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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-206684982014-10-01T21:47:56.466-07:00The Sacred MomentArthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138737115525063582004-01-03T11:45:00.000-08:002009-10-25T12:29:33.869-07:00Angels in America: A Hymn to Life[Added 1/31/06: Allow me a brief prefatory note about my methodology in this essay: in the first part, I provide many specifics about Angels in America. I do this for two reasons: first, to give you as strong a sense as I can of what actually transpires in the film, of the people, events and the kinds of moments that you see on the screen, and what you experience when you watch it; and second, this degree of specificity stands in stark contrast to the methods employed by those who attack Kushner's work. They denounce and attempt to marginalize it -- and they never provide any details or evidence to support their denunciations. All they offer are evaluations unconnected to evidence -- or evidence which is scant to the vanishing point, or irrelevant -- which makes their criticisms in my view, and in a word, worthless. So I provide here a great deal of detail to document the evaluations I offer. This particular issue becomes clearer in the second half of the article. The earliest of my entries about Kushner's play predated this essay by several months and has not yet been reposted, but the few references to that previous post are largely self-explanatory.

If you've never seen Angels in America, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Its profoundly affirming and deeply joyous message of "More life!" is perhaps the most important one of all, especially given national and world events at the present time. As Kushner writes at the end of his masterful work:

"You are fabulous, each and every one, and I bless you. More life. The great work begins."]

Part I

To offer any sort of comprehensive analysis and appreciation of Angels in America would require much more time and space than I can accommodate, so the following is a discussion of some elements which particularly struck me on a second viewing of the Mike Nichols film, shown on HBO. But the length of even this shortened treatment demonstrates the richness and complexity of the tapestry that Tony Kushner has woven with such enormous care. (Warning: If you have not yet seen Angels and would prefer to be entirely surprised by the many great pleasures it provides, please do not read the following. I include many details about the drama and what happens in it.)

But before I get to specifics, a couple of general comments. In a crucial way, my major test for any work of art -- and for writing of any kind, in fact -- is a simple one: Is this something I haven't seen or read before? Is this new to me? Is it something I haven't thought of before? In other words: Is this original? And in that crucial sense, that is the greatest virtue of Angels in my view: it is stunningly original. It's not a play or film you've seen before: it mixes politics, psychology, sexuality, religion, the countless intersections of all these issues with each other, general cultural trends, the future of the world -- and fantasy elements, lots of wonderful fantasy -- in all sorts of unimaginable ways. Unimaginable, that is, until Kushner imagined them, and presented them as a wonderful gift to all of us. For me, that above all places Angels in America far, far above almost any other new play I can think of in the last decade, or even two. If Angels did nothing else, that alone would be cause for celebration.

But Angels does much more than that. It offers us provocative ideas to think about for countless hours, it brings us characters that we care about enormously -- and it does all this in a marvelously theatrical and entertaining manner. Furthermore, in many of its concerns and the issues it raises, it is a drama clearly intended for adults. In this day and age, with most films being imitations of imitations of movies that were often not that good in the first place, and with many films being $100 million comic books, that is also an achievement of great note. And Angels is shot through with wonderful, pointed wit and humor. I think this should also be mentioned: a viewer need not be concerned with many of the issues I discuss below, or even most of them. You can, if you choose, simply sit back, and enjoy and contemplate it. That is, after all, what art is for in large measure. Angels in America is altogether a genuinely remarkable achievement, for all of these reasons, and for additional ones as well. But these are all evaluations -- so here are a number of specifics to support them. In the following, I will simply proceed through the drama as it unfolds.

-- In the opening segment, a very old Rabbi -- miraculously embodied by a nearly unrecognizable Meryl Streep, who continues to make such miracles appear as simple and as dependable as breathing -- eulogizes an old Jewish woman who has just died. The deceased woman was a Russian immigrant who had come to America many years before. Toward the beginning of the eulogy, the Rabbi is reciting the list of the woman's children and grandchildren -- Morris, Abraham, Samuel, Esther, Rachel -- and then the Rabbi comes to Eric. "Eric? That's a Jewish name?" It's a delightfully funny moment, especially as delivered by Streep, and typical of how Kushner constantly mixes comedy and much weightier matters in a manner which does not undercut the seriousness of the issues at hand in any way at all. The Rabbi then goes on to talk about how the deceased woman "brought the old world of Russia over on her back," how she was not merely "a person" but "a whole kind of a person," how there isn't any "America" qua "America" for immigrants (and perhaps for all of us, in one sense) -- and the Rabbi then talks about how that kind of journey, from the Old World to the New, does not and cannot take place any longer in our world today. But, the Rabbi says, all of the deceased's offspring internally recreate that journey every day: "In you, that journey...is."

In this manner, Kushner raises the following questions in our minds: what is the nature of assimilation into a new society? Do we become part of the new society altogether, or do we always remain apart in some manner? Are we constantly having to make the adjustment from our origins to our New World, whatever it may be? What do we mean by "America," anyway? And the Rabbi suggests still more issues to ponder. This is all accomplished in approximately the first three or four minutes -- more food for thought than most dramas offer in their entirety. And Kushner's just beginning. These issues also contain the essence of what is perhaps the play's major theme, as we shall see.

And when you watch or rewatch Angels, note the telling little moment when Louis and Prior Walter (two of the major characters, who are lovers when the drama begins) leave the synagogue: up until the moment they are "safely" away from all the relatives and friends, Louis and Prior are passing for straight; they behave like "close friends." When they turn the street corner, Prior glances back -- to make sure no one is watching -- and then, finally, puts his arm affectionately over Louis' shoulder. If you're not gay and have never had to play this game, it won't carry as much meaning for you -- but for most of us who are gay and of a certain age, we are all too familiar with this kind of pretense, and the terrible costs it carries. It's a small moment -- but it also heralds a much larger theme to come.

-- I didn't fully appreciate the following moment until I watched Angels the second time. After they leave the synagogue, Louis and Prior have a conversation in the park, and Prior shows Louis his first Kaposi's sarcoma lesion, which has just been diagnosed. (The drama begins in 1985, in the first years of the unfolding horror of AIDS.) At one point, Louis demands to know why Prior didn't tell him of his worries earlier. Prior responds: "I was afraid you'd leave me." And Louis says simply: "Oh." But the way he says it reveals that Louis himself knows that he might leave Prior in the midst of his illness, that Prior knew it, too, and that Louis knew that Prior knew it. It's one of those tiny moments that reverberates in all kinds of ways -- and most of us have had moments like that in our relationships. It carries that shock of recognition for the viewer, a kind of "Oh, no" moment. I suspect many of you probably know what I mean.

-- One of the other central relationships in Angels is that between Joe Pitt and his wife, Harper. Joe is a young, Republican Mormon, who clerks for a judge (and writes most of his opinions) and is also close friends with Roy Cohn, who has become Joe's surrogate father. In one of the first scenes between Joe and Harper, Joe is explaining why the Reagan Revolution means so much to him, and he talks about how America has now resumed its "sacred place among nations," and that people "aren't ashamed of it the way they used to be." It's one of a number of moments that carry an eerie foreshadowing of what has happened since 9/11 in many ways, and it also introduces yet another of Kushner's thematic concerns.

Joe is a closeted gay man. Some of the confrontations between Joe and Harper (who really knows that Joe is gay, but doesn't want to admit it to herself) are extraordinarily painful to watch, and they document in grisly detail the cost of maintaining a public image which does not acknowledge the truth of who we actually are. For example, at one point Joe responds to Harper's doubts by desperately clinging to the idea that as long as his behavior is "correct," then it doesn't matter what he might actually feel, and what he might actually be. Joe talks about how he's nothing more than a "shell of a man," and that there's nothing left in him to kill. And at another point, Harper asks Joe what he prays for. Joe says: "I pray for God to crush me, to break me up into little pieces and start all over again." Thus does Kushner reveal the terribly painful nature of beliefs such as those of many in the Religious Right -- that homosexuality is "just" a behavior, and that of course we love you, and we only condemn your actions. Kushner shows the awful psychological toll of making such demands -- demands which deny all kinds of psychological (and sexual) truths, and which are aimed at our very humanity in a profound sense.

This issue is, obviously, one that Kushner discussed in an interview that I mentioned in my earlier post. Kushner said:
I think that a character's politics have to live in the same sort of relationship to the character's psyche that people's politics live in relationship to their own psyches. People are never consistent. People will always do surprising things, both good and bad, and the way that people surprise themselves and their audience are the most interesting moments of human behavior. The space between what we'd like to be and what we actually are is where you find out the most interesting things.
-- The scene between Cohn and his doctor, when Cohn is told that he has AIDS, is fascinating for many reasons. Cohn's major argument to his doctor is this: I can't have AIDS, because only homosexuals and drug addicts (and maybe a few hemophiliacs) get AIDS. I'm not a drug addict or hemophiliac -- and I'm certainly not a homosexual. Homosexuals have no political power, they have no clout -- they don't know anyone important, and they can't make things happen. But Cohn is a player: he knows people, and he can make things happen. And since, in Cohn's view, we are defined by where we fit into the "food chain," by where we are in the pecking order, Cohn can't be a homosexual. Therefore, Cohn can't have AIDS. He has liver cancer.

Now, think about this for a moment. In another form, this is the same dilemma Joe faces: what defines us -- our actions, or what we are inside, the externalities and how we interact with the world, or our identities in our innermost souls? And what's the relationship between those two aspects of our lives, and of ourselves? If we deny who we are internally by means of our external actions, what kinds of costs does that require? Are they worth it, or do they destroy who we are over time? Which is more important to us? And can we change what we are internally by means of external actions which contradict it in some way? I would suggest that the answers are not always so clear, and I think it is safe to say that Kushner doesn't think the answers are simple ones at all. And these issues come up in our lives in many ways, very frequently. But this is part of a still larger issue that Kushner introduces, which I'll get to in a moment.

-- Two moments are simply wondrous in the telephone conversation between Joe and his mother, Hannah, also played by Meryl Streep. The first is another of those moments of recognition, the kind of psychologically revealing detail that all of us have experienced. Joe calls his mother (also a Mormon, of course) in a moment of desperation, at four in the morning -- from Central Park, where he has again gone to the gay cruising area. Early in the conversation, Joe asks, "Did dad love me?" Streep, who is very upset that something is terribly wrong -- why in the world is her son calling from the street in the middle of the night? and has he been drinking? -- is taken aback and very displeased by the "inappropriateness" of the question: "This is maudlin. I don't like this conversation." Joe tells her that it's about to get worse, and then it does: he tells her that he's a homosexual. When you watch Angels -- or when you watch it again -- look at Streep's eyes and face after Joe makes this announcement: the dead, stunned look, which slowly gives way to the beginning of unbearable pain. It's very brief; blink, and you'll miss it. And the first thing that Streep says -- again, just after Joe has told her he is gay -- is: "Well, you're old enough to understand your father didn't love you without being ridiculous about it."

How many of us have been through moments just like that -- when someone finally offers a truthful answer to a question they never wanted to address, simply to avoid discussing something infinitely worse that has come up in the meantime? Streep's admission of the truth about Joe's father, and her denial of the reality of Joe's being gay, are all the more remarkable in light of the transformations that this character will go through in the rest of the drama. But that conversation, and Streep's acting, are simply stunning, in their simultaneous simplicity and complexity, directness, psychological accuracy, and overwhelming truth.

If you're still with me, we are now approaching the end of only the first third of Angels. The drama has been slowly gathering steam -- it takes time to set up all the characters, conflicts and themes that Kushner deals with -- so you may need to give the first hour and a half a bit of patience. But, as I hope the above makes clear, such patience is repaid many times over. From this point on, Angels is like a locomotive under full power, constantly gathering speed -- and it carries us hurtling along its path. (The sole, and unfortunate, exception to this is the role of Harper, played by Mary-Louise Parker. Parker, who can be very good in a certain kind of part, seems out of her depth here: her performance is played on only a couple of notes, in contrast to everyone else's work. Because of the very limited range of Parker's performance -- a range which is not at all dictated by the character, as revealed by Marcia Gay Harden who played it wonderfully onstage when I saw it -- the Harper storyline pales in comparison to the others, and it sadly unbalances the work.)

-- After Louis has left Prior, who has gotten more and more ill, Louis has a conversation with Belize. Belize is a black nurse (and superbly played by Jeffrey Wright), and this character ties together a couple of strands of the story. Belize had been Prior's lover at one time and remains Prior's close friend. And when Cohn is hospitalized with AIDS, Belize is the hospital nurse who attends him. In the conversation with Louis, Belize finally loses his patience. Louis has been endlessly propounding his theory about "democracy in America," about how everything in America -- including race -- is meaningful only in political terms, and, as Belize says, "yada yada yada, blah blah blah." Aside from what Belize considers the underlying racism in Louis' comments, Belize tells Louis that he, Belize, knows that all this political theorizing actually only comes out of Louis' guilt over abandoning Prior -- that Louis is, in effect, trying to rationalize his guilt away by indulging in the development of political doctrine to no worthwhile end.

The scene is deceptively simply in my view, and much of this subtext can be lost. And as I noted above, the scene can be enjoyed, and enjoyed a lot, simply as drama. It also has some truly hilarious moments in it. When Louis says, "Real love isn't ever ambivalent," Belize riffs on this for quite a while -- telling Louis that that line comes from Belize's favorite paperback novel, In Love With the Night Mysterious, set in the pre-Civil War South. Our heroine, Margaret, is married to the plantation owner, but she is, of course, in love with the master's number one slave, Thaddeus. Since Margaret's husband suffers from AIDS (Antebellum Insufficiently Developed Sex organs, of course), Margaret and Thaddeus catch their moments of bliss when they can. In this wonderfully funny mini-monologue, Belize satirizes a certain kind of trashy fiction, a particular kind of racism, sophomoric ideas about love, and also touches on a number of other subjects. It's simply wonderful writing.

But underlying all this are the issues I touched on above: what is the relationship between the political ideas we espouse and our persons, and our emotions? To what extent are our political theories shaped, and sometimes even distorted, by what we feel? Are our political ideas of value in themselves, even when they're cut off from or contradict our inner sense of ourselves? And many more issues are suggested in the exchange between Louis and Belize -- and one of them is critical to one of Kushner's central themes. At one point, Louis says there are no "angels in America," that there is no "spiritual path," that everything is only political. Here and throughout the play, Kushner thus raises these additional questions: what is the relationship between the spiritual and the political? Between the spirit and the body? Which is more important? Do we need both? How can a political theory properly account for our spiritual needs? Should it? More about these points shortly.

-- I will only mention a couple of points about the scenes leading to the end of the first half of Angels. There is a wonderful scene between Meryl Streep (as Joe's mother) and Emma Thompson as a crazy homeless person. As she is desperately trying to get this crazy person to give her directions to Brooklyn, Streep delivers one of the funniest single lines in the play, offered with all of her character's religious sincerity combined with enormous impatience: "So...I'm sorry that you're psychotic, but just make an effort." A few moments later, Thompson says, "In the new century, I think we'll all be insane." Ah, how true that sometimes appears to be.

There is a deliriously wonderful fantasy scene, when Louis and Prior are reunited -- by means of the apparitions of two prior Prior Walters (as in Prior's ancestors; it's a long, illustrious family line, with Prior Walters numbering in the thirties by now) -- and they dance to "Moon River" in a set out of a 1930s Hollywood musical. Simply divine. There's no other word for it.

And then, the first half of Angels ends -- with the descent to Earth of the Angel finally manifesting herself to Prior, which event has been foretold throughout the first three hours: "The messenger has arrived."

Part II

I hope that Part I of my discussion about Angels in America provided enough details to give a sense of what the experience of watching the film is like -- and to give an indication of the variety and complexity of themes that run through it.

