Arms and influence: A hard day

IN THE NEWS
[I'm writing this post in case anyone has a friend, relative, co-worker, or acquaintance who can't understand how the events of the last couple of weeks have inspired shame and disgust in many of their fellow Americans. Feel free to point them to this post.]

Yesterday was a hard day. Work was unfriendly and unforgiving; the day's news was infuriating and depressing. In the course of just five minutes, I hit three new outrages browsing the regular online newspapers and weblogs. Ahmed Chalabi is accused of passing secrets to the Iranian government. Worse, Chalabi may have been Iran's catspaw as far back as when he was passing flawed intelligence to a Bush Administration eager for reasons to attack Iraq (a sentiment it shared with the Iranians). Senator John McCain was justifiably outraged that the version of the Taguba Report that Congress reviewed was redacted--a polite word, as you already know, for incomplete or censored. Truck drivers for Kelllog Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Haliburton, accuse the company of ordering them to drive empty trucks up and down dangerous Iraqi highways--at no small charge to the US taxpayer. (The jokesters at KBR listed the cargo as "sailboat fuel.")

Five minutes, three outrages. It was already a hard day; those five minutes made it vastly harder still.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one feeling that way. Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly said that his spirit was sagging under the weight of the news, too. A lot of people sent him words of encouragement, I was glad to see. For my own sake, I looked for some inspirational reading in The Mammoth Book of Heroes, short tales of courage from Spartacus' defiance of Rome to the Tienanmen protestors.

Sadly, I didn't find the book as inspirational as I hoped it would be. One of the first stories I read was about Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, the escape wizard who broke out of Nazi prisoner of war camps several times, including the "great escape" from Stalag Luft III. German patience with Allied escapees ran out with this major embarasssment, so Hitler had 50 of the re-captured Allied soldiers executed, including Bushell. (Previously, the Nazis had respected the Geneva Conventions when re-capturing Allied POWs, out of concern for what might happen after the war.) Hitler originally ordered all 76 prisoners to be executed, but Goering talked him down to the smaller figure. The Third Reich, as it turned out, was worried that it wouldn't be able to maintain the pretense of respecting the Geneva Conventions if all 76 prisoners were killed.

Hitler and Goering were concerned about the Geneva Conventions, at least to the extent that they wanted to appear to respect it. Douglas Feith openly mocks the Geneva Conventions in cases where suspected terrorists are captured--or suspected Iraqi insurgents, or people who might have useful information of some unspecified sort.

Then I read the firsthand account of John McCarthy, a prisoner of Islamic Jihad during the infamous hostage-taking period of the Lebanese Civil War. The story, of course, is shocking in its cruelty. The terrorists held McCarthy for a year--blindfolded, and chained to the wall--before they started any negotiations about his release. At this point, his kidnappers let McCarthy write a letter to his family, and then hey held him for another four years of captivity. The Islamic Jihad guards kept McCarthy and his fellow prisoner, Brian Keenan, in a state of constant fear and disorientation by physically threatening them, keeping them from communicating except in the quietest possible whisper, and disrupting their sleep by playing the radio or praying loudly. Blindfolded, chained, McCarthy and his fellow prisoners never knew if they would see their loved ones again. In the end, they had to wait years for their release.

No human being deserves this type of treatment. That's a statement, of course, which could just as easily apply to prisoners held for years at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and countless other jails, overt and covert, that the United States now keeps around the world.

Does it make better sense why was yesterday a hard day for me? Why, for many people, every day since 9/11 has been a little bit harder? So hard, in fact, that the daily news tears at your vitals, or makes you feel like a phantom dagger is plunging into your heart over and over again.

Events like the Abu Ghraib horrors pollute the sacred. We should be appalled by what happened at Abu Ghraib because we know that no American should is justified in terrorizing those prisoners in the same fashion as terrorists brutalized John McCarthy.

At least the Islamic Jihad guards let McCarthy write a letter to his parents. Many of the prisoners held in the "legal black hole" of Guantanamo Bay since 2001 have had no contact with the outside world. The same statement applies to the inmates of Abu Ghraib and the places we can't name, because the Bush Administration doesn't trust its own citizens to know how many people are really being held, and where, or even who these prisoners are. And when top Administration officials like Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone pooh-pooh the Geneva Conventions, we lower the bar so far that the Nazis appear to have respected international law more than we do now.

The glue that holds societies together, according to the early social scientist Emile Durkheim, is a sense of shared outrage (what he called the collective conscience). As members of the same society, we are outraged at the same things, for the same reasons. Americans, for example, are outraged by tyranny, so we depose tyrants. Like people in other societies, we feel our outrage stir when certain crimes happen--the Freeway Killer's murders, the Kennedy assassination, the Colombine massacre, the priestly pedophole cases, 9/11--and we demand that the criminal's sentence satisfy both retribution and justice. However, we also try to ensure, as Americans, that we visit retribution and justice on the right people, and retribution is held in reserve, only when it doesn't interfere with justice. It's this philosophy, we feel, that defines us as Americans. (Though we'd be pompous and self-righteous in the extreme to think we're the only nation that shares that sentiment.)

We're right to be outraged by the Nazis and Islamic Jihad. That outrage connects us to a conduit of shared strength, maintaining our spirit in difficult days like those since 9/11. We wake up, read the news, and find things that rattle our confidence. However, we can turn to our collective sense of ourselves, our history of trials that proved both our endurance and correctness, and we can find enough faith to keep us going.

When we pollute what's sacred to us and about us, that faith dissolves.

But not completely. I have a mulish confidence in this country, so I still believe that we'll survive this gauntlet of death and stupidity. My days may be hard, but not nearly as hard as it is for many of our soldiers, or the Iraqis we're supposed to be saving.

But I really don't think anyone's day should be as hard as yesterday was.

Postscript: I read one more story in The Mammoth Book of Heroes, this one about the English village of Eyam. In a brief but ferocious episode of the plague that started in 1665, Eyam lost over half of its population. What made this sad story a heroic tale was how the villagers chose to stay in Eyam, despite the mounting risk that they, too, would become infected. People who fled might have survived, but they might also have carried the plague to other towns. Apparently, the pivotal characters in this story were town's two clergymen--the official rector, and the former one, who lost his title when he refused to take the Oath of Conformity. Both men saved countless lives outside Eyam by convincing their fellow townsfolk to stay. When London suffered an outbreak of the plague, the authorities forcibly quarantined everyone in the city. The author of this piece, Paul Chadburn, was impressed by how the two rectors were able to convince the Eyamites to quarantine themselves. As Chadburn notes in an eloquent passage:

If, in the light of modern science, the alternatives put to them--likely annihilation of the few of Eyam or certain death among the many of Derbyshire--were not exhaustive and exclusive of the other possibilities, the lesson of Eyam remains, and the eternal truth--that men will sacrifice themselves, nay, their wives and their families, for a cause they believe to be good; forced, they will succumb to all the instincts of the animal.

A few words that might apply to events in today's news. I won't belabor why.

Arms and influence

The political uses of violence, for good or bad.

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05/22/2004

A hard day

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