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September 15, 2006
WB: Pavlovian Politics

Billmon:

My guess is the effect will wear off relatively quickly as we put the 9/11 anniversary behind us. Lower gas prices will probably do more to improve the GOP’s chances in November than Shrub’s second-hand terror attacks. Iraq will probably do more to hurt them. But for now at least, I guess we should score at least a few points for the Rovian brand of propaganda-based reality. Fear still works.

Pavlovian Politics

Posted by b on September 15, 2006 at 05:09 UTC | Permalink
Comments

Setting billmonesque hyperbole aside for a second, it really does seem sometimes like the Cheney Administration is deliberately trying to set the Middle East in flames. Why? What possible benefit could they or America derive from the bonfire that would justify the costs?
WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — President Bush and Congressional Republicans spent the last 10 days laying the foundation for a titanic pre-election struggle over national security, and now they have one. But the fight playing out this week on Capitol Hill is not what they had in mind.
Instead of drawing contrasts with Democrats, the president’s call for creating military tribunals to try terror suspects — a key substantive and political component of his fall agenda — has erupted into a remarkably intense clash pitting some of the best-known warriors in the Republican Party against Mr. Bush and the Congressional leadership.
At issue are definitions of what is permissible in trials and interrogations that both sides view as central to the character of the nation, the way the United States is perceived abroad and the rules of the game for what Mr. Bush has said will be a multigenerational battle against Islamic terrorists.
NYTimes
I keep repeating a simple, irrefutable and crucial fact about Bush, and I repeat it to any person available on any pertinent occasion. Call it an idée fixe, or a “hobby horse” of some kind. It earns the reception always accorded to someone’s obsessive, perseverating remarks (or ravings): people nod, they quickly change the subject, and they hope I recognize that I’m a little hard to follow, and that I’m making folks uneasy. And of course they’re absolutely right: when you get a little intense about something that perhaps they haven’t thought about, or don’t quite understand, then your own affective state makes them uneasy, and their uneasiness makes them feel a little sad, or a little disappointed. It certainly makes them restless.
So here we go again….
George Bush is a sadist.
Now that I’ve said it, why would I say it again? And again? What’s so special about being a “sadist”? What difference does it make that a President is a sadist, or that a sadist is a President? Aren’t all Presidents also “sadists,” by definition? People in power are powerfreaks, and powerfreaks are always hurting people. Everyone knows a bully, and isn’t every bully a sadist? Or every sadist a bully? You’re saying that Bush is a bully, aren’t you? Well, we knew it all along, so please stop repeating yourself, and please stop playing with words. Because you make us feel uneasy.
Bush, I repeat, is a sadist; and no, a sadist is not just a powerfreak, a bully, or even a straightforward sociopath. A sociopath may rob you of all you have, and run away with your spouse, but that hardly makes him a sadist. It arguably means that he isn’t a sadist at all: he hasn’t a grain of empathy in his person, and so the fact that you may, or may not, be suffering doesn’t concern him. For the sociopath, I, as a person, have no real existence: I’m nothing more than a thing, an obstacle to his goals. If I get out of his way, he’ll ignore me; and if I stay in his way, he’ll kill me.
With a sadist, everything changes. He has only one particular goal, which is to gratify his craving for pleasure. He might just as well be a womanizer, an alcoholic, a drug addict, or a gambler. He could also, and easily, be any or all of these things. And in fact he may seek to gain power—by running for an elective office, let’s say—with the principle motive of gratifying his particular cravings.
A sadist generally gratifies his craving for pleasure by inflicting pain–physical pain–on the body of another person. He or she may sometimes be satisfied by inflicting “mental” pain on others, and indeed there’s always a “mental” component required to gratify any sadistic craving. It’s never enough simply to beat on someone’s body; there has to be some feedback: one has to hear the person scream, or shed tears, or start to shake, or simply go out of his or her mind. Until and unless this happens, the sadist will have to try harder. And since the gratification is always a short-term thing, like any fix–or an orgasm–the craving will soon return. It’s a form of sexuality.
When an Al-Qaida operative was captured some time ago, gravely wounded and in terrible pain, his interrogators gave him some painkillers–to bring him to his senses and start their interrogation. And when someone later mentioned this fact to Bush, our President exploded with rage on the spot: “Who told them to give him painkillers?,” was his immediate, heartfelt and spontaneous query.
And of course Bush presided over the killing–all quite legal, I’m sure–of some three hundred convicted criminals on death row in the state of Texas. I doubt that any other governor in the history of the United States has executed three hundred prisoners. And we know he laughed at the death of Carla Faye Tucker.
Need I bore you any more on this subject? Bush has no other purpose in life—dry drunk that he is—than to get his kicks by inflicting pain, and sitting back and hearing the screams of the tortured. I’m absolutely certain that he stays in touch, and in person, with the folks who carry out his tortures, and demands a full and detailed accounting of what they’ve done. I’ll bet my house on this possibility, and I’ll pay off the mortgage myself if I’m proven wrong.
Which brings us, at long last, to our friends in the military, and to Colin Powell, and to those Republican senators mentioned in the article cited above. All of those men may be powerfreaks of some kind, and may have their own particular cravings to gratify. How could they not, being human? But they also have other things to live for. They are, as we like to say, “fully socialized,” and take pleasure in doing good work as lawyers, or soldiers, or legislators. They are curious and caring people. They inquire, discuss, and deliberate before they act. All of them are undoubtedly vain in a rather ordinary way, and want to win the esteem of their fellow man. It’s the basis of civilization.
And those men have discovered something about Bush that bothers them: his ravings about “Islamofascism,” and the world-wide conflict of civilizations, is nothing more or less than the gratification of his very particular craving, of his sadism. And they see that the military and civilian branches of government are tasked, so far as he’s concerned, with the one and only mission of gratifying his appetites. And this, as they’re beginning to find, can only mean that he thinks of the Senate, and the House of Representatives, in they very same way that he thinks of Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay. They are “targets of opportunity”. And so they begin to identify, as indeed they have every right to do, with the unlucky men and women who’ve found themselves in those other, “faraway” places.
My thoughts are with them; I wish them the best of luck.
[link fixed – 1:41 am – b.]