Kushner's thematic material is endlessly rich and provocative. At the beginning of the second half of Angels, the Angel who has appeared to Prior Walter transmits her primary message: "Stop moving!" What she means is this: when God became displeased with His angels, He created man. But in that creation, God inadvertently permitted endless change -- progress, invention, immigration. But all of this constant change, all of this ongoing life, disrupts heaven and results in nothing but chaos and pain. Therefore, the only solution is stasis, peace, quiet, and death. Hence, all movement must stop. This is the message that the Angel wishes Prior to accept, and to act upon. And why wouldn't he? He has AIDS, he is getting sicker and sicker, and he has nothing to look forward to but endless, worsening pain. Moreover, he has been deserted by his lover, Louis.

The balance of Angels shows us how and why Prior rejects the Angel's message -- and why he chooses life. As he says several times: despite all the horrific elements of his existence at the moment, despite the pain, the loneliness, the grief, "I want more life."

Let me flesh out some of the play's themes that I indicated in the first part of this essay. I noted that one of Kushner's primary concerns is the relationship between the spiritual and the political. But more than this, Kushner is concerned about the interrelationships of the personal -- what we are in our souls, the theoretical -- what we believe, what our ideology is, and the political -- the nature of the overall system in which we live and function. Kushner dramatizes this concern through several of his characters: Louis, with his conflict between what he believes politically and his personal desertion of Prior when Prior becomes ill; Roy Cohn, with his conflict between his homosexuality and his political power, and how he must dissemble to maintain that power; and Joe, with his conflict between his homosexuality and both his conservative political views and his Mormonism.

In interviews, Kushner often talks about his view that playwrighting is "dialectical" in nature. Many people are probably quick to ascribe this view simply to Kushner's "leftism." As I discussed in my first post about Angels, Kushner is most definitely a leftist, and I probably disagree with almost all of his explicitly political beliefs. But it is a mistake to think that dialectics belongs only to the left. The greatest champion of dialectics in the name of another political theory is undoubtedly Chris Sciabarra (see, for example, this page about Total Freedom: Toward A Dialectical Libertarianism). And as Chris has shown in his work, a dialectical approach can be found in Aristotle, and in Ayn Rand. To put the matter more simply, as Chris often does, dialectics is the art of "context-keeping." This is the same issue that I discussed in my essay about "Contextual Libertarianism" -- where I emphasized, as I often do, the importance of cultural issues, and the damage that is done when cultural factors are ignored, as they often are by "atomist libertarians." [With regard to the following discussion of an aspect of Rand's methodology, please see the introductory comments to my "Contextual Libertarianism" essay for a brief indication of my now very qualified endorsement of certain of Rand's views. The methodology described below is one I fully endorse; unfortunately, Rand failed to utilize this approach much more often that she employed it -- and that failure often led to disastrous results, in my view.]

So it is not surprising that Chris should discuss a three-level model of analysis, in terms that are almost identical to the manner in which Kushner treats his material. Here is Chris describing this methodology in a major foreign policy essay:
In Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, I explored Rand's mode for analyzing every social problem on three distinct levels: (1) The Personal, in which she focused on the psycho-epistemological and ethical dimensions; (2) The Cultural, in which she focused on the linguistic, pedagogical, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions; and (3) The Structural, in which she focused on the political and economic dimensions. Every social problem-and solution-entailed mutually reinforcing personal, cultural, and structural factors. This is why Rand maintained: "Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries" ("For the New Intellectual"). It is also why she criticized Libertarians: for seeking political and economic change without the requisite personal and cultural foundations. But it is just as faulty to focus on ethics or culture to the exclusion of structural realities. By disconnecting any level from the others, we drain the radical life-blood out of Objectivism and ossify Rand's system into a form of conservatism. The active embrace of one-dimensional thinking by some Objectivists undermines fundamentally Rand's contextual, dialectical way of looking at the world. It is a perverse kind of "vulgar" one-sidedness that has led "far too many Objectivists [to] act as if they are conservatives who simply don't go to church," as economist Larry Sechrest suggests (OWL list, 29 January 2003).
Thus we see how, as I discussed in my post about contextual libertarianism, the approach and methodology utilized by certain leftists and libertarians are not at all dissimilar; in fact, in many ways they are almost identical.

There is yet another issue to be found here. It involves one aspect of Angels which I do not feel qualified to discuss myself. The play is rich, and dense, with religious symbolism, language and allusion. I simply do not have the knowledge to explore this subject in any meaningful way. However, I just recently found this wonderful essay about Kushner's play, and particularly about its treatment of Mormonism. The essay is by a gay Mormon, and published on the site of Affirmation, an organization for "Gay and Lesbian Mormons." In one passage, the author discusses the variety of religious symbolism in the play:
The cosmos in which this play is set is a hodge-podge of elements drawn from a variety of religious and quasi-religious sources. The wrestling-the-angel motif, the flaming Alephs, the ladder on which Prior ascends into Heaven, and the Kaddish for Roy Cohn are drawn from Judaism. The angelic-visitation motif, the peepstones, and the Restoration rhetoric ("A marvelous work and a wonder we undertake. . . . The Great Work begins" [Millennium 62, 119]) are drawn from Mormonism. The prominent role of sex in the workings of the cosmos, the hermaphroditic Angel, and the Angel's multiple Emanations--Fluor, Phosphor, Lumen, Candle--are elements of Gnosticism (which Kushner may have encountered through the writings of Harold Bloom, who calls himself a Jewish Gnostic). The Charlton Heston Moses drag is drawn, obviously, from The Ten Commandments; since, as I have already shown, Kushner insists that the drag is not a lapse into an elbow-in-the-ribs playing style, I presume that the drag is employed as an widely-recognized symbol of the prophetic vocation. (Personally, I think it's pathetic that Americans' concept of the prophetic vocation has been determined by Hollywood, but c'est la vie.) The play even incorporates several allusions to the film The Wizard of Oz, which, as a ubiquitous and at least vestigially archetypal story of the fantastic, is the closest thing to a mythic community text to be found within gay culture. Allusions to the film include the lines, "People come and go so quickly here" (Millennium 34), "If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with" (Perestroika 53), and several lines following Prior's return from Heaven (". . . but all the same I kept saying I want to go home. And they sent me home" [Perestroika 140]).
And from the same essay, here is the author on what is, in many ways, the same point about dialectics that I made above:
Which brings me to the concept of "casserole myth." Having rejected codified, totalizing theories or belief systems, Kushner turns instead to an organic, open-ended worldview. He describes the process by which this worldview comes into being in the afterword to Perestroika:

"I have been blessed with remarkable friends, colleagues, comrades, collaborators: Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery; and we help each other to discern, amidst the gathering dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace, and places from whence hope may be plausibly expected. (158)"

It is this process of organizing for themselves their understanding of the world in which we see Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah engaged in the play's closing scene. Drawing from Jewish, Christian, and Mormon sacred stories, they create together a new Story, a new myth, the myth of their future cleansing and Prior's healing in the restored fountain of Bethesda. Note that this Story is not a theory; it is not codified, nor does it attempt to totalize human experience. Louis hastens to assure the audience that he and the other characters regard the myth as a metaphor, not a literal prophecy ("Not literally in Jerusalem, I mean we don't want this to have sort of Zionist implications" [148]). But its metaphorical nature does not lessen the myth's importance as a space in which a variety of belief systems come together in a mutual expression of hope for the future.

It is this space which I call a casserole myth. I borrow the term "casserole" from my Latin American studies: unlike North Americans, who have traditionally regarded their culture as a melting pot, Latin Americans describe their culture as a casserole (cazuela), i.e., as a combination of elements from a variety of cultures--Native American, Spanish, African, etc.--each of which has retained its identity rather than being assimilated into a mainstream culture. To borrow a phrase from Angels in America, Latin Americans regard their culture as a "melting pot where nothing melted" (Millennium 10). Similarly, what I term a casserole myth is a combination of beliefs, these beliefs not being assimilated or reconciled into some new totalizing religious system, but rather retaining their own identity in what becomes a non-codified, non-totalizing understanding of the world which expresses itself through a diversity of religious motifs and symbols.
In this respect, perhaps the most astonishing and complex accomplishment of Angels is how Kushner dramatizes the effects of these opposed worldviews in the lives of his characters. Those characters who propound totalistic ideologies -- a belief system which demands that everything be fit into its proper place, a closed system where further thought and exploration are forbidden, and where "impermissible" thoughts or actions are condemned -- end up alone, in pain, or dead. Thus, Cohn dies in agony; and Joe and Harper are alone when the drama concludes (although there might be hope for both of them).

But the characters who appear in the final scene -- Prior, Louis, Belize and, of all people, Hannah (Joe's mother) -- are willing to explore new avenues, both in thought and action. They are willing to look at all of life, and rejoice in its complexity, infuriating complications, and, to put it simply, just how messy it can often be. But they accept it (which does not mean that they do not judge it), without demanding that every development and occurrence be forced into a preexisting ideological framework, whether or not that framework can accommodate it. They accept it, and say: More life. But the others will not or cannot do that -- and as a result, they suffer loneliness or death, and life is lost to them. The ideologies and/or politics that they champion finally destroy them.

One other aspect of Angels should be noted. As I discussed in my first post about the play, Kushner demonstrates great compassion, and even love, for all of his characters, even those (like Cohn) whose politics Kushner himself clearly despises. Thus, for example, we have the brief affair between Louis and Joe, and Louis' acknowledgment that Joe is a "decent and caring man," despite his Republicanism and Mormonism (both of which Louis hates). Joe is one of the most sympathetic characters in Angels in many ways. He is presented by Kushner himself as "decent and caring," and he struggles terribly with the conflict between his political/religious convictions and his homosexuality. But he, too, is willing to allow for change, for life to go on in unpredictable ways -- and after he leaves his wife and begins his affair with Louis, he "blossoms" and seems to be happy. At the play's conclusion, his ultimate fate is unclear, and we are not sure which path he will finally take.

But with regard to Kushner's compassion for and acceptance of life, and even of those characters whose political beliefs might be loathsome, note that Belize, who acknowledges that he hates Cohn, helps Cohn in the course of his illness. And after Cohn has died, it is Belize who makes certain that the Kaddish is recited over Cohn's body. In another remarkable scene that is part reality, part fantasy, Louis says Kaddish --with an assist from Ethel Rosenberg's ghost. The inclusion of Rosenberg in this passage is, as Louis says, "miraculous" -- although there is, of course, that special ending to the Kaddish (which I will not spoil for anyone who hasn't yet seen it). And with regard to Cohn's death, Belize talks about how hard it is to forgive, about how forgiveness wouldn't be as meaningful if it weren't so difficult, but that "maybe a queen can forgive a vanquished foe" -- and that forgiveness is perhaps where "love and justice meet."

Louis and Ethel Rosenberg saying Kaddish over Cohn's body captures one part of the division that Kushner addresses: the crucial need for a spiritual path, as well as a political and ideological one -- how all three parts of that tripartite model are needed to accept life in all its richness. Kushner also emphasizes that we must accept our bodies, and rejoice in our sexuality. As the Angel says to Hannah: "The body is the garden of the soul." And it is the Angel's demonstration to Hannah of what that means that helps Hannah to free herself from the ways in which her ideological system, her Mormonism, has strangled her soul. Thus does Kushner show us that body and soul must be united before we can fully accept what life has to offer.

There are a few additional passages from Angels that I want to mention, in large part because they show another element that I haven't mentioned sufficiently: the richness and beauty of much of its language. In one of the final scenes between Belize and Cohn, Cohn asks Belize about the afterlife. Belize describes a city like San Francisco, and offers a wealth of detail about it. Toward the end of his description, Belize says that "all the deities are Creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers." And he concludes by saying: "Race, taste, and history...finally overcome. And you ain't there." Cohn asks: "And heaven?" And Belize says: "That was heaven, Roy."

In Harper's final scene, she describes how she believes the ozone layer will be repaired (the ozone layer has been one of Harper's many obsessions): how souls arising from the dead on earth all join hands, and form atoms which plug up the holes which had been there. And she says: "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress, longing for what we've left behind...and dreaming ahead."

And in one of my favorite moments, Hannah is consoling Prior, who has been hospitalized again. Despite all their apparent differences, Hannah and Prior connect in a very meaningful way -- precisely because, whatever their explicit ideologies may be, they are alive, and they see what is before them. Prior had told Hannah a few things about the Angel that appeared to him, and he admits how frightened he is of the experience. And Hannah tells him: "An angel is a belief...with wings and arms to carry you. It's not to be afraid of. And if it can't hold you up, seek for something new."

And, believe it or not, there is still much, much more than I haven't even mentioned. But I think this gives you an idea of the richness, the complexity, the humor, the pain, the anger, the love, and the countless other elements that make up Angels in America. In Prior's insistence on "more life" -- despite his sickness, despite his pain, despite everything that the Angels believe should make him welcome death -- we witness a great testament to the healing power of our spirits, our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, all the complexities and contradictions that make us human, and to the healing power of life itself. In this sense, life is its own answer, and we need no other. As Prior says at the very end of this miraculous journey: "You are fabulous, each and every one, and I bless you. More life. The great work begins."

Against all this, we have Andrew Sullivan's entries about the play. Reviewing his archives for several weeks beginning at the end of November, we find the following items about Tony Kushner and Angels in America. There is this one:
POSEUR ALERT II: "His conversation is quick, emphatic, torrential — it comes in complete paragraphs, which themselves come complete with footnotes, jokes and marginalia. The word "dialectic" puts in frequent appearances, and questions about God are liable to be answered with references to 18th-century astronomers." - from the latest New York Times puff-piece on Tony Kushner. There's also a lovely Freudian slip in the text, as a friend pointed out to me in an email: "The writer quotes Kushner: 'Brecht was like a light bulb going off.' Leaving the fledgling dramatist in complete darkness, it seems."
Then there is this one:
'ANGELS' FLOPS: You know that the emperor is sparsely clad when even some of the contributors to the New York Times forums concede they fell asleep in the middle of "Angels in America." The NYT has devoted week after week and page after page to the most glowing hype about this production I can remember. So did almost every other major outlet. I read nothing but raves. (No, I haven't watched it yet. I just got cable two days ago. But I will try and slog through it this Sunday, as I did with the original, interminable stage production.) But the ratings were execrable, despite the massive hype. Hmmm. Could it be that Frank Rich is wrong, and that this pretentious left-wing screed is, er, just a pretentious left-wing screed?
And this one:
ANOTHER 'ANGELS' REVIEW: "I turned it off after the first hour. As a socially progressive Republican from a Catholic background, I was looking forward to what promised to be a nice mix of spirituality and commentary on one of our most pressing cultural issues. It wasn't the leftist propaganda that turned me off - although that certainly didn't help - but the biggest problem I had with the film was that it was just a bad movie. The scenes of the movie that supposedly brought spirituality into the mix were a convoluted mess that reminded me of a cheesy play. The characters weren't written poorly, but the screenplay wasn't written well as a whole. Pacino, of course, carried the movie as much as he could. And the one thing that could have redeemed the film, its attempt at humor, failed miserably - even the supposedly humorous scenes seemed to turn their nose up at the audience. More than anything, it was just a long, drawn out, poorly written film that exuded a holier-than-thou leftist elitism. I just wish critics would have the guts to say so."
And this one:
CRITIQUES OF 'ANGELS': Here are two actual reviews of "Angels in America," the leftist play hailed by every living critic as a masterpiece for the ages. Dale Peck sees its datedness, as well as its merits. Timothy Hulsey is much tougher. Money quote:

"The scenes and speeches in Angels never add up, perhaps because Kushner's characters don't change or progress much over time. Roy Cohn, the one major character who never fails to impress audiences (and who gives actors a chance to tear off whole chunks of scenery with their teeth), starts the play as an amoral son-of-a-bitch, and ends the play as an amoral son-of-a-bitch. Prior Walter, the protagonist, begins the play as a sweet, introspective left-winger with a trust fund, and ends as a sweet, introspective left-winger with a trust fund. You'd think that angels and AIDS would have had more of an impact on these guys, but no."

