Good Punchline in Torture Debate

Not that I often need a diversion or digression to get me following a random string, but a friend sent me an article the other day about US government use of torture, prohibited by decree of Barack Obama in one of the first acts of his presidency.   The author opined that as president Mitt Romney was likely to rescind that decree.  There was a link to an article about SERE training (see first line of yesterday’s post for link) and the US government’s perverse relationship to the torture it rightly condemns when barbaric enemies employ it.

I sent the link to that article to my friend and we shared reactions to it.   He wrote that he was aware that as soon as the acetylene torch came out he’d tell them everything.   We seemed to agree on most points.   Then, after a long and stressful day, I got an email from him with that old chestnut, the ticking time bomb scenario.   He said use of torture was not such a clear moral issue when your loved ones were on the verge of death and the prisoner in the chair likely knew how to stop it– but wasn’t talking.  In that case, he said, there is an arguable duty to use any means necessary to save your loved ones, including the worst tortures you can think of.

I reacted with a good measure of horror, and arguments, and I slapped at the hypothetical that American advocates of torture had recently used over and over to justify the torture of many innocent men, people they called “detainees” and kept in secret “black sites” or on an American military base in Cuba that they lawyered up to claim was not, therefore, subject to U.S. and International laws.  

This torture in my name, although the torture was legally redefined in a secret internal memo and defended as merely “enhanced interrogation”, and marketed as necessary to protect us from terrorists who’d planted countless ticking time bombs, has been one of the most galling aspects of the rise of the “neo-Con” partisan in American politics.  That most of the people tortured, these “worst of the worst”, had later been released as innocent is another fact that makes me wanna holler.

My friend, a skilled lawyer, hit back on each of my points, then made this point, toward the end of his gamely fighting email:

Me: Your conclusion would seem to be that if there’s a time bomb ticking, or if you believe strongly enough that there is, everyone should probably be tortured, just in case one of them knows something you would come to regret not torturing them to find out.

Him: There you go again. Screw the fucking time bomb. Why not just torture everyone and get it the fuck over with. There, I said it. Somebody had to.

I’d thought he was at least half (if not 90%) joking, so I’d ended my previous with this:

But I think you may be pulling my shackled leg in a stress position while pouring ice water on me as my balls are given a mild shock from a car battery.

 Him:  Wait your turn.

When I wrote back, my will and spirit finally broken, I told him: You win, torture away.

Him:  I am, my friend, I am.

PTSD

I read this in an excellent article by a graduate of the SERE program, the Cold War-inspired torture institute set up to try to train American servicemen to resist inhumanly brutal interrogation and brainwashing techniques (SERE later formed the blueprint for the “enhanced interrogation” –tortures — Dick Cheney, John Yoo and David Addington were so enthusiastic about):

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a disease characterized by, among other things, an addiction to the reliving of powerful memories, memories that habitually traumatize and re-traumatize the mind until, in the worst cases, it becomes impossible to live without the chemical rush the memories provide.

This reminded me of the study a brilliant, and disturbed, classmate of mine in Law School told me about.  Scientists studied the brains of people who had been abused as children and found there were significant physical changes in the brains of these people, now adults.  Being traumatized and re-traumatized, living in a hostile environment where you are powerless, frequently punished for infractions of brutal, arbitrary, impossible to know rules, changes your brain, literally.

I’m not putting this all together for you correctly now, and I must toddle off to sleep, have to be up early to attend a workshop about getting blood from corporate stones.  I’ll reorganize it better tomorrow evening.  But for now, when I wonder about my own debilitating moods, the odd actions of people I’ve known for years, self-destructive or strangely gruff behavior, and grimness, this traumatizing and re-traumatizing gives me an insight, or the glimmer of one.

Stay tuned.

Lets Not Go There

“Lets not go there,” is the other side of “all options are on the table.”   One says, “even hypothetically, I do not want to entertain any idea like this.”   The other says, “hypothetically, we will forget about law, morality and everything else and reserve the right to do the worst things you can imagine.”  Both are terrible reactions to stress, whatever Realpolitik value they may have.

I learned, in the last five years of my mother’s life, to be much more patient with her.  She was dying a long, slow-motion death from endometrial cancer.  There were periods of remission and times when the disease would rage back.   I had a lot of compassion for my mother, which my sister told me was easy for me because our mother clearly loved me so much.   That may have been part of it, but there were other factors.  One thing I learned was not to press an issue once my mother resisted it strongly enough.   