Posted by: alabama | Sep 15 2006 5:29 utc | 1

Sorry about the red type. I guess I haven’t learned how to do this citation thing quite right.

Posted by: alabama | Sep 15 2006 5:31 utc | 2

To me this is just another demonstration of how mechanical and mindless our “democratic” process has become, particularly among the ditto heads. I get the distinct impression that if Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al. had simply stepped up to their microphones and yelled “Blah, blah, blah, TERRORISM! Blah, blah, blah, ENEMY! Blah blah blah, DANGER!” over and over and over again, it would have had about the same effect on their numbers.
Reminded me of this Far Side classic:
What Dogs Hear

Posted by: Steve | Sep 15 2006 5:42 utc | 3

Bush aspires to be a sadist. He’ll always be just a twerp. Unfortunately, his underlings, from Cheney on down, are pros.

Posted by: biklett | Sep 15 2006 5:55 utc | 4

Hyperboly aside (Ha!)
To quote Billmon:
Not surprisingly, most of the shift appears to be among conservative Republicans, who are responding in their traditional knee-jerk fashion to the administration’s balls-out rhetoric about Islamofascists, the battle for civilization, World War III, etc.
Apparently, talking about waging total war against absolute evil is an adequate substitute for actually doing it.
And so Bush, unable to actualize his drive to sadism, must be placated to know it is being preformed in his name, by his order — Which by the way, is the primary appeal of his cult supporters, to know vicariously that their (personal &) secret desire is met through him as their proxie. Because (as I keep saying) underneith most typical wingnut mentality is either the desire to dominate, or to watch it as a form of legitimate, hallowed, and sanctified pornography.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 15 2006 8:02 utc | 5

re sadism, see childsplay
frog torturer
and Governor Decider
Bush’s single pardon
many thanks to b real (Man Bites Dog #21)

Posted by: plushtown | Sep 15 2006 14:20 utc | 6

2nd link again (if doesn’t work again, google Bush’s single pardon)
Bush’s single pardon

Posted by: plushtown | Sep 15 2006 14:27 utc | 7

nope, sorry, for Bush’s single pardon google: bush pardon satanist.