I also didn't realize that Kushner had written an earlier play equating tolerance of Ronald Reagan with aquiescence in Nazism. Ahead of his time, for a change.
And this one:
ANGELS DROOPS: The most brilliant, ground-breaking, revolutionary work of art since, er, Frank Rich started writing for the New York Times slipped again in the ratings last week. Its first audience of 4.2 million slipped to 2.9 million for the finale, according to Hollywood Reporter. A reader's defense of 'Angels' can be read here.
The "reader's defense" is worth reading in its entirety. I give Sullivan a few points for publishing it, and it concludes this way:
I used to enjoy reading your blog, though I didn't always agree with your politics. However, after reading this continual diatribe against "Angels," I've lost my taste for your writing. You're more concerned with scoring points against Kushner than giving the play a decent critique. Indeed, I notice you haven't cited any positive reviews of "Angels" in your blog. But I guess when you're pushing an agenda, that's not too important.
And...that's it, to date. In view of the detail I have offered about Kushner's work, I do not think it necessary to characterize Sullivan's treatment of this extraordinary achievement. However, I will note that I find it close to incomprehensible that Sullivan, a gay man, cannot even acknowledge the treatment of a character like Joe, and Kushner's searing portrayal of the terrible costs exacted by an ideology that condemns the actions of gay men, even as it continues to insist that it "loves the sinner."

But I believe that Sullivan himself -- together with innumerable other people of both Right and Left, many of whom place the demands of ideology above all else -- perfectly encapsulates the tragedy that Kushner dramatizes with a character like Roy Cohn. When ideological strictures trump everything, you finally deny yourself the complexities, the reality, and the rewards of life itself. In this sense, a sense much deeper than Sullivan's focus on an issue such as Kushner's treatment of Reagan's attitude toward gays and AIDS, Sullivan is Cohn -- and Sullivan, together with all the other conservatives which he so perfectly embodies, is indeed the "soul of modern conservatism."

So there is your choice: on one hand, you have an unbending ideology, which will force everything into its required place -- or dispense with it altogether, and ultimately destroy it. You have damnations such as "pretentious left-wing screed," "interminable," "poorly written," "holier-than-thou leftist elitism," "cheesy play" -- all offered without a shred of supporting evidence -- and you have the dismissal of a writer of extraordinary talent as a "fledgling dramatist [left] in complete darkness."

And on the other hand, you have the full embrace of life -- the embrace of our bodies, our sexuality, our religions with all their diversity, our political beliefs in all their complexity, our minds and our emotions, and all the myriad ways in which we can connect with each other, if only we will allow ourselves to do so. You have an angel that can "carry you," you have a world of continuity, of ongoing struggle and joy, where "nothing's lost forever" -- and most of all, you have more life.

Each of us, of course, is free to make his or her own choice. I've made mine. What's yours?Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138369292761985172004-07-05T05:35:00.000-07:002009-10-23T13:13:44.994-07:00From Mild Smacking to Outright Sadism, Torture and War: The Lie of "Well-Intentioned" ViolenceI had begun this essay with a different title: A New Law for Adults -- Moderate Assaults Now Permitted. Can you imagine for one moment that anyone would assent to a law of the kind suggested by that statement? Think about the howls of justified outrage that would greet a proposal to pass a law stating as follows:
After review of many studies and having consulted the opinions of numerous experts, we have concluded that it is sometimes acceptable for one spouse to smack the other, if he or she does so to inflict "moderate punishment" for disapproved behavior. However, we emphasize that this new law should not be taken as permission for any adult to go further. Any violence engaged in by one spouse which results in genuine physical or mental harm to the other will be prosecuted to the full extent permitted by other applicable laws.
With the exception of the most emotionally deadened and hardened people, those people who do not care too much about the extent to which they might reveal their own propensities to violence, I cannot imagine that anyone would view such a law as justified, moral or even humane in the most basic sense. Yet, when it comes to the most defenseless human beings of all -- infants and young children -- even an allegedly "civilized" nation sees fit to treat those children as insensate, unfeeling objects, and as property belonging to parents, who may now feel free to inflict violence on their children [link no longer working], allegedly "for their own good":
British lawmakers on Monday voted against a ban on parents spanking their children, and decided instead to tighten existing rules.

After a three-hour debate in the House of Lords, peers rejected the ban by 250 votes to 75.

Instead, they voted by 226-91 to allow moderate spanking, but make it easier to prosecute parents who physically or mentally abuse their children by spanking.

...

Britain is out of step on the issue with several European countries, including Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Austria, where all physical punishment of children is illegal.

Pressure groups insist children must have the same legal protection from being hit as adults and had called for the law to be changed. Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has repeatedly shied away from a ban, fearing it will be accused of intruding into family affairs.

The current law dates back to a case in 1860, when a judge ruled that physical punishment of children should be allowed as a "reasonable chastisement.'' ...

In the House of Lords on Monday, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Lester successfully proposed a measure to allow moderate spanking, but remove the "reasonable chastisement'' defense if parents harmed a child physically or mentally. If the amendment is also approved by the Commons, the new law will make it easier for authorities to prosecute violent parents.

Several peers called for an outright ban.

"Smacking can lead to battering which can lead to death," said Liberal Democrat peer Lord Thomas. "We are presented with medical reports, social service records, school records and one can see the route to death which starts with the initial smack."

Independent peer Lord Ackner disagreed. "I think we are overlooking that parents have a unique relationship with their children and in order to fulfill their parental responsibilities they have powers which they don't possess in relation to anyone else," he said.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith backed Lester's measure and said it would "have the effect of preventing harm to children without criminalizing parents for minor disciplinary steps."

Blair's government ordered its Labour peers to vote against a ban, but allowed them a free vote on Lester's amendment.

"The government wants an outcome that maintains the balance between the parent's right to discipline and protecting the child," said Blair's official spokesman. "That is why we don't want to criminalize parents. That is why we are opposed to outright bans."
It is a measure of the limitless denial in which the great majority of people live that the leaders of a country can seriously offer arguments such as those quoted above to justify violence against children. And make no mistake: any kind of smack, no matter how "light" or "moderate," is violence. But Blair's government doesn't "want to criminalize parents," for committing criminal acts.

It is indeed true that parents have a "unique relationship" with their children. Children depend on their parents for everything -- for shelter, for food, and for emotional and mental support and sustenance, for their very survival. That same total dependence is then used by some adults to justify violence against those same children, violence which those same parents would not be permitted against any adult. But many people are so deluded that they believe it is part of "their parental responsibilities" to assault their own children.

How would you feel if the following happened? You are at dinner with a friend. The friend expresses disapproval of your table manners. When you fail to conform to his suggested changes in your behavior, he stands up, walks over to your chair and says: "I'm sorry, but I'm only doing this for your own good." And then he slaps you.

Would you be outraged? Would you feel violated, in your person and autonomy? Would you not want to be friends any longer with a person who would permit himself such behavior, who would allow himself to believe that he was justified in inflicting physical violence on another human being? Yet we see parents do this kind of thing with children in restaurants and other public places all the time. God only knows what they might permit themselves at home, in private. And precisely because children are dependent on their parents for their survival, and because children have nowhere else to go -- they can hardly change parents with the ease with which an adult might look for a new friend -- the damage inflicted is incalculable, and likely to last a lifetime.

In another news story from today, we see a demonstration of the other end of this continuum -- and the unbelievable horrors to which this kind of denial can lead [link no longer working]:
OSHAWA, Ont. (CP) - Two brothers kept caged and chained in their family home over 13 years reacted bitterly Monday after their adoptive parents were sentenced to nine months in jail for treatment the judge said was horrendous but well-intentioned.

The boys, who were adopted as toddlers and raised in nearby Blackstock, said their parents deserved longer terms and complained the judge appeared to blame them in part for their ordeal.

"I don't feel (justice) has been served," said one boy, 17, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his 18-year-old brother.

"I feel they should get more time."

Even close relatives of the couple denounced the sentence as too lenient given the judge's description of the boys' treatment as "near torture." ...

When investigators visited the ramshackle two-storey farmhouse northeast of Toronto, one boy was found in a makeshift cage that was strapped to a wall and padlocked.

They were often tied to their beds, sometimes handcuffed. At one time, one brother was forced to sleep in a bare dog cage.

They were kept in diapers because they couldn't get to the washroom, subjected to rectal examinations and often beaten with a variety of household implements.

They lived in such fear, court heard, they ate their own feces to hide evidence of accidents and, deprived of water, felt compelled to drink their own urine. ...

Ontario Court Judge Donald Halikowski blasted the couple's "ill-informed system of discipline" as demeaning and damaging to the boys.

However, Halikowski said their behaviour was "underscored by good intentions," that there was no evidence the parents were sadistic. ...

Child welfare workers rejected Halikowski's suggestion that the apprehension of the boys may have caused them more emotional damage than the abuse from their parents.

"We are disappointed," said Wanda Secord of the Durham Children's Aid Society.

"We had hoped for a stronger sentence."

The younger son has denounced his adoptive mother as a "stupid bitch" and said he didn't have a childhood "because of her stupidness."

The older boy said the "unbearable" crib incidents had continued to haunt him.
If you had any doubts about the immense significance of Miller's work, this ought to convince you once and for all. The crucial point to note is that the justifications offered for this monstrous sadism are precisely those justifications offered for "mild smacking." This judge -- like many other adults -- appears to sincerely believe that these adults' actions were "underscored by good intentions," and that there was "no evidence" that the parents "were sadistic." The light sentences he imposed only underscore the depth of his own denial.

Note the ungraspable magnitude of this denial: Putting a young boy in a makeshift, padlocked cage is not sadistic. Tying children to their beds, with handcuffs, is not sadistic. Keeping children in diapers when they are too old to need them -- if only they could get to a bathroom -- subjecting them to "rectal examinations," and beating them often is not sadistic. And creating such fear in children that they will eat their own feces and drink their own urine is not sadistic.

Any person who defends or minimizes such acts to any extent at all is capable of inflicting the most unimaginable tortures on anyone. If you wonder what makes possible horrors such as those which occurred in the Third Reich, wonder no more.

I had wanted to return to my series on "The Roots of Horror." Very regrettably, these latest news stories provide the opportunity. The denial which underlies the justifications for the new law in Britain and for the judge's comments is the same denial that leads to criminal adults, depressed and sometimes suicidal adults, incalculable suffering, unprovoked wars of aggression, and any number of other horrors. I have talked about some of those issues in previous entries in this series, and I will have much more to say on these topics and a number of others in the coming weeks.

For the moment, I will only review a few salient points. The analysis I am offering in this series is derived in significant part from the work of Alice Miller. (Here is Miller's website, with links to her books and various articles.) In a post several months ago, I explained why I began to seek again for underlying causes, and I used the continued and altogether remarkable resistance on the part of many supporters of our current foreign policy to acknowledge obvious gaps and inconsistencies in their arguments. After discussing a number of other factors, I wrote:
There is another area that appears to be pointedly neglected by many hawks: the human costs of our actions over the last year. Our government follows this course as a matter of policy: our own non-fatal casualties are significantly undercounted and/or ignored, and the deaths and injuries to innocent Iraqis are almost never mentioned. It is as if, in a very deep sense, these human costs of our policies are not fully real to certain people, or they refuse to allow them to become real. One would think that a strong advocate of our foreign policy would at least have the good grace to acknowledge the costs to American soldiers and to their families, even if they won't mention dead Iraqis, but they almost never mention either of these subjects.

At a certain point, one is justified in thinking that much deeper psychological mechanisms are involved -- and to conclude that the manner in which the debate about foreign policy has been and continues to be conducted obviously involves much more than the surface issues which people are willing to identify. Repeated denial and avoidance, across a wide range of issues and engaged in by very large numbers of people, requires an explanation which consists of more than noting that people will look for information that tends to support what they already believe. That is certainly true -- but it isn't enough to explain many people's seemingly limitless ability to deny what is literally screaming in their faces.

So I began rereading Alice Miller. Here is one obvious and very important point about why her work has so much explanatory power: the one universal experience that all of us share -- an experience that crosses almost all cultures, all economic classes, and all political systems -- is that we have all been children. And as Miller demonstrates in her books in great detail, the experiences of early childhood leave patterns of thinking, feeling and behavior which last all our lives. This crucial fact is confirmed more and more, by numerous studies. Miller further shows that the most basic of the mechanisms that she analyzes are to be found in every culture, and in every historical period -- most notably, the commandment that we are to obey and respect our elders, and especially our parents.

Thus, all the facets of the denial-obedience mechanism that I summarized at the beginning of this entry are not to be found only in the United States, or only in the last century. These results can be observed throughout all of mankind's history, in every culture, and across the entire world.
Here is the very brief summary of the denial-obedience mechanism that I set out in that earlier post (and I must stress again that, for a full appreciation of Miller's argument, you need to consult her books):
By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."
Returning to the two news stories, here is Miller explaining part of the mechanism that underlies the denial of many (if not most) adults with regard to the cruelty and even outright sadism that is inflicted on countless children. In discussing an excerpt from a book by Phil Donahue (the full excerpt is in this post), Miller notes:
Although Donahue's discussion ostensibly proceeds from the question of which parental behavior might exert a traumatizing and lasting effect on the child, and although it would appear to give priority to concern for the child, the second paragraph shows that basically it is concerned only with liberating parents from justified guilt feelings. They are assured that their actions pose no danger: The child will suffer no harm if he knows that he is being tormented out of "love" and "for his own good." This kind of reassurance that relies on untruths is based on the statements of "experts" quoted here and, I need hardly say, corresponds to the wishes of all parents who are not prepared to question their own behavior.

But might not there be a different way, other than reassurances? Might not one explain to the parents, in all honesty and frankness, why they traumatize their children? Not all of them would stop tormenting their children, but some would. We can be certain, however, that they would not stop if they were told, as were their own parents thirty years earlier, that one slap more or less does no harm, provided they love the child. Although this phrase contains a contradiction, it can continue to be handed down because we are used to it. Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love. This inner confusion prevailed for thirty or forty years and is passed on to one's own child. That's all. To purvey this confusion to the child as truth leads to new confusions that, although examined in detail by experts, are still confusions. If, on the other hand, one can admit one's errors to the child and apologize for a lack of self-control, no confusions are created.

If a mother can make it clear to a child that at that particular moment when she slapped him her love for him deserted her and she was dominated by other feelings that had nothing to do with the child, the child can keep a clear head, feel respected, and not be disoriented in his relationship to his mother. While it is true that love for a child cannot be commanded, each of us is free to decide to refrain from hypocrisy.
In that post, I commented: "For these reasons, my view is very simple: it is always wrong to hit, slap or spank a child. Always."

But some adults who are prepared to deny the damaging effects of spanking and "light smacking" will use the same arguments to "justify" outright sadism -- just as the judge did. He clings to the notion that "good intentions" lie behind parents' terrifying their children to the extent that those children will eat their own feces and drink their own urine.

What is crucial to see -- and what I know many people will nonetheless deny -- is that these are not different phenomena. They spring from the same roots, have the same ultimate causes, and lead to similar horrors, which differ only in degree, but not in kind. And those same causes lead to the torture, exterminations, war and other nightmares that the world sees over and over again.

