would inflict harm upon his stately body. The king cannot punch every highwayman in the face, but his torturers can certainly act as the fists of his bodily state, or stately body.

While there's still much to-do about the necessary secrecy of the particular methods employed against our enemies, there's a gleeful publicity about the fact that something's making them scream in the back room. We should be clear in recognizing that secretism is a moral gambit through which our governors maintain their veneer of reluctance, necessary until we've reacculturated ourselves to torture as a legitimate tactic of the state not to elecit information, but to (take it away, Michel) discipline and punish, and moreover, to elecit confession. Remember that medieval law often required either multiple eyewitnesses to a crime or else a confession in order to convict: torture a man until he confesses, then execute him (or just tortue him some more) because he confesses. The current reflection of this is in the concurrent work to suspend or eliminate the provisions of habeus corpus, which is a step in a judicial process based on rules of evidence and a conception of physical, rather than spiritual, culpability.

But if anything is obvious about the new world of the Long War (is that still the going euphemism?), it's that we're quickly reverting to a new-old notion of the prisoner as a kind of spiritual transgressor, even as he (possibly) and we (certainly) inflict actual, physical harm. Consider that George W. Bush does not say of our prisoners at Guantanamo, "These are guilty men," but instead, "These are bad men." It still seems alien to us, but probably won't for long, that these qualitative assertions establish guilt even as proof of guilt must still be gained through confession, elicited through physical torture, which retroactively justifies the acts of torture while also establishing the State's right to cut the criminal, the invader, from its body. Many people have lately been pointing that if there is one thing we know about torture, it's that the tortured man tells his interrogator whatever it is his interrogator wants to hear.

Yes. He does.

That Old-Time Religion

Crooks and Liars has a clip of Bill Maher and company talkin bout Jesus Camp. The blond woman, a self-professed Christian and Fox Newsette, says Christianity is radical because it demands you not convert at gun- or sword-point but instead "lay down your life for Christ." A curiously literal meaning, but then, Christians are a curiously literal people, except, of course, when they're not. (If this is so radical a notion, I wonder though, just what the hell was Mordecai doing back in da day.) The good-looking moderate Muslim in the sharp glasses makes the reasonable point that we ought not to try to out-zealot the zealots. Then the actor on the panel says, You know, all I ever here are voices of religious division and sectarianism. Why's it gotta be a wedge and not a bridge?

For indeed, the spirit of ecumenicalism is the great gift that religion has bestowed on the world.

Maher says, Whoa there, fella. Religion is all about making truth claims. How do you build a bridge of exclusive divine truth? He picks out the blond and says, Yo, girl, you're a Christian, don't you think I'm inferior?

Oh, no, no.

But you think you possess a truth that I don't.

Yes.

So logically, that's an assertion of superiority.

Oh, no. I just think you're confused.

Yeah baby, that'll win 'em for god. "If you see someone who's hungry," the blond begins to defend herself when accused of condescension, but that's as far as she gets, because Maher tells her that he ain't hungry, lady.

Christianity was always such an odd candidate to become the world's top dog in the salvation racket. Judaism emphasized radical communal survival and practical morality; Hinduism invented itself as the ultimate synchretism; Islam promised paradise for a meager five acts of devotion. Christianity, meanwhile constructed itself out of the sloppily-reconciled writings of a bunch of Mediterranean millennarian cultists who truly believed that the end was nigh and that this world would soon pass away for another. There's plenty of mystical, world-ending mumbojumbo in every belief system, but Christianity started out believing that, you know, tomorrow could be it. It's like the Weekly World News of religions: it keeps announcing the end of the world. A few issues later, its sources tell it that the aliens have once again had to push back the date, which just goes to show that the cosmic secretariat is as lamely inefficient as the Department of Public Works.

Oh Sister

I suppose there's always been a curiously martial side to summer camp. Thinking back on my own experience, for instance, I wonder why the fuck a bunch of suburban Jews needed to learn archery. This new Jesus Camp movie, though, appears to portray a campgoing experience that, in the words of my marketing nitwits, explores a new paradigm.

At Jesus Camp, children are taught that they are soldiers in struggle to win souls for god--the subtextual thrust of the whole soldier bit being that the unwon soul has a one-way ticket anyway, so you may as well help 'em hurry onto the next Infernal Express.

I've only seen the previews, which mostly focus on--can you call her the Head Counselor? I'm uncertain of the etiquette--Pastor Becky Fisher, a chunky woman of the sort you expect to see buying bruised canteloupe in the grocery section of the Super WalMart, as she chides, cajoles, and exhorts her campers, a task often accompanied, in that odd Christian fashion, by copious weeping. In one scene included in the trailer, she becomes positively Ahabian . . .

And if you want evidence that truly, truly the West, or at least America, is headed toward a dim, Spenglerian future, it's that our modern Ahabs are now Becky Fishers. In Ahab, Melville penned a character who embodied part of the primal quintessence of America: a mad ambition, a vainglorious conception of his own righteousness, a willingness to damn all toward destiny. Ahab is an extraordinary literary charcter in that he elevates, with startling believability, the physical tragedy that befell him in his dangerous trade to an exceeding zealotry, and even though we know that the whole world moves, that Ahab is only one man on one ship with one crew pursuing one whale, by the time he's crying about breaking through the pasteboard mask, heaven and hell and the earth in between seem small compared to the consuming greatness of Ahab's vengeance. You may argue convincingly that it's the allegorical nature of Melville's story that gives his tragic villain such scope, but I'd still hold that at the root of Ahab's greatness is not whatever he stands for in a metaphorical sense, but what he is.