Posted by: plushtown | Sep 15 2006 14:31 utc | 8

It is not politics but corporate management. Perks (low gas prices), job-loss fear (terror), climbing the ladder (getting to know the in people to scam the others), making vague stabs at gathering opinion (Diebold).. And when you want to gut the company, splitting groups who adhere to ‘leaders’ and getting people involved in side issues like a geographical move which affects everyone.

Posted by: Noirette | Sep 15 2006 14:44 utc | 9

Yes I suppose fear still works.
It’s not that it scares people into countenancing things they ordinarily wouldn’t, that it works as the rover boys feel it should.
It’s that it is a still-current excuse, agreed upon in advance to be sufficient, to justify the actions of the cabal to themselves and to those who agree with them.
To those who never feared anything to begin with, other than a dimunition of the return on their investment; certainly not the loss of American lives in 9/11, in Iraq, or in Afghanistan.
And certainly they are fearless as regards the blowback that those other than themselves will bear in retribution for their chaotic pyromania.
No one who’s been paying attention at all is going to be whipsawed by any real fear at this point in time.
Other than a fear of the fires these fear mongering pyromaniacs are setting as we speak, the only thing we have to fear….
And that, like all fears, is dispelled by meeting it head on and working to quench the fires the maniacs have set already and to prevent them from starting more fires, in Iran for instance.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Sep 15 2006 14:55 utc | 10

I get the distinct impression that if Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al. had simply stepped up to their microphones and yelled “Blah, blah, blah, TERRORISM! Blah, blah, blah, ENEMY! Blah blah blah, DANGER!” over and over and over again…
like this? Terror, Iraq, Weapons
[plushtown, use the preview feature – there were extra chars at the end of your url string]

Posted by: b real | Sep 15 2006 15:06 utc | 11

@Bama #1
For six years, I have been trying to put together the words and thoughts your have so clearly and succinctly expressed above. I also would be willing to bet that GW gets sexually aroused by hearing the screams of his victims, I would even go so far as to bet that he has participated to some degree in torture of some type. Wild speculation yes, but given his demeanor not unfounded.
These types cheerlead our pushover nation under some delusion of calvanistic rightiousness dehumanizing along the way as if it were their toy, a plaything to subject to the whims of their sexual unfullfilled desires. I suspect psychologically Bush even wants to be punished himself, is the reason his absurdity never ceases.
As Jung remarked, everything unconscious returns as fate. Spirit and soul deprivation have different symptoms. The missing sweetness of our cities, (read New Orleans), the homelessness and choked freeways and planet – these are the public pains of the wounded soul.
I have asked before, How long would it take you, given the keys and the whip, to want to control whomever you could, however you wanted with no thoughts of retribution? Look at our current political class, they have known what they wanted to do since the early 50’s, 60’s or 70’s. I wouldnt want to, I suspect many on this board wouldn’t want to, further, controlling others absolutely brings with it a moral dilemma not suited to my belief system… and again, I suspect most MOA’s.
They want rich and poor, black and white, power and control, gog and magog, –they have all the money and amenities and illth they need– they want Master and slave. A Sadeian Nation.
Thomas Moore’s Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism explains alot of Merican culture. From the jacket:
In Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism, Thomas More turns to a shocking subject: the hidden values in the repulsively fascinating fiction s of the Marquis de Sade. Moore offers a fearlessly new reading of sexual sadism, as he exposes the psychological and imaginative implications of torture, violence, and victimization. Moore, whose eye is always on the soul, advocates a third way of dealing with life’s inherent problems of power and tyranny – not moralistic repression, not idealist transformation, but rather than the ancient paradox that the cause of a disease is its cure. Imagination cures literalism, opening a way through the cruelties that affect family, education, love affairs, the work place, and politics.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 15 2006 15:56 utc | 12