As I indicated, I will have much more to say on this subject in the near future. For now, I will leave the final word to Alice Miller. Here is an excerpt from her article entitled, "Every Smack Is a Humiliation":
Many researchers have already proved that corporal punishment can indeed produce obedient children in the short term but, in the long term, it will have serious negative consequences on the child's character and behavior. This disastrous development toward later crimes can be prevented if there is at least one single person who loves and understands the child. During their whole childhood, dictators like Hitler, Stalin or Mao never came across such a helping witness. They learned early on to glorify cruelty and hypocrisy and to justify these actions while committing crimes against millions of people. Millions of others, also exposed to physical maltreatment in childhood, helped them to do so without the slightest remorse.

Children should not be the scapegoats for the painful experiences of adults. The claim that mild punishments (slaps or smacks) have no detrimental effects is still widespread because we learned this message at a very early age from our parents, who had taken it over from their own parents. This conviction helped the child to minimize his suffering and to endure it. Unfortunately, the main damage it causes is precisely our numbness, as well as the lack of sensitivity for our children's pain. The result of the broad dissemination of this damage is that each successive generation is subjected to the tragic effects of seemingly harmless physical "correction." Many parents still think: What didn't hurt me can't hurt my child. They don't realize that their conclusion is wrong because they never challenged their assumption. ...

It is imperative to launch such legislation—prohibiting corporal punishment—all over the world. It does not set out to incriminate anyone but is designed to have a protective and informative function for parents. Sanctions could simply take the form of the obligation for parents to internalize information available today on the consequences of corporal punishment. Information on the "well-meant smack" should therefore be broadcasted to all, since unconscious education to violence takes root very early and inflicts disastrous imprints. The vital interests of society as a whole are at stake.
UPDATE: And if you had wondered about the even more specific relevance of this to other foreign policy events, you shouldn't wonder about that any longer, either:
According to information from the International Red Cross, more than a 100 children are imprisoned in Iraq, including in the infamous prison Abu Ghraib.

The German TV magazine "Report" revealed that there has been abuse of children and youth by the coalition forces.

Mainz - "Between January and May of this year we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations" the representative of the International Red Cross, Florian Westphal, told the TV station SWR's Magazine "Report Mainz". He noted that these were places of detention controlled by coalition troops. According to Westphal the number of children held captive could be even higher.

The TV Magazine also reported of evidence and eye witness reports according to which U.S. soldiers also abused children and youthful detainees. Samuel Provance, a staff sergeant stationed in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison said that interrogating officers had pressured a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police had only intervened when the girl was already half undressed. On another occasion, a 16 year old was soaked with water, driven through the cold, and then smeared with mud.
As Miller notes in her article entitled "The Origins of Torture in Endured Child Abuse" (at her site, under Articles):
Many people have claimed to be appalled by the acts of perversion committed by American soldiers on ADULT people, Iraqi prisoners. Amazingly, I have never heard of any such reaction in response to the occasional attempts to expose similar practices committed towards CHILDREN as for instance in British and American schools. There, these practices come under the heading of "education." But the cruelty is the same. The world appears to be surprised that such brutality should rear its head among the American forces.

After all, America presents itself to the international public as the guardian of world peace. There is an explanation for all this, but hardly anyone wants to hear it.
And so now it is revealed that the coalition forces have abused children, as well as adults. That is hardly surprising; in fact, given the underlying causes identified by Miller, it is inevitable.

I urge you to read Miller's entire piece, as well as the other articles at her site.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1137967364297524752005-12-11T13:57:00.000-08:002007-06-21T17:19:03.279-07:00ON TORTURE, V: A Monster's Confession, and the Choice to be HumanWith regard to everything that follows, I urge you always to keep in mind two crucial facts. The first is the very simple truth that ought to end all the debates about torture before they even begin: TORTURE DOES NOT WORK. Torture does not lead to accurate intelligence, it does not aid us in any ascertainable, identifiable way in preventing atrocities visited upon either combatants or innocent civilians, and it does not take us one step closer to victory over our genuine enemies. For anyone who remains at all decent, that stops the discussion immediately. But it does not -- only because of certain truths a dangerous number of us refuse to face.

The second fact, which cannot ever be emphasized too often or too much, identifies the actual nature of torture. As I put it in Part III of this series:
Torture is the deliberate infliction of unbearable agony on a human being -- a human being who is intentionally kept alive precisely so that he will suffer still more and for a longer period of time -- for no justifiable reason. This is the embrace of sadism and cruelty for their own sake, and for no other end whatsoever.
I suppose it is only appropriate, in an especially grisly manner, that Charles Krauthammer, a leading and particularly vicious hawk, should have written a "defense" of torture recently published in what is probably the most profoundly irresponsible, dishonest and uncivilized periodical in the United States today, The Weekly Standard. The title and subheading of his article are themselves instructive: "The Truth about Torture -- It's time to be honest about doing terrible things." Krauthammer tells the "truth" and is "honest" in the same manner we might view Hitler or Stalin as "truthful" and "honest": his article is one lie piled on top of another. The distortions and contradictions are endless. Only a man who is deeply uncivilized and who is contemptibly dishonest could have authored such a piece; the same is true to varying degrees of anyone and everyone who has praised it, as many hawks have.

The deeply sickening and repellent tone of Krauthammer's paean to inhumanity is revealed in his opening paragraph:
DURING THE LAST FEW WEEKS in Washington the pieties about torture have lain so thick in the air that it has been impossible to have a reasoned discussion. The McCain amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any prisoner by any agent of the United States sailed through the Senate by a vote of 90-9. The Washington establishment remains stunned that nine such retrograde, morally inert persons--let alone senators--could be found in this noble capital.
Those who question the advisability of embracing barbarism as national policy are employing "pieties about torture," and they make it impossible for the monsters in our midst to have "a reasoned discussion" about what degree of sadism for its own sake is "proper," and precisely when it should be employed. Only "retrograde, morally inert persons" could oppose the McCain amendment. It is a wonder that even one such monster could be found "in this noble capital."

This is the cheaply sarcastic tone appropriate to a high school bully who happily terrorizes those he believes to be weaker than he is, not to any sort of serious consideration of an issue that directly calls into question whether we still deserve to be called "civilized" to any extent at all. The survival of our nation's soul is at stake, as it has been for at least the last several years -- and Krauthammer deliberately throws himself into the gutter and rolls around in the mud. Perhaps we should be grateful that people like Krauthammer finally recognize what is their natural environment. But the fact that a commentator who is viewed as "respectable" even in the most minuscule degree speaks of this subject in this particular way contaminates all of us.

Krauthammer very grudgingly and ungracefully concedes that John McCain "deserves respect" for his opposition to the official government approval of torture, but McCain's own history makes it impossible for anyone to do otherwise. (Actually, now that I recall the manner in which certain conservatives have smeared Murtha, Max Cleland, and others -- and McCain himself -- I probably am no longer safe in maintaining even that much. Certain conservatives will undoubtedly smear McCain himself in unforgivably ugly ways before this debate is over.) And I would not object to Krauthammer's statement: "But that does not mean, as seems to be the assumption in Washington today, that a critical analysis of his 'no torture, ever' policy is beyond the pale" -- if Krauthammer did not proceed to engage in lies and endless misdirection in the service of evil.

I will not spend a great deal of time on Krauthammer's effort to prove his "honesty" and "truthfulness," by beginning with "a few analytic distinctions." In the end, such distinctions are completely irrelevant: see the first two fundamental points above. Krauthammer identifies "three kinds of war prisoners" relevant to a discussion of "torture and prisoner maltreatment": "the ordinary soldier caught on the field of battle" (in which case "we have no right to disturb a hair on his head"); "the captured terrorist," who is "by definition, an unlawful combatant" (and who therefore "is entitled to no protections whatsoever"); and "the terrorist with information." It is with regard only to this last category that Krauthammer maintains "the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply."

To demonstrate his "seriousness," Krauthammer immediately employs the utterly misleading hypothetical that he calls "the textbook case":
A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?
I discussed this hypothetical in some detail in Part I of this series. I explained why it is a fantasy concocted by Hollywood scriptwriters who are unoriginal hacks of the first order, and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with how this problem would ever arise in the actual world.

By employing this example, one which has been discredited countless times -- and many times by experts on these subjects -- Krauthammer confesses not only his intellectual dishonesty, but his utter ignorance of torture itself, and how it works and fails to work. See Part IV of this series, and Darius Rejali's treatment of the "ticking bomb" problem. Here is a brief excerpt:
With regard to the "ticking time bomb" scenario, so beloved of torture's advocates, Rejali writes:

"What if time is short, as with a 'ticking bomb'? Does torture offer a shortcut? Real torture -- not the stuff of television -- takes days, if not weeks. Even torturers know this. There are three things that limit torture's value in this context."

Those "three things" are the medical limit, the resource limit, and the psychological limit. Consult the article for details.
As is usually true of men engaged in evil of this kind, Krauthammer is well aware of what he accomplishes if he gets you to accept his invalid hypothetical. Here is the heart of his argument:
Torture is not always impermissible. However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when--i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb.

That is why the McCain amendment, which by mandating "torture never" refuses even to recognize the legitimacy of any moral calculus, cannot be right. There must be exceptions. The real argument should be over what constitutes a legitimate exception.
Krauthammer knows exactly what is at stake here, and that is why his dishonesty is eternally unforgivable: "once you've established the principle" that torture would be required in certain circumstances, the argument is over. Krauthammer is hoping you won't notice that no meaningful distinction would exist any longer between us and the most loathsome, inhuman monster on this planet, in the entire span of human history.

The contradictions that Krauthammer permits himself, and which he hopes to foist on you, are further revealed in two other excerpts that deserve mention. With regard to "the terrorist with information," but not information about an allegedly impending catastrophe, Krauthammer writes:
A rational moral calculus might not permit measures as extreme as the nuke-in-Manhattan scenario, but would surely permit measures beyond mere psychological pressure.

Such a determination would not be made with an untroubled conscience. It would be troubled because there is no denying the monstrous evil that is any form of torture. And there is no denying how corrupting it can be to the individuals and society that practice it. But elected leaders, responsible above all for the protection of their citizens, have the obligation to tolerate their own sleepless nights by doing what is necessary--and only what is necessary, nothing more--to get information that could prevent mass murder.
As Krauthammer will shortly tell us, we are "morally compelled" to embrace measures that we know to represent and embody "monstrous evil." To translate this into plainer language: we are morally compelled to act in ways we know to be immoral -- and not simply immoral, but monstrously evil. Morality, according to Krauthammer, thus necessitates its own destruction. If the subject were not so horrifying, I would consider it ironic in the extreme that Krauthammer and hawks like him dare to accuse our enemies of being nihilists: to destroy the very concept of morality, and to do so in the name of saving it, is indeed a monstrous accomplishment that not even our worst enemies would have thought to attempt. The shrewder of our enemies might have realized that the worst among us would accomplish that particular destruction all on their own. But Krauthammer insists that "we must" cross this particular Rubicon -- but that "we need rules." The "rules" will save us. Every slaughtering dictator in history has said the same.

And then there is this:
[I]t simply will not do to take refuge in the claim that all of the above discussion is superfluous because torture never works anyway. Would that this were true. Unfortunately, on its face, this is nonsense. Is one to believe that in the entire history of human warfare, no combatant has ever received useful information by the use of pressure, torture, or any other kind of inhuman treatment? It may indeed be true that torture is not a reliable tool. But that is very different from saying that it is never useful.
Once again, let us translate this to make its meaning unmistakably clear: Because it is possible that on even one occasion torture might lead to "useful" information and save lives, there is no reason to resist the explicit embrace of the "reasoning" that has justified the most murderous regimes in history.

One final dishonesty in Krauthammer's article requires discussion. This particular dishonesty also reveals that Krauthammer and those who accede to this argument understand nothing at all about principles, or why specifically moral principles are so crucial to civilization. Krauthammer takes McCain to task for McCain's statement that, in the case of the invalid "ticking time bomb" scenario, McCain said, "you do what you have to do. But you take responsibility for it." Krauthammer then asks: "But if torturing the ticking time bomb suspect is 'what you have to do,' then why has McCain been going around arguing that such things must never be done?"

In this manner, Krauthammer and others of his kind eject themselves from civilization entirely, and forever. McCain's point is that we still do not consider sadistic, inhumane treatment as valid -- but if the circumstances demonstrate that, in the particular case, the use of torture in fact led to the saving of many lives, then, but only then, will we decline to impose the punishment that would otherwise be imposed. But the principle would remain intact. The exception would remain the exception: we still would not approve such conduct, and thus make it acceptable and sure to spread further in its use. We would recognize that a genuine emergency might carve out an exception only with regard to the punishment imposed, but not with regard to the behavior that we condemn in no uncertain terms.

Krauthammer wishes to convince us that he is "serious" and "truthful." Fine, then let us be "serious" and "truthful." I have no doubt, and neither does any other adult, that in a genuine emergency of the "ticking time bomb" fantasy variety, torture has been and will continue to be employed. But the point of the prohibition is to make those who may choose to use torture to remember the great and terrible significance of what they do: that torture is never to be used routinely, or even in a certain "category" of cases. Such "categories" are easily subject to manipulation and in the service of sadistic brutality. Even a scant knowledge of the twentieth century confirms that point, more times than we would care to remember. The rest of human history provides several encyclopedias of confirming evidence.

The further point is that, in such a case, the person or persons who used torture would be asking for mercy, i.e., that the law not be applied to them given the extraordinary nature of this specific case. If we were convinced that they acted with sufficient justification in this one case, we would grant them that mercy. Again, the principle and the prohibition would be preserved.

The full monstrousness of Krauthammer's purpose becomes clear in the scope of its horror at the very end of his article:
But if that is the case, then McCain embraces the same exceptions I do, but prefers to pretend he does not. If that is the case, then his much-touted and endlessly repeated absolutism on inhumane treatment is merely for show. If that is the case, then the moral preening and the phony arguments can stop now, and we can all agree that in this real world of astonishingly murderous enemies, in two very circumscribed circumstances, we must all be prepared to torture. Having established that, we can then begin to work together to codify rules of interrogation for the two very unpleasant but very real cases in which we are morally permitted--indeed morally compelled--to do terrible things.
This is the same justification that every cowardly, bloodthirsty murderer has always used: "You have left me no choice but to be a monster. Because I am helpless to resist what I know to be evil, I am still moral. I still uphold the values of civilization."

A word that is stronger and more damning that "evil" is needed to convey the nature of this kind of argument. Krauthammer seeks to make us all monsters, and to make us all accept that we must be monsters: "We must all be prepared to torture." And even worse: we are "morally compelled" to be monsters.

The confession is undeniable. Be absolutely sure to grasp what it is: Krauthammer thus confesses that he is already a monster, but he does not want you to condemn him for it. To the contrary, he wants you to become a monster too, to accept that you were "compelled" do so in the name of morality itself, all so that you will fear judgment in the same manner, and for the same reason.

Thus, these monsters seek to reduce every one of us to their level -- to make all of us sadistic brutes, who inflict pain for the sake of pain, and who continue to maintain that they are "morally compelled" to do so, that they are upholding civilization in so acting, and that they had no choice in the matter.

But it is all a lie. It is the single worst lie any human being can ever tell. We always have a choice. The choice is what makes us human. That is where the essence of our humanity lies -- and where the possibility for true nobility of action and spirit resides.

It is also where the capacity for evil lies. Krauthammer and those who believe as he does have told us in unmistakable terms that they are already monsters. They deny it, but the truth is that they have chosen to be monsters. Krauthammer's entire article is nothing but a series of lies, and a series of rationalizations to disguise his own evil.

They are monsters. They now seek to turn us into a nation of monsters. Never, ever forget it.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138210790290629482004-11-30T09:35:00.000-08:002007-03-31T16:59:21.412-07:00The Indifference and Denial that KillI have been intending to write about Iris Chang's death for several weeks, since she died earlier in November. Chang was best known for The Rape of Nanking, a book which told the story, for the first time in any detail, of the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China during World War II. We will never know what demons finally detroyed Iris Chang. Whatever their particular nature, they finally won the battle they had waged with her, a battle that had probably gone on for many years.