Anyway, today's Ahabs are of the aggrieved non-minority who succeed in taking exceeding zealotry in actual matters of heaven and hell and turning them into asinine sideshows full of weeping children and weeping lady preachers and the sort of back-holler tent-revivalist nonsense that you'd expect at the William Jennings Bryan Posthumous Admiration Society. This is the Even Greater Awakening we keep hearing about? These are people who make the theological considerations of the Salem Witch Trials seem positively Talmudic. I expect that on some level they must understand that every little boy won for Jesus in such a fashion today will be tomorrow's furtive, ex-homosexual homosexual masturbator. And with that, I commend to you another amusing Coen Bros. bit, from O Brother, Where Art Thou?:

PETE: Well I'll be a sonofabitch. Delmar's been saved.
DELMAR O'DONNELL: Well that's it, boys. I've been redeemed. The preacher's done warshed away all my sins and transgressions. It's the straight and narrow from here on out, and heaven everlasting's my reward.
ULYSSES EVERETT MCGILL: Delmar, what are you talking about? We've got bigger fish to fry.
DELMAR: The preacher says all my sins is warshed away, including that Piggly Wiggly I knocked over in Yazoo.
ULYSSES: I thought you said you was innocent of those charges?
DELMAR: Well I was lyin'. And the preacher says that that sin's been warshed away too. Neither God nor man's got nothin' on me now. C'mon in boys, the water is fine.

Obey My Euphemism!

Cliff May, a ho hanging out on The Corner, has composed what must be the one millionth post titled "Tortured Logic," regarding his political opponents' views on torture. Or, what May insists is not torture. He knows that it isn't torture because:

President Bush has said over and over that he will not authorize or condone torture, that torture is illegal under U.S. law. The McCain Amendment reinforces that prohibition.

The target of his chagrin is a Washington Post headline: "The Torture Debate." He feels that by calling the debate about torture a debate about torture, people may become confused, prey to the misapprehension that we are talking about torture, when what we are talking about, whatever it is, is not torture.

A paragraph later he's angry because the Washington Post apparently engaged for this debate "two writers both of whom fervently oppose torture." Aside from the stylistic oddity--"two writers both of whom" indeed--the complaint seems odd. Since we're not talking about torture, why should a writers opinion on the matter of torture have any bearing? I fervently oppose Chicago's ban on foie gras, but that hardly disqualifies me from offering considered opinions on the current craze for rosé.

What follows is variety on the old college "oh, come on, baby, just hold it for a second, that's all I need, come on baby," in which torture, AKA "cause[ing] a terrorist with vital, life-saving information temporary discomfort," replaces the unceremoniously displayed sophomore erection, and after a few exhortations to touch it and "now rub it baby" and "now kiss it, can't you see it wants a little kiss," May goes all the way. Employing the sort of syllogistic wisdom that's usually accompanied by a desperate craving for brownies, pizza, and encore showings of Dazed and Confused, May asks us: If we can't torture 'em, how the fuck can we kill 'em?

Now this is serious Graham Greene, cruelty-of-man-and-indiffernce-of-heaven-territory here. All is cruel, all is arbitrary. You can't save her Pyle. Save yourself.

May complains that FDR "didn't fight WWII this way," which is true because he, you know, won. I hesitate to bring this up, but we did not, in fact, torture Nazis. And we captured a lot more of the fuckers than we have terrorists. We treated them well, gave them three square a day, etc. We did not, in other words, caper around the world snatching every Aryan we could find, flying him off to a secret prison, and putting his balls in a vice. I know the current Wisdom That Is Conventional holds terrorists to be a greater threat than Nazi Germany and Communist Russia and the Five Planeteers by their powers combined, and that therefore extraordinary measures are necessary to, as they say, bring these guys to justice. The Blind Lady will surely oblige, just as soon as she emerges from her Iron Maiden.

Are We Gonna Split Hairs?

Let’s pretend there’s an opposition party!

That's Michael Bérubé introducing a vaudeville of the "'Credomats,'" who behave unsurprisingly exactly as The Professor would like "Democrats" to behave. Sound and (rather limited) fury. Every time the institutional Democratic Party fails, folks like The Prof show up to mock and deride them, followed shortly by a hearty call to vote for Democrats. In the prior post, I linked to Digby, damning the Democrats in ringing tones for their absence and cowardice on the phony torture debate, going so far as to damn voting itself in our non-Republic, only to follow it up with an update that he didn't really mean it, that voting is fighting, and that we must vote for democrats because--incredible!--they're not the ones actually ordering the torture. In general I try to avoid political nostrums, since I'm hardly trying to land a gig as an Op-Edder for Kaplan Co., but I think I can say as a general rule that if the most stirring defense you can offer for your party is that they're merely still, silent witnesses to the comission of an atrocity, it may be time to alter your political allegiences.

Your choice is between a party that actively advocates torture and a party that doesn't peep in opposition because it wishes to "highlight divisions among Republicans" on the issue. Good god, men. Don't take my word for it: take the word of Walter Sobchak:

WALTER: Fucking Germans. Nothing changes. Fucking Nazis.
DONNY: They were Nazis, Dude?
WALTER: Come on, Donny, they were threatening castration!
DONNY: Uh-huh.
WALTER: Are you gonna split hairs?
DONNY: No--
WALTER: Am I wrong?
DONNY: Well--
DUDE: They're nihilists.
WALTER: Huh?
DUDE: They kept saying they believe in nothing.
WALTER: Nihilists? Fuck me. I mean, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it's an ethos.

I suppose what I mean to ask is: Is there anything that the Democratic Party can do--or fail to do, more accurately--that will cause our internet liberals to abandon that party, rather than merely voting for them again and again with mere regret and resignation?