grrr… meant to add,

The ways of Sade are not limited to bedroom and scenes of bondage or porno theaters or forbidden books. Any aspect of culture, from the great to the small, insofar as it is engaged in issues of power has therefore Sadean qualities. Furthermore, since life is never perfect, every aspect of culture will know the split of power into torture and suffering, dominance and submission, or sentimentality and cruelty.

Further Moore writes, that in any culture that does not acknowledge it’s skeletons, –it’s sins, if you will– will have that imagination played out in real life.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 15 2006 16:10 utc | 13

In my job, I travel often by car, and when I forget to grab some CDs, I often wander over to the AM dial and listen to the Dark Side. Although this is purely anecdotal, my instinct is that Rush and Hannity are starting to feel it all slipping away. The shrillness, the bitterness and anger, the pure volume of their shows has gone way up. Several times the other day I heard what appeared to be moderate Repubs call in, concerned about the direction of their country. They were abused, yelled at, muted, and hung up on.
Fox News’ rating are in a decline, while MSNBC’s are on the rise. Keith Olbermann’s last two rants have garnered a significant amount of attention.
Remember: after a certain point, no matter how loudly one shouts “wolf!”, no one listens anymore. Hopefully the Repubs have arrived at this point at a most inopportune time, less than two months before the election.
Still, the Dems seem unable to make any hay out of the rightwing’s fuckups. Maybe it’s the “don’t murder an enemy who is commiting suicide” tactic, but I doubt it. Besides Jack Murtha, the Dems have no one of any stature; they’re all Small People, not presidential, not visionary in any way. It’s just sad.

Posted by: montysano | Sep 15 2006 16:18 utc | 14

The fear works, but even that has become ersatz. It is a thrill (related to sadism btw), a knee jerk and insincere reaction. Like, hoo, new Bin Laden tape, we have to be scared. No real fear -for harm to life, limb, family, work, or of terrorist attacks – is involved. The reaction is a programmed, expected, indulged in as compliance to authoritarianism, a purely conventional response, a superficial adherence. Part of American life. Life as a TV show – on stage, looking bright and good, behaving right.

Posted by: Noirette | Sep 15 2006 16:36 utc | 15

Thanks, Alabama. I’ve long thought his sadism was driving element of Marquis de Bush Admin & glad to see you develop it. I hadn’t thought to extend it to Congress – often wondered if films were ordered sent to WH for his personal enjoyment. Tough life when prez. can’t escape from his velvet prison to run to his fave male homosexual whore house – extreme measures for extreme times…

Posted by: jj | Sep 15 2006 16:46 utc | 16

noirette
yeah, you know. whoever said the “people” can’t think for themselves is much closer to the truth than the sly academicians who say “totality?. what totality”
“Everyone is waiting to see to what extent the malaise of capitalist civilization is really and simply the anarchy of meaning and the emptiness of its soul”.–negri
zzzzing.