On November ninth, Iris Chang shot herself. She was 36 years old.

I have a theory about what might have been responsible for Chang's suicide, at least in part. The idea has haunted me for the past several weeks. I kept putting it aside, both because I found it too painful to think about -- and because I have too many of my own problems right now. But the theory kept coming back to me, because I think one of the demons that tormented Chang may be the same one that has tormented me for much of the past year.

Some clues are sprinkled through this Salon article about Iris Chang, by a fellow journalist who was Chang's friend for many years. In their last conversation before Chang's death, Iris Chang told Paula Kamen: "I just wanted to let you know that in case something should happen to me, you should always know that you've been a good friend." I think that final conversation makes it very clear that Chang had already decided she would take her own life. She must have concluded she couldn't win the battle that was raging inside her.

At the very end of her article, Kamen writes:
Before we finally hung up, she said one last time: If anything happened to her, I had to let people know what she was like before this happened.

And I said I would.
Kamen has kept her word, in an admirable fashion that I think would have pleased Chang.

The first part of the article tells of the women's experiences in college, and how Kamen "would have liked" Chang more if she hadn't always found herself "eating Iris' dust." Chang was always at least one step ahead of her classmates, and she managed to get published in places that seemed hopelessly out of reach to everyone else. From the summer-magazine internship in New York City available to only one student at their journalism school, to an internship with a Chicago daily newspaper, to becoming a college stringer for The New York Times covering the Urbana-Champaign area (after publishing six of her articles, the Times "told her to stop, so the paper would not raise eyebrows by disproportionately covering Champaign") -- Iris Chang was always there first.

Kamen is very open about the resentment she felt upon always finding herself in Chang's shadow. I'm sure many other people resented Chang as well. Kamen appears to think Chang was unaware of that resentment. I doubt that a woman as sensitive as Chang's work revealed her to be was oblivious to it; perhaps she simply considered it unavoidable, but ultimately unimportant. In any case, Chang actively pursued her friendship with Kamen, and was very encouraging to Kamen about Kamen's own work. Kamen finally realized part of the "Iris Code": "Think big. Almost to the point of being naive."

In later years, Kamen fully embraced the Iris Code:
By that time, I was definitely a firm convert to the Iris Code -- to the point of spreading the gospel. When I occasionally went to universities to speak on my books, and then was a guest at writing classes, I would lecture students to "Iris Chang" it. She had become a verb to me. An action verb.

"Just think big!" I told them. "That's half the battle! What do you have to lose? If someone turns you down, they turn you down, so what? And then you move on. Just get a sense of entitlement, will you? It doesn't matter if you're in the Midwest. Or if you're at a public school. Just decide what you want and go get it. To the point of being naive. Your voice is not your voice. It's the voice of your generation! Just Iris Chang it!" I explained, almost taking on her passionate tone as I spoke.
With regard to my theory about one of the demons that may have tormented Chang, here's the first major clue, in Kamen's description of Chang's best-known work:
In 1997, she published her blockbuster "The Rape of Nanking." Then, I was really impressed.

She had made a major historical discovery: a hidden Nazi diary chronicling the massacres by the Japanese in China in new detail. In China, the WWII atrocities have long been a national nightmare, and they have received attention from historians and academics over the years. But it took Chang's energy, will and engaging writing style to make the massacre come alive to a popular audience in the West. From reading her letters, I knew how hard she had worked on that book. She traveled through China on her own and challenged the U.S. government for long-classified documents. She was genuinely shocked at the atrocities she had exposed, and reacted with a pure, honest rage -- like someone seeing evil for the very first time. She couldn't understand the possibility of knowing about such things and not writing about them. Part of the power of her interviewing was that she had no filters to block out anything that was being said to her; I suspect she didn't even know that people came with filters.
And here's another clue:
The last time I saw Iris was in the spring of 2003, when I went to see her read in Chicago for her third book, a history of the Chinese in America. She was in good spirits, and we had a good time afterward going out for stuffed pizza in a small group and hearing about her latest adventures. I was curious about her next project, and the stories she was gathering for it. I knew they were intense, like those she had covered for "The Rape of Nanking." As a sign of the darkness of the interviews' content, a typist hired to transcribe them cried all the way through the work. The interviews covered the brutal ordeals suffered by U.S. soldiers during the Bataan Death March in the Philippines in World War II. For about four years, their Japanese captors starved and tortured them with unimaginable cruelty. A soldier, for example, would be ordered to bury his friend alive. If that person refused, they would make someone else bury him alive.

In these interviews, the surviving elderly soldiers also complained that the U.S government had turned a blind eye to them. Besides feeling abandoned while they were prisoners, the men were upset that the United States did not adequately prosecute the captured Japanese offenders. Some of the men talked about expecting finally to come home to the U.S. to great fanfare, to see "the rockets' red glare." But no one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through. "'But then, there was no rockets' red glare,'" one subject said, over and over again.

As was the case with many of her other subjects, that interview was probably the first time that soldier had talked about his experiences in the war. A war in which his comrades had sacrificed so dearly, some with their lives, and others, with their sanity. While this material was difficult, I hoped that the book would do the same for the Bataan Death March that "The Rape of Nanking" had done for the atrocities at Nanking, that it would raise a new level of awareness about this largely forgotten chapter of history. Iris represented these men's last hope to get their stories told.
I suspect that, at some point, Chang may have realized she was confronting evil -- not once, but twice. And I think it was the second time that she looked evil in the face that may finally have destroyed her.

Certainly, Chang had a great success with The Rape of Nanking. There was that Nazi diary, and people could focus more easily on the atrocities that had been committed -- because the atrocities had been committed by them, the Japanese whom the U.S. government had completely dehumanized as an entire population during World War II. Not only were the Japanese subhuman for many Americans (at least, throughout the period of World War II), but they were the enemy. It wasn't so difficult to acknowledge the horror of what they had done.

And while the Japanese were the initial villains in the Bataan Death March story, another villain was subsequently introduced into the storyline. After the unimaginable cruelty and torture to which they had been subjected, the soldiers who had managed to survive found that "no one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through. "'But then, there was no rockets' red glare,'" one subject said, over and over again."

"No one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through." That's the key.

I have been writing about this kind of denial at great length, in my series on "The Roots of Horror." In numerous entries, I have described how this mechanism of denial is initially set in early childhood. The young child must first deny his own pain, simply to survive. Acknowledging it, and experiencing it, fully might kill him. I recently discovered just how true that is, by recalling some very early childhood memories. Simply remembering certain things almost killed me over the last two months. I'm still not entirely certain how I survived, and I'm in the process of putting myself back together even now.

So to survive, we deny and repress the full experience of the pain we experience. As we mature, and if we do not surface those feelings -- which also lead to profound rage at the cruelty we suffer at the hands of adults who are supposedly devoted to nurturing us, and who tell us they are only being cruel "for our own good" -- we deny the pain of others in the same way, and for the same reasons. If we acknowledge the immense pain felt by others, that will trigger our own feelings of pain. And those feelings are much too threatening, and they represent a great danger that cannot be allowed to come too close. See my earlier essays for many more details and examples of how these dynamics manifest themselves.

Kamen offers a few more clues about what might have caused this tragedy, in the details of that final phone conversation with Iris Chang. Kamen says: "She talked about her overwhelming fears and anxieties, including being unable to face the magnitude -- and the controversial nature -- of the stories that she had uncovered." Chang believed she suffered from real, physical problems. Her family thought "it's internal" -- as if what happens in our mental and emotional life does not have physical effects, as well. (I add that, even if the ultimate cause is psychological, at certain points genuine physical ailments can arise which may require treatment as well. But adequate and appropriate treatment requires a doctor and/or a psychologist who understands and is sympathetic to all the issues involved, and such professionals are tragically still rare and difficult to find. And simply prescribing pills to make us "feel better" is no solution at all in the long-term, although it may sometimes be necessary to avoid a person taking her own life in the short-term.)

Kamen also writes this telling sentence: "She was fixated on not seeing herself as having anything wrong with her." I suspect the message that there was something "wrong with her" was the message conveyed by her family, who thought all her problems were "internal."

Here is what I wonder about. Chang was researching and writing about the most monstrous cruelties that we can imagine, and we probably can't even imagine -- not even in our worst nightmares -- many of the details the survivors of the Bataan Death March told Chang. And after the unbearable torture they had miraculously managed to survive, they found that, "No one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through." No one wanted to know about the torments they had been forced to endure, and no one wanted to know about the torment they might still experience.

I strongly suspect that Chang suffered some of the same torments herself. Kamen notes that Chang "had no filters to block out anything that was being said to her." Chang was fully open to the pain suffered by the people she wrote about; she acknowledged it completely, and allowed it to become completely real. Most people cannot or will not do that.

But I think Kamen is wrong when she says that she suspects Chang "didn't even know that people came with filters." I think that was what Chang was discovering -- and that discovery may have been the demon that finally destroyed her. Chang may have been unaware of people's "filters" at one time, but I think she felt the full impact of our culture's widespread denial in her final years. Just as the Bataan survivors discovered that no one "seemed interested in what they had gone through," Chang may have found that people still were not interested in it. While people might be willing to acknowledge the horrors in which the enemy engaged, they are not so willing to acknowledge the horrors they themselves perpetrate -- or the horrors that may have been perpetrated by the United States. Many people still refuse to acknowledge that U.S. forces committed atrocities of their own in Vietnam.

And Chang's own family thought her immense feelings of pain and anger -- anger directed both at the Japanese, but also and perhaps more significantly at an American public that still insisted on denial and avoidance -- signified that there was something "wrong with her." What we ourselves refuse to acknowledge, we condemn in others: we insist on making it their problem, when in fact it is our own.

The final catastrophe may have been Chang's growing realization that there was no one who fully understood or felt what she was feeling, that there was no one who was willing to listen when she spoke about the demons that haunted her. Her feelings represented a "problem" that needed to be fixed. The idea that her reaction was completely appropriate -- and more than that, completely healthy -- was intolerable to those around her. And she probably suspected that much of the audience for her new book would engage in the same denial. To acknowledge the full truth of the horror, including all of its sources -- even and especially when one of them is our own culture of denial -- is more than most people are capable of, or willing to undertake.

I do not compare my writing here to Chang's work. She wrote several books; although I have written five or six books' worth of essays, those essays have not been published in book form, at least not yet. I do not reach the kind of audience that Chang did. Yet, particularly in connection with my "Roots of Horror" series, I have many of the feelings that I suspect Chang may have felt. It astonishes me that very, very few people appear to think my writing on this subject is of any importance at all. Almost no one ever mentions that series or any of the entries in it, and almost no one ever discusses it, not even to criticize it. And even though I understand the mechanism of denial involved, and even though I have written about that mechanism at great length, the studied and purposeful avoidance of these dynamics -- when we see them being reenacted yet again, in our entire approach to foreign policy and more specifically in connection with the still unfolding horrors in Iraq -- fills me with unspeakable sadness, and it also makes me feel tremendous anger.

The anger arises directly out of the consequences of this continued denial: many innocent people continue to suffer untold pain and awful, horrific injuries because of what we do. And many people have been killed and continue to die as the result of our policies. Yet many people tell me that my feelings of sadness and rage are my problem, not theirs, not our country's, and not the world's. They tell me that I should write about something else, that I'm wasting my time, and that I'm only engaging in groundless psychological speculation -- even when more and more evidence confirming the truth and reality of these dynamics arrives every day, with numerous news stories.

Despite all the naysayers, I will continue writing about these issues. I do not believe there are any more important issues to be discussed. But I often feel that no one wants to hear about it, and that they would prefer that I simply keep quiet. I suspect that Iris Chang may have had some of those same feelings, when she was repeatedly told that her feelings were her problem and that something was "wrong with her."

As an additional important piece of evidence, recall my entries about the dynamics of suicide. In particular, recall Alice Miller's description of the causes of Sylvia Plath's suicide:
Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter's life, she never would have published the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her daughter would have been too painful to bear.

If a sensitive child like Sylvia Plath intuits that it is essential for her mother to interpret the daughter's pain only as the consequence of a picture being damaged and not as a consequence of the destruction of her daughter's self and its expression--symbolized in the fate of the pastel--the child will do her utmost to hide her authentic feelings from the mother. The letters are testimony of the false self she constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar). With the publication of the letters, her mother erects an imposing monument to her daughter's false self.

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Many parents are like Sylvia's mother. They desperately try to behave correctly toward their child, and in their child's behavior they seek reassurance that they are good parents. The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child--well behaved and dutiful--of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.
Also recall Miller's title for her chapter about Plath: "Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering" (which appears in Miller's book, For Your Own Good).

I have emphasized Miller's key sentence before: "We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself."

Iris Chang may have been yet another victim of the continued, unending denial which permeates our culture, and our world. If I am correct, she finally felt that killing herself was "the only possible way to express [her] true self." No one wanted to hear about what most concerned her and, even if they listened, they did so only with great reluctance, and they didn't fully grasp what she was trying to communicate.

I know those feelings all too well, every single one of them. And thoughts of suicide came uncomfortably close over the last two months. I think I have turned the corner and that the worst is behind me, even though a long struggle still lies ahead of me. I now have to rebuild my life, in almost every area. And if only a handful of people seem to understand what I'm talking about...well, that will have to suffice. I do not intend to give up, or to stop writing about these issues. They are much too important, and I am convinced I have something of significance to say -- even if the world does not care to acknowledge it.

I will offer some more details about what I have learned over the last few months very soon. And I will also write about some of the suicides of soldiers who had served in Iraq, since they reveal many of the identical dynamics. In the meantime, I urge you to read (or perhaps reread) some of the earlier entries in my series on "The Roots of Horror." Most of all, I desperately wish that more people understood and appreciated the underlying causes involved -- and realized at long last that the costs of continued denial can be too terrible to contemplate.

And that denial may have been what finally killed Iris Chang. The world's overwhelming indifference to pain and suffering finally may have been more than she could bear. More of us should keep that possibility in mind. Life is terribly precious, and the fact that Iris Chang's life has ended so tragically, when she still had so much of it before her and when she might have given us so much more wonderful and crucially important work, should cause all of us to wonder why.

And to make it our goal that such tragedies do not continue to be repeated every day, without end. Is facing the truth, fully and without fear, truly more terrifying than death itself? For far too many people, it appears that it is. But if anything could ever be wrong, that surely must be. Someday, it has to stop.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138566848625365212005-12-03T12:27:00.000-08:002007-03-31T09:39:13.496-07:00For Maria Callas, Now and Always: All Things Are ConnectedHad she lived, Maria Callas would have celebrated her 82nd birthday today. It is only fitting that, in a life filled with controversy, the first dispute should concern this usually simple fact: Callas herself insisted she was born on December 2; other records indicate the fourth to be the correct date. She left us in 1977, when she was only 53 years old. She once remarked: "First I lost my voice, then I lost my figure and then I lost Onassis." She lost the ability to make her artistic vision real, which was her soul's reason for being, then she lost what she believed to be her physical allure -- an attractiveness she achieved at great personal cost, in service to her art in the first instance -- and then she lost perhaps the only man to make her feel truly feminine, and genuinely like a woman. When it was all gone, Callas felt there was no reason to go on -- so she died. Some of her friends still believe her death was largely self-willed. (Here is a site with a wealth of information about her.)

