Saturday, February 25, 2006
Sheer torture
Since my copy of the New Yorker always arrives about four days late (I like to think I have the best read postman in Brooklyn; my copy of the Atlantic takes ages to get here) I only just finished Jane Mayer's jaw-dropping account in the 2.27 issue of Navy general counsel Alberto Mora. In case you missed the headlines the story spawned -- and there should have been more but the press got swept up in the story of Tom and Katie's problems -- Mora left the Navy after writing an internal memo exposing and denouncing the Bush administration's policy of torture, the tacit and sometimes explicit permission it has handed down to torture prisoners in the ongoing, neverending war on terror, particularly those prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
It's a classic story of one man's outrage in the face of moral decay and one more on the right should heed (most people on the left don't seem to need convincing that torture is a bad thing and shouldn't be practiced by the US). Mora is the son of parents who came from old Communist regimes (Cuba, Hungary) and had moral as well as practical objections to the advocacy of torture: how can we fight bad buys if we are doing the same things we accuse them of? "I was appalled by he whole thing," he said of discovering the then secret policy documents (written by then WH counsel Alberto Gonzalez and admin lawyer John Yoo) that justified torturing terrorists on the basis of ticking-bomb scenarios (which Israel has used to justify torture for years and is a favorite gag in Fox TV's 24) and the big trump card of the Patriot Act and the powers Bush believes he has to do anything in the wake of 9.11. Read the story, see if you have some outrage left.
And though Secretary of Torture Donald Rumsfeld comes off as a dependable, almost Dickensian villain (he liked to joke that forcing prisoners to stand all day was not torture because he stood in his office all day at work) and VP Cheney is an equally reliable shadow over everything -- think of that big black eye in Lord of the Rings -- I was left wondering about the good Christian people who blindly defend this adminstration and its policies. As I often do in such cases, I go back to Dostoevski and wonder: in what scenario would Jesus give his blessing to the torture of men? Even villainous terrorists opposed to your religion, not to mention your way of life and your right to watch 24, which is so much better on Tivo so you can zip past all the ads, so each hour in Jack Bauer's bad bad day is only 45 minutes, sort of like being at the shrink's...
Mora questioned one of his superiors on a technique Rummy signed off on, the "deprivation of light and auditory stimuli" -- what did that mean? "Could a prisoner be locked in a completely dark cell? If so could he be kept there a month? Longer? Until he went blind? What precisely did the authority to exploit phobias permit? Could a detainee be held in a coffin? What about using dogs? Rats? How far could an interrogator push this? Until a man went insane?" The biggest exploiters of rat phobias, of course, are the agents of the government in Orwell's 1984 but nowhere outside of a class taught by Joe Stalin in the inner circles of hell is that book held up as a teaching tool for domestic security. It is time for those who call themselves Christians and support this administration to start asking, again, what Jesus not Jack Bauer would do.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The Truman show
My wife and I took part in a documentary that aired on MSNBC Sunday night, entitled Love & Marriage in the 21st Century. The filmmaker, Fred Golding, followed us and three other couples around for what seemed like forever and asked lots of personal questions about money and family and and careers and sex. When it was all over, which for us was in November, we were quite sick of the whole thing (though we got to really like Fred and his assistant, Alex) and were quite glad to be done with it.
We saw the doc in its entirety in December and were both a little chagrined: I felt I came off like a middle-aged whiner worrying where his hopes and dreams went, while my wife thought she came off like an emotionally challenged career nazi. (Watching it with her, there were several occasions where she turned to me and said, "That was taken out of context" or "I also said how much I loved you right then.") I certainly got a better sense of why, after I have written things about people that I thought were perfectly honest and representative, they have objected. Fred was doing what any director, or writer, has to do when telling a story with multiple characters: He was selecting material to make his points, using what we had said to illuminate a certain kind of modern marriage: working (always working) wife and sometimes working (trying to work) stay-at-home dad.
If nothing else, it was educational for me as a journalist though we were both kind of relieved when the network aired it opposite the Olympics, with minimal promotion. And the feedback we did get was almost entirely positive: a lot of husbands and wives saw themselves in our situtation and thought us articulate and honest. Our house looked great, too, and really, what else matters?
Probably the weirdest thing for me was the sense that I was watching my life in real time: most of it was filmed last winter and I was wearing the same coat and hat when I walked the same dog... it was like The Truman Show except the whole world wasn't watching. They were waiting for a miracle on ice.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
All I want is the truth
Talking to my intro to journalism class about James Frey and his fungible definition of "memoir" (stuff that I remember that may not have actually happened, as least to me) has been interesting. A few of my students were Frey fans who felt betrayed by the Smoking Gun revelations and were now disinclined to read future works by him. And most assumed that making up stuff that you pass off as true was new under the sun.
How then explain Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, in which a nameless narrator describes events that occurred when Defoe was five years old? And presents himself as a grown merchant and Londoner (a character much like the author's uncle it turns out)? Journalism was just being born then, and Defoe was one of the people birthing it, and we can imagine from what we know of his impertinent behavior that he probably enjoyed passing something off as fact that was fiction -- albeit well-researched, believable fiction about real events.
Similarly, Mark Twain's essay "A Private History of a Campaign That Failed" recounts the author's less-than-heroic stint of military duty (he "fought" for the Confederacy in Missouri for a few weeks near the beginning of the Civil War). The characters and particulars of geography are factual but the story's climax, in which Twain and his fellow Rangers shoot and kill a man who may or not have been a Union scout, is almost certainly fiction. He added the detail over time, both to give the story more heft and to clarify his opposition to war.
"I liked this story before you told me that the killing might not be real," one of my students said. "I don't know how I feel about it now."
That's a good place to start.