Posted by: slothrop | Sep 15 2006 16:47 utc | 17

alabama
all exercising of power implies cruelty sometimes great cruelty
the unjust war is based in its very heart on both cruelty & punishment
perhaps i am a little foolish & imagine competence where it does not exist but i am mostly surprised by the absolute stupidity of their plans, their strategies (if they can be called that) & their tactics
perhaps macnamara, westmoreland & johnson were no more competent but i imagined it
having worked & been in milieus where violence is a form of coin – i have never been frightend of the real brutes because i believe both in destiny & history — historical materialism – & i have understood if you were prudent, intelligent & had the capacity to hear – you could sense when they were falling or a little inattentive & you could whack them in that moment & a balance of force could be arrived at
but i have always been a little fearful of thoughtless thugs who – mostly by accident – commit acts of which they are barely conscient – not so much sociopathic in the classic sense but people who are really without reflexive capability
& it is strange that someone has mentioned that shrillness in the commentators -even in the prettyboy cia hood anderson cooper because it is plainly hysteric & in a terrible way comic because they have to change their minds each week with the rapidity of events
from here for example, cnn’s week at war – is in the purest sense comic – they seem to have no capacity to remember what they sd last week
& again it is in the act of forgetting that cruelty flows & forms institutional forms of sadism

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 15 2006 17:49 utc | 18

Uncle $cam, sadism and masochism–inflicting and suffering pain–play a part in everyone’s being, if only as the negative charge, so to speak, of the “pleasure/pain” series comprising our instinctual life. And so there can never be a politics or a politician, in peace or in war, who’s truly free of sadism. We know this, just as we also know that our instincts needn’t run the whole show. And when those instincts take over (as must happen from time to time, precisely because we are human), then we enter a state of crisis that will kill us if allowed to continue.
This, I think, is what’s driving the resistance of the four Republican Senators and Secretary Powell. As members of the military community, these men are no strangers to the giving and taking of pain. As military men, they also know the hazards, the seductions, and the price to be paid, on a purely practical level, by a loss of accountability and control over sadistic instincts.
I’d even go so far as to say that the hard-won practice of restraining sadism, collectively and individually, is the essence of military discipline. This is everywhere true-in the relations between commanders and subordinates, captors and prisoners, soldiers and civilians. I’ll even bet that the reaction of the Senators and the Secretary to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is less one of “feeling the victims’ pain”, than of watching their very own military force lose the requisite skills to maintain its complex discipline.
These men have all seen, from the ground in Iraq, the evidence of soldiers killing civilians at will. And since this has to bother them even more than the torture inflicted by the interrogators, they’re doing the very thing that their discipline trained them not to do: they’re speaking out in public against their ranking superiors. They surely feel like mutineers–a high price to pay, and a paradoxical price, for keeping discipline intact.
Bush, then, for reasons that you and I have pondered over the years, is wrecking the military machine at its point of greatest sensitivity. How much more wrecking can it take, these men must wonder, if, as seems likely, we’re fated to many more years of warfare?
A word about Rumsfeld and Cheney–that Mutt and Jeff team of power freaks who love to break rules and who hate to be held unaccountable. No doubt they despise the Geneva Convention, and for just these very reasons. This doesn’t make them sadists in the manner of Bush. Something still worse is going on with those guys: they know that Bush is an idiot, and they’ve learned very well that he’ll do whatever they say if they provide him his daily dose of torture. They are the primary enablers of his habit, which operates in a very narrow domain–narrow in relation to their own ambitions, whose reach is more or less impossible to calculate.
For this reason alone, Rumsfeld and Cheney must feel that the military’s putting of the torture toy under lock and key is a direct threat to their own freedom of maneuver–a much greater threat, perhaps, than the softening counter-moves of a Rice, or the relentless inquest of a Patrick Fitzgerald.

Posted by: alabama | Sep 15 2006 17:53 utc | 19

plushtown,
you meant:
Bush’s single pardon
You almost got it rigth, just got some extra letters after the .shtml
Checking that my links work is my number one use of the ‘Preview’ button.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Sep 15 2006 17:55 utc | 20

& now we have the encerclement of baghdad – could it fill the requirements of tragicomedy more fully

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 15 2006 19:41 utc | 21

The USA never has had a President like George W Bush. Vietnam killed LBJ. You could see the tragedy carved in his face. George’s face is just the same as when he ran against Ann Richards in Texas, frat boy grown old.
Two trends have crashed together in 2006; television election of politicians and media control by few wing-nut corporate owners. Republican politicians are corrupt crazy liars and corporate media is not calling them out.
Bill Frist last night on NewsHour stated we’re not going to do what Harry Reid wants to do, and that is surrender, to wave a white flag, to cut and run at a time when we’re being threatened,
Radicals are in charge of the US government. Iran is in their bull’s-eye. Except, you wouldn’t know it watching the Nightly News.