I would from time to time get a call from my mother, in a fury, after spending a few hours with my sister.  She would recount the episode that had infuriated her.  She’d close with the warning not to tell my sister any of this.  I’d hang up and soon I’d have a call from my sister, giving her account of the same horrific few hours.  She too would close with a stern request that I not mention our conversation to our mother.

Having heard both sides I was in a unique position to see how relatively simple a partial solution to this unsolvable personality clash could be.   A skilled mediator, I knew, could frame the issues in such a way that with relatively few adjustments in behavior tensions could have been dialed back.  The issue involved ingratitude and harsh criticism, if each had been aware how much their behavior infuriated the other, it would have been possible to mitigate the main source of recurrent anger between them.  I pitched the idea to them several times over a period of months, separately and together.  They were united in their resistance to trying it, though both acknowledged it could have some value, if the other party were not such an intractable, self-righteous and infuriating force.

“Don’t go there,” warned my sister.   “Besides,” she predicted, “she would never go for it.”   My mother said something similar.  I soon dropped it.  Over time they did a pretty good job pretending this mutual rage was not lurking between them.  As my mother got weaker and weaker she protested less and less, my sister became more and more of a caretaker, almost a parent, and they came to rely on each other much more.  The issues that drove them to call me and vent receded in those final couple of years.

But to this day, when my sister describes certain traits of our mother’s, she does so with the same anger and vehemence she might have had when the wars between them were raging full force.

When I hear “let’s not go there” this impasse between two people I love always leaps to mind.  It tells me again that most people would rather complain about a bad situation than do the hard work that would be necessary to change it.

As a recently declassified CIA report, written around the time of the 1976 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, stated in regard to torture and mind-control techniques:  “If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”  I guess that’s right.

Creativity

Warning: this is a mild bummer, forced up like a synthetic hairball; it contains little of the spontaneity it seeks to evoke

The pursuit of creativity (he begins pedantically) might sound like a frivolous add-on for somebody who already has enough and might want to enrich some downtime.  I could be drinking my own Kool-aid, but to me creativity is essential to just about everything.  Creativity is the life force, what makes our lives here possible in the first place, and as rich as they can be, no matter how otherwise poor, after that.

Why bother to invent a new way to say things when the old ones are tried and true, fine and dandy?  Because we need to, cleverness is a net gain, like a laugh, the difference between a grim march and a healthy hike.  Why do we laugh?  If I have to ‘splain it, Lucy, it won’t be funny.  We laugh because we hear something comically unexpected, or see something that surprises us and makes us lose it.  If the moment hadn’t been spun that way, by someone creating it just right, we’d still be yawning.

Creativity is a moment of grace that refreshes and restores the creator and the beneficiary of the creation, the aerialist spinning amazingly from one trapeze to another rather than plummeting to splat like a pumpkin as the crowd shudders.

Creativity is a moment of faith, taking a chance to do something new with belief in success.  It’s done with a freedom we might not otherwise see in our day.  

Lack of creativity makes us wince, someone trying to be original by imitating something many others have already done trying to be original.  Or when the attempt misfires like, for example, a mildly embarrassing moment from yesterday’s nice chat with an old friend.  This guy is very funny, and it struck me, toward the end of a serious talk, that we hadn’t had a single laugh, which is rare for a conversation with him.  The subjects we talked about had been serious, we were both concentrating hard.  My mind was sluggish trying to shift gears as I was reminded by something he said of a certain joke.  I asked him if he’d heard the one about…. and I dick-fingeredly handled the joke by the punchline to jog his memory.

“No,” he said with a smile.  I could hear over the phone that the same smile was there a few moments later, along with a slightly surreal laugh, as he acted like the punchline I’d already told him had been a surprise.  He created a little reaction to distract us both from the embarrassment of my moment of anti-creativity.

But how about the person somewhere down south who first described someone’s clumsy attempt to do something as being “dick-fingered”?

Supremely creative.  If you think about it, even for a hot little moment, you will realize I am right to extoll its importance.  Now go forth, be fruitful and multiply yourself, and have a nice day.

The Illusion of A World

What draws the helpless addict to the internet?  The illusion of a world, input, output, putt putt, the illusion of an interactive world community.  Hindu and Buddhist texts refer to the world we perceive with our senses as Maya, the veil this hectic universe of noise, show and desire wears.  So the internet is a play within a play, carried out on the vast virtual stage of liquid cyberspace.   Every kid’s dreams can sail on that sea, take a step back, all the dreams together are less than the breath of a single ant.

“You are addicted to the internet,” says Sekhnet, not without some justification.   I look around at the available options and come running back here, where there is no demand on me but to focus my thoughts, if I like.   And to dial back my expectation of anyone actually giving a rat’s tutu.