Callas was indisputably a supremely great artist, one of the very highest and most demanding rank -- an artist who comes along only a very few times in a generation, if we are extraordinarily lucky. This obviously does not mean that a listener has to love Callas's voice, in terms of its basic quality alone, above all others. With regard to lushness, richness, timbre or what is often referred to simply as beauty (a term which is unhelpfully most often left very vague in terms of a more specific meaning), one may prefer Renata Tebaldi, for example. In certain moods, I prefer to listen to Tebaldi myself, if what I want to hear above all else is a sound of almost inhuman, ineffable purity. Very early Tebaldi, up to the late 1950s, is what you want for such occasions. Callas's severest critics will sometimes gleefully point out her many technical failings, especially in the later stages of her very brief career.

But at her peak, Callas was a supreme technician; listen to the live Lucia di Lammermoor from Berlin, with Karajan conducting, to see what I mean. In what may be the single best book about opera, its history, its interpreters, and its special power that I have yet read, A Song of Love and Death, Peter Conrad wonderfully evokes Callas's unique gifts, and he writes about that Lucia performance:
Callas is admired for her willingness to let vocal beauty suffer in the interest of verbal meaning. But she was more than a great actress with an unreliable voice. She herself insisted on the authority of bel canto [which literally means "beautiful singing," and which refers to a particular Italian tradition of singing made world-famous in the nineteenth century], and remembering her early performances as Kundry in Parsifal said, 'I hated the screams--but I suppose I did them well'; she was capable of creating a dramatic character, psychologically true and detailed, using strictly musical resources and never marring an absolute beauty of tone.

Perhaps the finest case is her Lucia in Karajan's production for La Scala, which visited (and was taped in) Berlin during 1955. She discovers a musical language for Lucia's distraction. ...

The character's disorientation is revealed by her musical habits. She cowers behind diminuendi for instance, like that on 'quella fonte!' in her first scene. The reduction of volume swallows up and introverts the word and the idea....Her mad scene is an episode of recondite sonic research, dramatically appalling because so musically imperturbable. Singing of a 'dolce suono' ["sweet sound"] in a voice which is girlishly pure, Callas lyrically retreats to a mad second childhood. When a high note on the word for altar oscillates out of control, it does so because it has taken off from the rational human register and is echoing through the vast vacancy within Lucia's mind. Lucia chases echoes until, in the glassy, unphysical sound Callas makes during her concert with the flute, she herself becomes one: an acoustic specter; Orpheus insane but in tune.

This was the musical Callas, the notes her reverie. In other roles she was less serenely melodic, more intent on scavenging drama from the words. As Cherubini's Medea, she virtually tormented the text into meaning. She bit on words, she chewed them, she spat them. Uttered by her, they had power to kill.
Callas unquestionably had grave and obvious technical problems, once the impossible demands she made of her instrument began to take their toll -- demands that she miraculously met for a time. When that time had passed, the superlative artist remained. As Callas herself observed, "You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there." And so it was, always there.

And those who hold Tebaldi (or others) up as a reproach to Callas should remember that Tebaldi herself had a severe vocal crisis in the early 1960s, after which she retooled her voice almost completely. She went on to some considerable triumphs, and I enjoyed a number of those later performances a great deal. But the sheen and bloom were gone, replaced by a steely quality, particularly when Tebaldi strove for volume in the middle and upper reaches of her voice. That steel could have its own attractions, but it sometimes turned very ugly. If Tebaldi remains a personal preference for many people, neither I nor anyone else should try to dissuade them; besides, as I've learned from considerable experience, it's hopeless in any case. But such preferences in themselves need not signify greater matters, if that is all they are.

Callas's achievements were unequalled by any other opera singer of her time, and very few singers before that era or afterward have had the kind of impact she did. This is true not only with regard to the transcendent performances she gave at her best, as great as they were. She restored an entire branch and many works to the operatic repertoire that had been set aside for decades, lacking an interpreter of her special gifts to make those operas come alive again for contemporary audiences. It was Callas who opened the door, through which Sutherland, Caballe, Sills and many others followed. Callas's achievement is made even more remarkable by the brevity of the most significant part of her career: it lasted less than a decade, from the early to late 1950s. Those were the years that saw one stunning realization after another: the Visconti Traviata, the revival of Anna Bolena, a series of magnificent Normas, Lucia of course, to say nothing of Medea.

Many of the criticisms of Callas can strike one as odd in a way, as if they convey a biting, very personal edge: it is as if the critic is offended deep in his soul, for a reason he thinks you already know, but which he would prefer not to identify. In fact, it's not so mysterious: many people will acknowledge Callas's greatness. But they cannot forgive Callas for one reason above all others: Callas was great, and she knew it. In a culture drowning in mediocrity, one which idolizes the mundane, the commonplace, and often even the repellent, and turns people we would not care to know in our own lives into instant celebrities who are forgotten the next week, true greatness makes us profoundly uncomfortable. We don't know how to relate to it, and we think it reflects badly on us. Callas herself was wonderfully clear about the standards she would prefer to be employed: "I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged."

Many of us will permit Callas her greatness, provided she is humble about it. Genuine greatness cannot be humble in this way, simply to make mediocrity comfortable: to do so makes the achievement impossible. The extraordinary would become ordinary once more. Callas would have none of that; she sought to transcend the standards others had unthinkingly accepted, standards low enough that others could be assured of meeting them. She insisted on the absolute best from herself; when she could not meet her own standards, her failure tormented her. And she insisted on the best from her listeners; when we failed, as many of us did, we blamed her for making us aware of our own limitations.

Conrad writes very powerfully about the nature of the demands Callas placed on herself:
Callas saw her art as servitude. She was an aggressor toward her audiences, assuming that her voice would be disliked when first heard and schoolmarmishly remarking 'the public has to be taught'; she was even more brutally unsparing toward herself. During the 1967-68 broadcast season at the Met, she gave a radio interview in which she recurs to the idea of punishing the voice into obedience. 'You must serve music,' she says or 'the first person we serve must be the composer'; then she reiterates 'we are just servants of art.' She acknowledges that the voice will be recalcitrant, maybe incapable: it must acquire the virtuosity of an instrument, she says, 'whether we like it or not--or whether we can.' With disciplinary sadism, she castigates a voice which is self-indulgent, interested only in being beautiful. The image she uses is revealingly destructive: 'it isn't enough that you have a beautiful voice; you must take this voice and break it up into a thousand pieces, so she will serve you.'...Speaking of the demands she made of herself, she says, 'You set yourself a standard which is always a whip. You're whipping yourself always, like a soldier.' Hence her inability to forgive herself when the voice failed her, and her contempt for the easy way out. She couldn't skim through the music, slurring over difficulties; for her there had to be the self-inflicted punishment of an outright disaster--a last, voiceless Norma in Paris in 1965.

Callas bestowed her own unsparing integrity on the characters she played: they were versions of herself, sacrificial victims or (failing that) aspostates.
This kind of "unsparing integrity" exacts a terrible toll. Yet when such demands are met, and Callas met them so often that the feat can only stagger us in its magnitude, the result is greatness of a kind we encounter only on very rare occasions in our lives -- and then, only if fortune favors us.

Callas was fully aware she was attempting a totality of musicianship, expressivity, acting and communication that can only be achieved at great cost. She transformed her body, precisely so that the physical embodiment would not betray the ideal. How could she portray a courtesan dying of consumption (in Traviata) or a fragile, virginal young girl (in La Sonnambula) if she were obese? She couldn't, so the weight was banished by an act of willpower. She had different rules for the purposes that engaged her, rules that were not ours: "Don't talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddamn rules." As Conrad explains above, those rules were applied most unforgivingly to herself.

Callas's art, and the manner in which the artistic demands she made of herself affected her life, often put me in mind of part of Victor Hugo's credo. Hugo, a magnificent writer whose work is sorely neglected today, wrote the following in 1827, in the preface to his play, Cromwell. That preface became the rallying cry of the Romantic movement in literature. But what Hugo said encompassed much more than literary matters -- it represented an entire perspective on human life and achievement, and a way of viewing the world and man's place in it:
[T]he modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life, creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of Christian melancholy and philosophical criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected.
For Callas, art at its peak had to express both darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime: for her, too, "all things are connected."

In the very last paragraph of A Song of Love and Death, Peter Conrad captures the unique power of opera as well as any description I have ever read:
Opera is a sport, a display of physical and technical prowess. At the same time it is a form of almost religious aspiration, reaching for the sky from which music first poured down like Apollo's sunlight. Dancers leap into that lost altitude; singers send out their top notes on exploratory forays, and use their scales as Jacob's ladders. One word defines its visceral effect and its lofty ambition, and that is the first word uttered by Verdi's Otello as he whirls out of the storm. Opera's business is exultation.
Callas's art was the purest embodiment of that aspiration, and she provided that kind of exultation: she made the human divine. She remained fully and tragically human, but infused with the goddess. She demanded that we raise ourselves up, to meet her on that exalted plane. If we couldn't or wouldn't, we laid the blame at her feet, rather than confront our own failings.

Many of us recoil at the sight of genuine greatness: we seek to minimize it, find fault with it, or diminish it. If actual faults present themselves, we seize on them with an eagerness that is both revealing and deplorable. If those faults are not enough, we invent others. If through one of those infrequent miracles that grace our existence, another Callas were to come upon the scene today, I very much doubt she would survive for long -- and if she did, I hate to think what the cost would be.

But greatness of this kind cannot be denied in the end. Decades from now, and even in hundreds of years, Callas's art will be remembered by those who search history for the greatest of achievements, and who treasure and guard them as the most precious of rare gems. She will live, when we have been long forgotten. At the opening of his valuable book, The Callas Legacy, John Ardoin, an unusually perceptive commentator, offers the lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay that many think of in connection with Callas's life:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.
More and more, I am led to the conclusion that the brightest and fiercest flames last the shortest time, in every field of human endeavor. Perhaps the failing is ours -- in the comfort we seek from the mediocre and that which does not require us to raise ourselves up, and in our resistance to those achievements that transcend the boundaries of what we view as even possible. Or perhaps the brevity is inherent in the achievement itself: when we break the bounds of what most humans are capable of doing, the person who does so cannot tolerate the impossible strain for very long. Yet they cannot strive for less: that, too, would destroy them.

Whatever the explanation may be, such greatness is eternal. It will last as long as mankind does, and as long as we remember what is possible when we strive for perfection, and approach as near to it as we can. Perhaps, finally, that makes the terrible costs that Callas endured worth it in the end: that she will live forever.

For you, truly and incomparably La Divina: now and always.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138045165416276952004-02-19T11:28:00.000-08:002006-06-18T09:16:34.003-07:00THE ROOTS OF HORROR: The Suicide TabooAlice Miller's writings explain a great deal that otherwise remains mystifying. In particular, her identification of the precise mechanism by means of which an authentic self is prevented from being formed allows us to see that, in the deepest sense, a genuine soul -- an "I," if you will -- never has a chance to exist in far too many instances. And crucially related to this absence is an inability to remember in a meaningful way, or often even to acknowledge, the pain that we ourselves have experienced -- and this denial then prevents us from realizing the pain of others. This lack of a self, and the obedience to authority to which that lack is tied -- since we must find guidance from some source, and if it is not ourselves, it will be some external authority -- also lets us see why people desperately hold onto ideas which they otherwise would easily see to be nonsense, whether it is an incomprehensible, contradictory, unintelligible supernatural being, or some kind of totalitarian ideology.

No subject is more misunderstood, even today, than suicide. It remains one of the last taboos. This post is extremely difficult for me to write in certain ways. I have experienced very bad depressions in my life and, while I never attempted suicide, I went through periods when I often thought about it. Sometimes, I would share those feelings with friends. (I would always discuss them with a therapist if I was seeing one, but I'm not talking about professionals in what follows.) Almost every time I discussed my suicidal thoughts with friends, it turned out to be a disastrous mistake.

It is a measure of the deep misunderstandings and unthinking moral commandments so prevalent today that a number of people have said to me over the years something like the following: "Oh, don't even think about it. It's wrong. It's selfish. Think about the pain you would cause all of those who love you, including me. Don't you see how cruel it would be? Besides, it's so weak. How could you give in to such feelings?"

Every single issue that Miller discusses at great length is revealed in this illustration of what I've often heard over the years. And I assure you, it is absolutely accurate in terms of what people have said to me on any number of occasions. Several things should be noted about such remarks. The easy part is what we might term a general ethical point. It is more than a little absurd to say -- to someone who may be seriously contemplating wiping himself out of existence for all time -- that he's being "selfish." And such an argument is hardly likely to hold much persuasive power for someone experiencing deep depression, but to make that point only underscores how ludicrous the argument is, especially in these circumstances.

But that isn't what interests me about this, and as I said, that's the easy part -- although it points to the underlying issue, one of critical significance. Here's the hard part: note what is missing in those comments. What is missing is simply this: any acknowledgment of the inexpressible anguish and pain experienced by the person who seriously considers suicide. Do you have any idea how intense and unbearable such pain must be for a person to view suicide as a viable option for more than a moment? If you don't, I suggest you think about it for a long, long time. And then think about it some more.

The truly significant part is the following: this is exactly the mechanism that Miller describes. People who make comments like those (and most people have similar views) are cut off from their own pain, and they are therefore unable to empathize, or even recognize, pain felt by others, even when such pain is agonizingly extreme. When you make real to yourself the degree of pain someone must be feeling to think about suicide, it is simply astonishing that anyone would believe for one moment that pointing out the pain of others would be a compelling argument. In addition, there is another truly destructive element that such an approach introduces: that the person thinking of suicide should feel guilt for even considering it, much less doing it. Implying that anyone in enormous psychological pain should feel guilty about having such feelings in the first place is not precisely a useful therapeutic approach. But people very often accuse those experiencing deep depression of being "cruel," "weak" and "selfish" -- and they apparently have no appreciation at all for how deeply wounding such accusations are -- particularly at a time when the person hearing them is at his most vulnerable, and possibly in grave danger. This issue cannot be overemphasized: to the extent that a person hearing such accusations views them as valid, he will feel guilt, and he will experience even greater pain -- and the possibility that he may actually kill himself thereby increases. While they delude themselves into believing they are "helping," many people thus commit great harm. Sometimes, such harm is tragically and finally irreversible.

There is a still deeper issue involved. In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller discusses Sylvia Plath at some length. Her chapter title is illuminating: "Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering." Here is part of what Miller says:
Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter's life, she never would have published the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her daughter would have been too painful to bear.
Miller then quotes from the mother's book of Sylvia's letters. Plath's mother tells the story of how a pastel still-life Sylvia had completed gets blurred accidentally, when an apron brushes up against it. Sylvia lightly said, "Don't worry; I can patch it up." Later that night, Sylvia wrote her first poem "containing tragic undertones" -- at the age of fourteen. Here is part of it:
I thought that I could not be hurt;
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to suffering--
immune to mental pain
or agony. ...

(How frail the human heart must be--
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing--
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)

Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
and darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
where careless hands had reached out to
destroy

my silver web of happiness.
The hands then stopped in wonderment,
for, loving me, then wept to see
the tattered ruins of my firma-
ment.

(How frail the human heart must be--
a mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing,
or weep.)
Here is Miller again:
If a sensitive child like Sylvia Plath intuits that it is essential for her mother to interpret the daughter's pain only as the consequence of a picture being damaged and not as a consequence of the destruction of her daughter's self and its expression--symbolized in the fate of the pastel--the child will do her utmost to hide her authentic feelings from the mother. The letters are testimony of the false self she constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar). With the publication of the letters, her mother erects an imposing monument to her daughter's false self.

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Many parents are like Sylvia's mother. They desperately try to behave correctly toward their child, and in their child's behavior they seek reassurance that they are good parents. The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child--well behaved and dutiful--of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me. This can be observed in various parental attitudes.
And that is the most important, the absolutely crucial point: suicide is the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Most people do not grasp this at all.

Do not think that this is academic, or that it does not touch your life. It touches all our lives:
The silver grave cover bore colorful wreaths and American flags -- a nod to Suell's three years of military service. He was deployed to Iraq in April 2003 as an Army petroleum supply specialist out of Fort Sill, Okla. Less than two months later, he was dead.