Posted by: Jim S | Sep 15 2006 19:48 utc | 22

Instead of typing out the URL, just ‘copy’ from the address bar when you are at the website then ‘paste’ it in the comments section and stick your HTML’s around it.

Posted by: pb | Sep 15 2006 20:01 utc | 23

is sadism to “shock & awe” what hard-porn is to soft-porn ?

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Sep 15 2006 20:05 utc | 24

You have that backwards, I think, Jony. Shock & awe is all come-shot.

Posted by: Pyrrho | Sep 15 2006 21:03 utc | 25

jbc, sadism is the thing that Shakespeare tries to represent in Act III, scene 7 of King Lear. And in fact the spectacle of Cornwall gouging out Gloucester’s is so horrific that no one ever staged the scene with Gloucester facing the audience–not, that is, until Peter Brook’s breakthrough “theatre of cruelty” production in 1960. For almost 360 years, then, no one could bear to watch this action “in the face,” as it were. In terms of porn, it’s not so much “hard porn” as “porn that’s too hard to watch”.
“Shock and awe”, finally, was something staged for the general public, the kind of “sound and light show” that could turn up on primetime tv without upsetting the children’s parents. Very colorful in an abstract sort of way. (Was anyone actually killed by “shock and awe”? If so, I haven’t seen the statistics). When compared to the things we’ve been watching ever since, it would hardly rate as porn of any kind.
I doubt that any soldier would have trouble accepting military actions like the “shock and awe” displayed in March of 2003–provided, of course, that a war has been declared. But I also can’t imagine any disciplined soldier stomaching or tolerating the actions of Cornwall. Still, it’s also a fact that discipline breaks down, and when it does, the torture starts to take place–and of course a lot of our troops in Iraq have been behaving like Cornwall, since the summer of 2003 at the latest.
This, I think, is what troubles those senators and that secretary.

Posted by: alabama | Sep 15 2006 21:07 utc | 26

that would be “Gloucester’s eyes”. Interesting that I didn’t set it down exactly.

Posted by: alabama | Sep 15 2006 21:10 utc | 27

& we have the panzerpapen with his delicate & prudent observations of islam
in the belly of the beast – rep ney says he’s clean until he pleads guilty & is about to rat out on his brothers in arms
& here we have sarkozy cosying up to george & karl & trying to establish himself as a hungarian emigree helmut kohl – well a very very tiny version
& of course we have the fear ramped up as is normal in september- with france being mentioned in a q’s video – could the ‘terrorist infrastructure’ — ask for more from its erstwhile enemies – who in essence – are their accomplices
this is cruelty so clumsy kent from lear could comprehend

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 15 2006 21:48 utc | 28

Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am?
The Fool:Lear’s shadow.
~William Shakespeare, King Lear

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 15 2006 22:02 utc | 29

@montysano (#14):
I’ve long ago come to the conclusion that a function of the current political ‘system’ in this country is to weed out anyone with a strong vision. Most politicians are washed-out, bland, banal idiots who couldn’t write a 5-paragraph essay unless it was heavily plagarized. It’s very sad because the ones who have real passion and vision also have done things in their lives that the ‘mainstream’ considers abnormal and unacceptible…like sparking up a doobie at a Dead Show and daydreaming of love and freedom.