In the real world you’d be well-advised to stay busy, bub.   That’s all I’m saying.  There’s a reason many people are workaholics, looking your own life in the face can be terrifying.   Could lead you to question things you’re better off not questioning, dwelling on things better left alone.  Such dwelling could lead to self-revelations that will cause major tremors in your life, could shake the whole structure of it to pieces.  Stay busy, my friends, that’s my advice.

“That’s not your advice,” a voice knowing better says.

My advice is don’t ask me for advice, is what I say.   My advice is to look at your fears and figure out something productive to do about them.  Which is very easy for me to say, wrestling with the lethargic anaconda of my own terrors.  If you’re getting your ass kicked, find a way to get out of the room, that’s all I’m saying.  Which is easy for me to say, no active monsters in my life at the moment, except for the fear of a difficult dream I’m trying to make real turning out to be another illusion, another dead end. 

I suppose anyone in a tough spot can rationalize their situation in a similar way: this difficult waking dream, OK,  this nightmare, can be turned around by a miracle.  Miracles happen every day.  The bad guy gets hit by lightning, the pure soul wins the lottery.  OK, if not by a miracle, by changing my view of it– making this alchemy part of my daily spiritual practice, let me say.  If I can change the way I view the battle I’m locked in I can turn it to my advantage, somehow, it becomes spiritual work, to accommodate myself to a merciless world of suffering and stop thinking about better and worse, stop heaping puny human value judgments on a situation that is not susceptible to such things.  And, anyway, is it not entirely possible that a bit of unexpected mercy will come my way, I’m not a bad person, there’s nothing bad about staying in a tough spot and …. what am I nattering about?

I can’t shake the damnable expectation that I am not the only one who gives a rat’s ass about any of this.

Bullying

In answer to the unasked question, I don’t know the answer.  If you consent to be bullied, participate in the cruel and grotesque dance of it, what advice can compel as much as the terrifying, all-consuming tango of that?

There are many situations where we are powerless, or virtually so.   In other situations, though the choice may appear very scary, there are life-affirming choices within our power to select.

Easier said than done, I suppose.

The Right to Rage

You have the right to rage, but there is a price you must be willing to pay.  You might think the rage itself is price enough, but you would be fucking wrong.

A mother, say, may rage at her child.   In the moment nobody is fast enough or strong enough to prevent the attack, certainly not the kid.   The enraged woman might have a right to her rage, a lawyer could argue, but if she takes a bottle and skulls her kid she has a right to be taken to the police station and sent over to the Laughing Academy for observation.

My father had been treated to this kind of tough love as a very young boy.  This kind of tough love may be more properly called hatred.  It leaves only betrayal and rage behind in the child who, instead of being protected by his mother, was beaten by her.  “A face only a mother could love,” has a bitter ring to someone who was brutalized by his own mother.

My father, to his credit, rarely lashed out with his hands to hit my sister and me.  It was the tongue, sharp as a bullwhip, that he lashed out with.  I won’t describe the torrent of hate speech that often foamed out of his mouth.  I understand it now, but, shit…

It is not unusual for children, watching one parent rage and the other cower, to make the obvious mistake:  the raging one is strong, the cowering one weak.  It is not weakness to cower and not strength to scream and threaten, or lash out.   I’ve seen many situations where a kid winds up emulating the style of the parent they identify as strong.   These situations are always sickening.

My father was very smart, and a gifted arguer.  He taught me the Socratic Method years before I heard of it.  A series of logical questions, with answers beyond dispute, leading to a conclusion, also beyond dispute.  I did some ju-jitsu on him one day on line at a wedding buffet in a bistro on Metropolitan Avenue.

“You’ve said many times that physical violence and verbal violence are exactly the same in the harm they do to the victim,” I said, piling some shrimp on my plate.

“Yes,” he said, swallowing, dignified, ready to rumble.  He already knew where we were going.

“So all the verbal violence around the kitchen table directed at A___ and me was the same as if you’d been beating on us?”  I asked, pulling a celery heart out of ice.

“That’s right,” he said, not avoiding it now.

“So would you say A___ and I were victims of child abuse?” I asked him, moving the Queen behind the Rook, and the celery heart behind the shrimp.

“Yes,” he said, “I would have to say that you were.”

The thing I remember most about this exchange, which took place more than twenty years ago, is the angry look my sister shot me over the old man’s shoulder.  She was mad on his behalf, her identification with the strong parent was greater than her realization of the damage he’d done to her.

You have the right to rage, everyone does.  But for the love of God, don’t do it.