A report provided to the family at their request says that the 24-year-old died of a drug overdose on Father's Day, one of 22 suicides reported among troops in Iraq last year.

According to William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, who discussed the suicides in a briefing last month, that represents a rate of more than 13.5 per 100,000 troops, about 20 percent higher than the recent Army average of 10.5 to 11. The Pentagon plans to release the findings of a team sent to Iraq last fall to investigate the mental health of the troops, including suicides.

The number Winkenwerder cited does not include cases under investigation, so the actual number may be higher. It also excludes the suicides by soldiers who have returned to the United States. For instance, two soldiers undergoing mental health treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington reportedly committed suicide there, in July 2003 and last month. In its weekly report on the treatment of returning battlefield soldiers, the hospital never mentioned the deaths. An official at Walter Reed said the deaths are "suspected" suicides and are being investigated by the Army's criminal division.

Stephen L. Robinson, who visits the hospital regularly and is executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for veterans and soldiers, said there was no public record of the deaths. "They just covered it up," he said.

The military's emphasis on honor, valor and courage makes suicide perhaps one of its last taboos. The Pentagon does not publicly identify a soldier's death as a suicide but may classify it as a "non-hostile gunshot wound," or death from "non-hostile injuries," which can also include accidents such as negligent discharge of a weapon. In comparison, the Pentagon will release a description of the cause of death -- enemy fire, a land mine, a car crash -- for a soldier killed in action or as a result of an accident.

The Washington Post contacted more than a dozen families of soldiers whose causes of death were listed as non-combat related. Some said that although the military had not provided further details, information from soldiers in the field indicated that the deaths were from "friendly fire" or an accidental weapons discharge. For others awaiting the results of an investigation, the possibility of suicide was too painful to bear.

"I am not ready to hear that," said the mother of one soldier who died from a gunshot wound to the head -- a "non-combat weapons discharge," according to the Pentagon.

In Texas, the Suell family says the military has it wrong. Suellboy, as he was known to those closest to him, was strong-minded and a God-fearing Christian. The son of a minister, he preached to others that suicide was a sin. He drew hearts on the letters he sent to his wife and said he could not wait to come home to see his daughters.

Rebecca Suell, 23, said she will never believe that her husband killed himself. She and her mother-in-law, Mathis, 47, are demanding answers, and they say the military has been silent and unsupportive. ...

Soldiers looking for ways to cope have several options. Military chaplains, assigned to individual units, offer comfort without the label of mental illness. Soldiers in more serious distress might be referred to inpatient psychiatric wards or be sent home. The Army sent 596 soldiers from Iraq to mental health treatment facilities in 2003.

Still, some soldiers don't speak up or don't get noticed. ...

In his letters, Joseph Suell wrote that Iraq was a shadowy conflict. "Over here you never know what's going to happen next," he wrote to his mother-in-law, Janice Doggett, 41. "So I just keep faith in Jesus and keep my eyes open."

To his widow, those are not the words of a suicidal man. He had no history of mental illness, and even while in Iraq he was making plans. Married at City Hall, he and Rebecca planned a church wedding upon his return.

Maybe he took some pills because he couldn't sleep, Rebecca Suell suggested. Or because he was feeling a little bit stressed. But the intention was not death.

"When he got his teeth pulled he wouldn't even take one pill for the pain," said Rebecca Suell. "Why would he take a bottle?" ...

"He didn't commit suicide," Shepherd said. "That ain't him." ...

Tears crawled down her cheeks at a Sunday morning church service when the minister spoke of having a good year. In her living room, they fell again as she tried to make sense of Suell's death.

"I have no autopsy report, no toxicology report, nothing," she said. The one document that Mathis has from the military is a DD Form 1300, a casualty report that lists the cause and circumstances of the death as "self-inflicted: drug overdose."

"I believe in my heart that he did take some medicine, but it wasn't to kill himself. He probably had a headache," she said.

"I'm not blaming God -- God don't make mistakes. I'm not mad at the war -- Joseph wasn't war material."

Suell told his mother that he hadn't killed anyone, and he hoped he wouldn't have to.

"God looked down on Joseph and said he's not that type of person. God came down and took my son."
And so you see how the denial -- first the denial of one's own pain, and then the denial of the pain of others -- continues, and takes the most terrible toll imaginable. Whatever the cost, even if it may result in a person's death, people will not acknowledge the reality of another's pain. And so a mother says, "I am not ready to hear that" -- even though her son's pain was so great that it may have caused him to take his own life. He is dead, but she is not ready to hear why. Her denial of his pain probably took precedence over his life, and now it takes precedence over his death.

And thus the horrors continue.

Finally, here's some unsolicited advice. If anyone you know ever makes a tentative effort to discuss obviously painful feelings with you, and perhaps even thoughts of suicide, do not judge them, do not condemn them, and above all, do not attempt in any way to shut them down. Listen, listen as carefully as you can -- and communicate to the person in every manner possible that there is someone who cares about them, who hears and sees the pain they are in, and who wants to help, if you can. Just be there, as a friend, as someone who empathizes, and make real to yourself what their pain feels like.

Just be there, with understanding, with compassion, with affection or love, as the case may be. As Miller indicates, be open to what the person is telling you. Sometimes, just being there, being there in the most meaningful sense, is the hardest thing in the world to do -- and the most important.

And perhaps, someday, the horrors will end. I still choose to believe in miracles.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1137957713640834282005-12-10T11:17:00.000-08:002006-02-16T19:17:21.086-08:00ON TORTURE, II: Of Means and Ends[All of the essays in my series, On Torture, together with a brief description of each entry, are listed here.]

[This essay was originally published on May 20, 2005, and was titled: "No Sympathy for Any of Them, None at All." I include it in the group of earlier essays concerning torture for a few reasons. The most important of those reasons is to once more make the point that it is not possible to support the overall purposes of our current foreign policy, as for example Andrew Sullivan continues to do, without also supporting the particular means of implementing that policy -- means that are logically necessary and inextricably woven up in it, and used to advance it. To be precise, I should say that it is not possible assuming a certain degree of analytic ability and intellectual honesty. Sullivan has failed to demonstrate these qualities (among others) on numerous occasions. The lesson is one I had thought people understood by now, but many obviously do not: the ends determine the means. Invalid, and sometimes loathsome ends, require and necessitate cruel, barbaric and sometimes loathsome means. You cannot have these particular ends without certain means, Sullivan's self-obsessed wails of protest aside. He will not question the goals he still endorses, but he rails against the logically implied means of trying to attain them. Even a cursory appreciation of history would have informed Sullivan of the futility and error in his approach.

After this essay, I've included an excerpt from a Naomi Klein article that I initially noted on June 7 of this year, when Klein's piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Klein drives this same point home using the horrifying example of the French experience in Algeria. As a character in the film "Battle of Algiers" notes when defending the use of torture by the French -- and it should be emphasized that the character is based on an historical figure and on the facts of the French catastrophe: If this is what you still want, "then you must accept all the consequences." This is the stark truth that defenders of our policies like Sullivan still refuse to acknowledge. Tragically, those who have died or been maimed as the result of the policies of the Bush administration did not have the same choice -- and that choice is still denied to the innocent victims of our actions today.

This is why I have no patience whatsoever for Sullivan and others of his kind -- those people who support our foreign policy but who recoil at its barbaric elements. Tens of thousands of people are now dead or have suffered untold agonies because of policies they continue to support to this day -- but they still refuse to take responsibility for any of it. They cling to their so-called "noble ideals" -- while every day provides further evidence that those "ideals" are drenched in blood. There is nothing in the least "idealistic" about their program: it stinks of death and of untold human suffering. But Sullivan and others like him insist that if the policy were implemented in the way they recommend, none of these horrors would come to pass. They forget, and hope we too will forget, that every monster in history has made the same claim -- and with as little justification. The problem lies not in the specific means, as detestable as they are, but in the nature of the "ideals" themselves. But they will admit none of this, and so the destruction and the horror continue.]

As regular readers here know, although I recognize that we have genuine enemies who need to be defeated (which requires that we narrowly target the threats we face), I am profoundly opposed to Bush's purposely never-defined "War on Terror" and his plans for "benevolent hegemony" via endless war, with nation-building as an inextricable and crucial part of his strategy. A brief review of the relevant history reveals that such delusions have always led finally to the destruction of the nation that attempts to put such plans into operation.

With that brief prefatory note in mind, I will say that I view it as an unqualifiedly good thing when those who enthusiastically support Bush's foreign policy begin to fight among themselves. With regard to all such internecine battles, I emphatically join our president in saying: Bring it on! So in many ways, the current feud involving Reynolds, Sullivan, various denizens of The Corner and assorted other hawks is altogether a delight to behold, and balm to the soul.

Given Sullivan's abhorrence in reaction to torture and abuse meted out by U.S. troops, some might think that I would take Sullivan's side. They would be wrong, for reasons I have explained at length. These are a few key passages from my earlier essay:
It is true that Sullivan provides a good overview of the barbaric torture story ... but so have any number of other people. And in his U.K. Times article, he indulges himself in a truly repellent practice, one which is habitual to him. What seems to concern Sullivan just as much as the barbarity of torture or the disaster in Iraq is the exquisite agony that Bush's failures have visited upon his, Sullivan's, precious soul. In fact, the Torments of Sullivan as endlessly detailed by Sullivan himself for all the world to witness—assuming, without any grounds to do so, that any sentient being actually gives a damn—appear to be of considerably greater moment to him than the sufferings visited upon many thousands of people because of the policies he so endlessly championed.

...

And if you consult his blog (assuming you have a much stronger tolerance for this kind of melodramatic self-dramatizing than I do), you will find many more instances of this adolescent self-examination. Here's a news flash for Sullivan: an endless number of people, Americans, Iraqis and others, have suffered genuine agony and injury—and are now dead—because of people like you, and as the direct result of your unquenchable desire for absolute safety, which in your view requires "benevolent American hegemony" exercised over the entire world by means of military force. Never mind that this fatal Utopian delusion has never led to anything other than death and destruction; you're scared, you want to feel safe, and you will see the world destroyed before questioning the absolutely mistaken ideas that you treat as axioms never to be challenged.

And Sullivan's crimes are even worse than this: it was Sullivan (along with many other warbloggers) who fatally poisoned the cultural atmosphere after 9/11, with his interminable rants about the "fifth columnists" who allegedly are enemies as dangerous to us as foreign terrorists. Recall that those "fifth columnists" included anyone at all who failed to embrace George Bush and his program for world domination in the manner that Sullivan himself did. But now—now that everything that many of those opposed to the Iraq war predicted before the fact has come to pass, and now that the details of abuse and torture have surfaced—now Sullivan is having a few second thoughts.

But there is a deeper problem here—namely, that Sullivan's second thoughts do not go nearly far enough. Sullivan has not given up the program he endorses at all—or even seriously questioned it. He still believes "in this war as a war of liberation and increased security." This, too, fails to pass the sanity test. Sullivan apparently has never read the numerous articles by any number of experts on terrorism (genuine experts, I emphasize, not dilettantes who blog in between jaunts to Provincetown and walking the dog)—all of whom have pointed out at great length that the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as every other aspect of Bush's "War on Terror," have only served to increase the actual dangers we face.

But none of this for Sullivan. (None: "I've long admired Bush's recognition of the life-and-death struggle against Islamist fascism as the central task of his presidency. And it's hard not to value his grit in pursuing what will, I think, eventually be regarded as critical wars in the defense of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. He comes across as a genuinely kind and warm man, of solid values and clear objectives.") Sullivan still wants his American Empire (with his other hero, Tony Blair, as a very junior partner), he still wants American hegemony, and he still wants us to impose "freedom" by force on countries that have no history or culture to support a political system modeled on ours. He's still an apocalyptic crusader, seeking to create a new world through sacred violence and death just like his hero, Bush.

He just doesn't want any of the mess. Here's another news flash for Sullivan: if you want empire and military domination of large swathes of the world in an endless, woefully defined "War on Terror," lifelong detentions and torture are an inseparable part of what you're going to get. That kind of mess (and much worse) is woven into the very fabric of the program you so enthusiastically supported—and which you still support.

Of course, to understand that brutality, cruelty, torture, death, the disregard of individual rights, and the undermining of what are supposedly "American values" inevitably accompany the drive to empire requires that one is capable of grasping the lessons of history, that one can engage in meaningful and accurate analysis of political and cultural dynamics—and that one can think.

It also assumes that a person understands that he cannot continually express admiration and support for the political equivalent of Al Capone—and then recoil in shock when he sees that blood has been spilled on his immaculate carpet. Oh, the horror! His carpet has been soiled, and his soul is tormented—while countless other people are maimed or dead.

In addition to everything else that is so deeply repellent about his writing and "thinking," Sullivan's sense of priorities is so fundamentally twisted and perverse that no regrets he expresses at this point deserve even a moment of sympathy. He made his bed, and he deserves to lie in it. That's the very least he deserves.
Therefore, in one very limited sense (and leaving aside the lunacy of other aspects of these comments), Reynolds is correct when he says:
When Andrew was a champion of the war on terror, writing about martial spirit and fifth columns composed of the "decadent left," did he believe that nothing like Abu Ghraib would happen, when such things (and much worse) happen in prisons across America (and everywhere else) on a daily basis? If so, he was writing out of an appalling ignorance.
However, for the reasons explained in the essay excerpted above and in many others here, I obviously think both Reynolds and Sullivan are wrong, and not just wrong but gravely, hopelessly wrong.

With regard to a few more minor points, I will note that John Podhoretz has revealed a degree of ugliness and hatred which is truly sickening to contemplate. There was this post ("If he's going to go all camp on us, couldn't the Sullied One have quoted Mae West or Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or something?"), and then this one. Podhoretz's view of what is "clever" is as shallow and disgusting as is his complete inability to appreciate the gravity of the issues raised by the allegations of torture. And his treatment of Sullivan is utterly despicable, regardless of Sullivan's own many sins.

The fact that National Review tolerates and even seems to encourage this kind of naked hatred and bigotry places that once somewhat respectable magazine beyond the pale, for all time as far as I'm concerned. This is the territory inhabited by mindless, violent thugs, consumed by hatred and lashing out at anyone who disagrees with them, no matter how well-founded those disagreements might be. And these are the people who would see the world consumed by nuclear clouds, rather than ever admit they might be wrong.

All in all, it's a thoroughly sickening display. As my headline says: no sympathy for any them, none at all. I only wish that there might be some way that this squabbling in the prowar ranks might translate into a weakening of Bush's drive toward empire and perpetual war. But, alas, indications of any such weakening are scant to non-existent. Even though the signs of disaster mount day by day, as was true of Vietnam—which constituted a national tragedy from which we now see we learned absolutely nothing—we will not have second thoughts and change our direction until the costs become thoroughly unsustainable, and until a sufficient number of Americans become disgusted and fed up, and threaten retribution on their elected political leaders.

May that day come very, very soon.

-------------

[Originally posted on June 7, 2005: "You Must Accept All the Consequences."]

Naomi Klein ("Torture's Part of the Territory"):
Brace yourself for a flood of gruesome new torture snapshots. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Defense Department to release dozens of additional photographs and videotapes depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The photographs will elicit what has become a predictable response: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will claim to be shocked and will assure us that action is already being taken to prevent such abuses from happening again. But imagine, for a moment, if events followed a different script. Imagine if Rumsfeld responded like Col. Mathieu in "Battle of Algiers," Gillo Pontecorvo's famed 1965 film about the National Liberation Front's attempt to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. In one of the film's key scenes, Mathieu finds himself in a situation familiar to top officials in the Bush administration: He is being grilled by a room filled with journalists about allegations that French paratroopers are torturing Algerian prisoners.