Posted by: Dr. Wellington Yueh | Sep 15 2006 23:10 utc | 30

Breaking News:
Several Spanish news outlets are reporting that the #2 in Hezbollah, head of the Bodicia Brigade (the armed wing of Hezbollah), has been captured by agents of the Spanish Interior Ministry while on holiday in Spain, and rendited to a secure location for debriefing.
GNN’s own Hunter Blitzer, reports from Washington that the White House and the E Wing of the Pentagon are estatic. It is thought by understanding Hezbollah’s defense strategy in the recent Israeli-Lebanese conflict that, in the words of one Pentagon official, “Real men will finally be able to go to Iran.”
In a related note,WWN’s Baghdad bureau chief reports that Britain’s military attache in Baghdad, Lt. Col. G. Bell, was seen at her favorite saddle shop, buying several riding crops and smiling wistfully.
Links below.
This is Walter Crankcase reporting for GNN.
Good Night and Good News.
http://www.escolar.net/MT/archives/2006/09/el_peor_escenar.htm
http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/

Posted by: Walter Crankcase | Sep 16 2006 0:30 utc | 31

Sorry:
First Link:
LINK
Scroll down to:
El peor escenario bélico internacional que hay en este momento
Second Link:
LINK

Posted by: Walter Crankcase | Sep 16 2006 0:42 utc | 32

Alabama–
What you are stating is hardly more than a simple fact. But as you say, people do not want to hear it. People are desperate to live in their fantasy world, the more so that the do intuit it is all about to unravel. They don’t want to face what is coming and will cling to any excuse not to. So Bush being a sadist–which is really rather obvious–is just a sour note. A few actually envy him, but most just don’t want this intrusion on their fantasy.
There is no polite way to handle this situation, but there is more than one impolite way. Try out different things and see if you can find one that works.
biklet–
It is true that Bush is basically incompetent, but he is plenty dangerous all the same. And he has surrounded himself with other sadists who ARE competent, on a day to day (not strategic) basis.

Posted by: Gaianne | Sep 16 2006 1:50 utc | 33

Gaianne, no ordinary person can do much to intervene in this situation. Talking about it with other people, for instance, won’t help very much if other people refuse to listen (here we both agree). The intervention simply misfires.
He or she can, however, “intervene” (or reflect) on his or her own thinking on the matter. This actually requires a modest degree of imagination, honesty, and research (reading up on the specifics of sadism, for example), but the effort is not misspent. When, for example, the President says (or screams), as he did in today’s news conference, that no intelligence gathering can occur until and unless the Congress gives him its unconditional permission to torture whomever he likes, then we can know as a certainty, in advance, that he’s not saying anything truthful about the gathering of intelligence; he’s only blackmailing us into letting him indulge his craving for torture. I find it’s helpful to know this in a timely and lucid way.
Or as Edgar says in King Lear, at a moment when he’s able least to intervene, “Bear free and patient thoughts”.
Other barflies can say whether or not I handle all situations politely….

Posted by: alabama | Sep 16 2006 2:31 utc | 34

Alabama wrote:
Still, it’s also a fact that discipline breaks down, and when it does, the torture starts to take place
I think the breakdown is more systemic than that. I suspect that our time is analagous to the time when the Medieval Catholic Church began openly advocating torture…I think the entire over-arching system is now officially dying when this happens. Is anyone familiar w/Medieval History to discuss this?
Alfred McCoy has written a history of Am. Use of Torture recently. The CIA sponsored academic research when US took over running the world after WWII to learn how to do it effectively & who would be amenable to doing it. What’s changed now is that the Ego of the Elite & is being forced to approve it as are the American People; whereas before it was a function of the Id It was done/taught by the CIA in dungeons in the Third World & kept secret from Americans – ie out of newspapers – and kept separate from the military precisely to keep discipline from breaking down, though it was often overseen by US Ambassador. I’ve often wondered if Pat, our mil. intel. poster for awhile wasn’t driven by the dissonance induced by she/her husband being forced to teach/practice/tolerate torture that drove her to post here.

Posted by: jj | Sep 16 2006 2:48 utc | 35

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