Based on real-life French commander Gen. Jacques Massus, Mathieu neither denies the abuse nor claims that those responsible will be punished. Instead, he flips the tables on the scandalized reporters, most of whom work for newspapers that overwhelmingly support France's continued occupation of Algeria. Torture "isn't the problem," he says calmly. "The problem is the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay. ... It's my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."

His point, as relevant in Iraq today as it was in Algeria in 1957, is that there is no nice, humanitarian way to occupy a nation against the will of its people. Those who support such an occupation don't have the right to morally separate themselves from the brutality it requires.
Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1139675872380492142006-02-11T08:30:00.000-08:002006-02-16T09:39:57.153-08:00ReminderJust a reminder that more recent posts will be found at Once Upon A Time.

Some of the new pieces focus on issues directly connected to the themes I've discussed in my Alice Miller essays. In particular, you may be interested in the series on Iran. The latest entries are this one, and Part VI, which has links to the earlier entries.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1139676181641931582006-02-04T08:42:00.000-08:002006-02-11T08:43:01.640-08:00Karloff, Gods and Monsters, and the Horrors of WarPosted at Once Upon A Time.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138054299824288692006-01-23T14:08:00.000-08:002006-02-02T13:12:17.860-08:00ON TORTUREThe following is a list of the entries in my series, "On Torture," written in December 2005, together with a brief description of the content of the individual parts of this extended essay:

I, State Violence and Brutality, and Totalitarianism: A discussion of the manner in which torture is an integral and necessary part of the apparatus of any totalitarian police state, relying in significant part on Hannah Arendt's immensely important writing.

II, Of Means and Ends: An analysis of the fundamental contradiction that fatally undercuts the opposition of a writer like Andrew Sullivan to the use or approval of torture: why it is not possible to continue to support the goals of our foreign policy -- which necessitate the imposition, by means of military force, of our form of government on cultures and societies that have no history, traditions or intellectual roots to sustain the specific political forms we have adopted -- while decrying the inevitably implied and necessary means of achieving those ends.

III, Brutality and Sadism as National Policy, and the Monsters of Our Time: An examination of how torture has become a central and systematic element of the Bush administration's policies in the prosecution of its erroneously conceived "War on Terror," and why the administration has unforgivably and perhaps fatally branded the United States as a barbarian nation.

IV, Becoming Monsters, and Ensuring Our Ultimate Defeat: A discussion of articles by Darius Rejali and Mark Danner, explaining why torture does not work, how the official governmental adoption of torture eventually destroys any society, and further analyzing how the horrifying damage resulting from the use of torture expands in all directions, corrupting everyone in its wake.

V, A Monster's Confession, and the Choice to be Human: A dissection of the "defense" of torture offered by Charles Krauthammer (a "defense" widely heralded by many hawks), explaining the numerous dishonesties and contradictions engaged in by Krauthammer, and his profound immorality.

Addendum--More From the Annals of Horror: Some excerpts from a recent article about the horrific torture inflicted on one prisoner, and the utterly meaningless "confession" ultimately coerced by such barbaric methods.

VI(A), The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face: The first part of an analysis of the ultimate failure of Andrew Sullivan's answer to Krauthammer, including an identification of certain crucial questions that are ignored by both writers -- and an explanation of how both Krauthammer and Sullivan reveal psychologies dominated, above all else, by the demand for obedience. (In the near future, I will offer a lengthier examination of that last point.)

VI(B), The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face: The conclusion of my explanation of the vast chasm that separates Sullivan's approach to this subject from mine, and a consideration of the ultimate roots of torture and violence in the numerous cruelties inflicted on children by the majority of parents, relying on the work of Alice Miller.

With regard to this last issue, a related piece is also critical: When the Demons Come. That essay discusses certain tragically common barbarities in child rearing (such as "hot saucing" and the methods championed by James Dobson), the psychological dynamics instilled by such means -- including most notably obedience and denial -- and how those dynamics lead to atrocities committed by adults.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138907819294588852006-02-02T11:11:00.000-08:002006-02-02T13:08:31.580-08:00Essays Based on the Work of Alice MillerWhat follows is a listing of many of the essays I've written based on the work of Alice Miller. It is not yet complete; as I continue to repost earlier essays, I will add them here. In addition, because of the great richness of Miller's thought and its endless implications and ramifications -- and because the dynamics identified by Miller are reflected in countless events in the world today, including perhaps most notably in our foreign policy -- I expect to write a number of future essays on these themes. Those, too, will be added to this list as they are published.

The articles are not always listed in the order they first appeared. Instead, I have grouped them by topic. I hope that will prove more helpful for readers trying to find essays that focus on specific topics.

The Roots of Horror Series

Instilling Obedience and Denial in Childhood: A review of two news stories that reveal our culture's preoccupation with the irrelevant and/or the trivial, a discussion of some of the reasons such stories are not deserving of any serious attention whatsoever -- and concluding with a horrifying news story that received almost no notice at all but most certainly should have, a story that serves as an introduction to the importance of Alice Miller's work about commonly accepted child-rearing practices and their consequences.

Worth A Thousand Words: A few comments about a Rembrandt painting that captures many of the themes that Miller discusses, and that leads into the next essay..

The Institutionalized Destruction of Innocence -- and of Life: A discussion of the story of Abraham and Isaac, and an introduction to some of Miller's central ideas: how cruelty to children, both physical and/or psychological -- cruelty in the form of not paying attention to the child's genuine needs, and demanding obedience above all -- prevents the formation of an authentic self, and how that lack of a true self can then be enlisted in the service of dangerous and destructive ideologies.

Mel Gibson, A Public Case Study in Obedience and Denial: A summary of Miller's major thesis, and an examination of Mel Gibson and fundamentalist religious belief more generally as one kind of example of the mechanisms that Miller discusses.

Addendum on Mel Gibson: Some further details about the views of Mel Gibson's father, which make indisputably clear the abusive nature of the psychological dynamics in this family.

The Consequences of Denial: Some examples of the mechanisms of denial from the current political scene, and an example of how far such denial can go, using an excerpt from the writings of Carl Jung.

The Search for Underlying Causes, and Why Spanking Is Always Wrong: A description of how and why I was led to seek for underlying causes and why I was drawn yet again to Alice Miller's books, and a discussion of why physical punishment, including even occasional spankings, is always wrong -- and why it is wrong and destructive psychologically, and wrong philosophically as well.

Iraq -- The Practice of Denial: An examination of the meaning of statements from some of the U.S. military commanders in Iraq, about how we "have to understand the Arab mind," and about how "the only thing they understand is force." I explore how the obedience-denial mechanism identified by Miller leads to massive denial of the pain, and of the very humanity, of the Iraqis themselves -- and how the United States thus is driven to treat the Iraqis in exactly the same manner that a brutal, punishing parent treats a "bad" child, all the while telling the child that the parent is only doing it "for the child's own good."

The Demand for Obedience: A review of the fundamentals of Miller's work, including her definitions of "poisonous pedagogy" and of a "helping witness," with some autobiographical details to make the latter concept clearer. I also examine the psychological dynamics underlying articles by David Brooks (condemning "narcissism" and calling for a return to "a creedal order") and Joseph Farah (condemning homosexuality, as he frequently does, specifically on the grounds that God has condemned it: "There is a reason most people frown on homosexuality. It is not prejudice. It is not bias. It is not irrational. It is because God has pronounced it wrong, immoral, abomination, sin.").

The Voice of the Thug, and the Harbinger of Horrors Still to Come: An analysis of certain aspects of the psychology revealed by many hawks, and a lengthy discussion of their reaction to the election in Spain. I consider the roots of the hatred, contempt and scorn heaped upon the Spanish people by writers such as David Brooks, Mark Steyn, and Andrew Sullivan, and what the sources of that reaction are -- and what such a reaction bodes for the future. I include an excerpt from Alice Miller's Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, which explains her contention that, "The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason" -- and I explain how many hawks are now engaged in a revenge fantasy of their own, with the "War on Terror" as their supposed justification.

From Mild Smacking to Outright Torture and War: The Lie of "Well-Intentioned Violence": Some news stories that show how our society commonly accepts violence, and even brutal sadism, toward children. I also examine again the dynamics of the denial in which most adults engage, and I excerpt Miller's article, "Why Every Smack Is A Humiliation." At the end, I review some recent news stories about the Abu Ghraib abuse -- and discuss why the fact that children were also abused by coalition forces is an inevitable result of the mechanisms Miller has identified.

To Destroy the World: The Case of Saddam Hussein: Some further excerpts from Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, including Miller's consideration of the question, "What makes a person wish to destroy the world?," and a discussion of the childhood of Saddam Hussein, and how that background helps to explain the monster that he became.

To Destroy the World, II: The Case of Fallujah, and Ralph Peters: An article continuing the examination of the dynamics identified by Miller, as they are revealed in the devastation unleashed on Fallujah and in a column by Ralph Peters. I explain how Peters' article is close to a perfect clinical example of an eliminationist pathology bent on revenge for its sake, and offering only the most transparent of rationalizations as its superficial justification.

"Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill": Relying on a news account, I explore what happens when the desire for revenge is unleashed, and when soldiers begin to take actual "joy" in killing for its own sake. When the soldiers return home, the ongoing psychological damage often includes suicide and domestic violence -- yet the military fails to offer sufficient treatment for any of these problems, and hopes that they will simply go away if they are ignored. Of course, they won't, and often lead to tragic consequences.

Instilling Obedience and Denial, Continued: Another story about one of the U.S. soldiers involved in the Iraqi prison abuse story, and how he came from a military family and "knows how to follow instructions."

The Ignored Casualties of War: A news story demonstrating how the wounds of war kill, even far from the battlefield.

About Prison Abuse and Torture in the U.S., and in Iraq

The Denial Spreads -- and the Desire for Control: A discussion focusing on certain news accounts of the Iraqi prisoner abuse story: the reliance on the "I was only following orders" excuse; how a loss of autonomy, i.e., the lack of a genuine self, often leads people to pursue careers in the military or in the U.S. prison system; and how the child who was once neglected and/or abused frequently grows up seeking an environment where he can now be the one in control, and the one giving orders.

"They Don't Represent America"? Not Quite, Mr. President: An essay concerning Bush's false assertion that the Iraqi prison abuses "don't represent America," focusing on some materials from Stop Prisoner Rape that document many decades of horrific prison abuse, including some personal horror stories of prison torture and rape -- here in the United States.

The Deep Rot and Corruption in Our Nation's Soul: A further consideration of the abuse, rape and torture that are regularly inflicted on prisoners, both here in the United States and in Iraq, and the roots and significance of this routine violence and cruelty. I also discuss an unusually perceptive article by a man who was once a prison guard, and his experience with regard to the crucial question: "How will you treat those who are helpless before you?"

The Real Scandal: A further consideration of the commonplace abuses that occur in the U.S. prison system, excerpting a New York Times story about these issues. As I also explain, "the true scandal lies in the fact that, given the history of prison abuse and rape here in the United States, and given how the U.S. went about reconstituting the criminal justice and prison system in Iraq --and given the particular individuals they selected for positions of authority and power -- the current scandal was the logical and inevitable result."

The Horrors Against Women: A genuinely horrifying news story that sets forth the systematic abuse and torture inflicted on women, almost all of whom were entirely innocent, by the U.S. forces in Iraq, and the tragic results of such practices. This is an aspect of the prison abuse story that has been almost entirely neglected.

The Practice of National Self-Deception and Denial: A consideration of how the military investigation into prison abuses reveals profound systemic failures -- even as the government adamantly denies the very conclusions impelled by the evidence it sets forth.

The Causes and Dynamics of Suicide

The Suicide Taboo: A discussion of the dynamics underlying suicide, what it represents psychologically, and why it is so little understood, drawing on Miller's analysis of Sylvia Plath's writings, and concluding with a news story about the suicides in our military at present. I also offer some personal observations, based on my own experiences, about how to deal with someone you might know who is suffering from severe depression.

And Still More Death: Yet another story about a soldier's suicide.

The Dynamics of Suicide, Revisited: A detailed news story about the suicide of a young man at the age of 27, and how it tragically reveals all the mechanisms discussed by Miller in her work.

"Suck It Up": The Denial Continues -- and Kills Once More: A news story about the suicide of a New Orleans police officer after Hurricane Katrina, revealing the same tragic psychological dynamics.

Articles on the General Themes

When the Demons Come: A review of the basic principles identified in Alice Miller's work, a discussion of "hot saucing" and other currently popular and "acceptable" forms of child abuse, and how all these issues then manifest themselves in full-fledged atrocities on a much broader scale, focusing on events from the Vietnam War and their aftermath, including the ongoing, terrible psychological injuries that result.

When Life and Happiness Are Not Enough: The Tragedy of the Unborn Self: An analysis of a detailed Washington Post article about the roots of the neoconservatives' views and program, including the perspectives offered by William Buckley and Irving Kristol. I consider how their political program and their foreign policy prescriptions arise from certain psychological dynamics which prevent the formation of a self in the first instance -- and how they are then driven to seek for "mystery" and "meaning" to fill the emptiness in their lives, and how that quest can lead to destruction and death, as we are now witnessing.

The Indifference and Denial that Kill: A piece concerning a lengthy article about Iris Chang and her life and work, and her suicide at the age of 36, including a discussion of how the issues identified by Miller are involved.

The Apocalyptic Crusader: Redemption, Purification and a New World -- through Sacred Violence and Death: A discussion of some excerpts from James Carroll's work, focusing on the nature of the apocalyptic worldview -- including how that view is shared by both certain of our enemies and Bush and many of his supporters -- and a consideration of the roots and great dangers of this particular perspective.

The Truth that Lies Within, and the Truth that Many Will Not Face: The conclusion of my series, On Torture, explaining the vast chasm that separates the approach of a writer like Andrew Sullivan to this subject from mine, and a consideration of the ultimate roots of torture and violence in the numerous cruelties inflicted on children by the majority of parents, relying on Miller's work. All of the entries in the series, On Torture, together with brief descriptions of their contents, are listed here.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138913967583339192006-02-02T12:58:00.000-08:002006-02-02T12:59:27.596-08:00An Explanation, and the PitchPosted at Once Upon A Time.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138899138836362362004-05-23T08:49:00.000-07:002006-02-02T08:53:49.096-08:00The Horrors Against WomenVia The Guardian, we learn the following:
The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.

The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.

Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq". ...

Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in US custody since last year's invasion - have also been abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an Iraqi woman. ...

In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women detainees being abused has provoked revulsion and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights activists. Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks "Noor" is now dead. "We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house. The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been killed."

Honour killings are not unusual in Islamic society, where rape is often equated with shame and where the stigma of being raped by an American soldier would, according to one Islamic cleric, be "unbearable". The prospects for rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is hardly surprising that no women have so far come forward to talk about their experiences in US-run jails where abuse was rife until early January.

One of the most depressing aspects of the saga is that, unaccountably, the US military continues to hold five women in solitary confinement at Abu Ghraib, in cells 2.5m (8ft) long by 1.5m (5ft) wide. ...

Nevertheless, there remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be here. Like other Iraqi prisoners, all five are classified as "security detainees" - a term invented by the Bush administration to justify the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of the war on terror. US military officials will only say that they are suspected of "anti-coalition activities". ...

The women appear to have been arrested in violation of international law - not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, whose devastating report on human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners was delivered to the government in February but failed to ring alarm bells, says the problem lies with the system. "It is an absence of judicial guarantees," says Nada Doumani, spokesperson for the ICRC. "The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."

Relatives who gathered outside Abu Ghraib last Friday said it was common knowledge that women had been abused inside the jail. Hamid Abdul Hussein, 40, who was there hoping to see his brother Jabar freed, said former detainees who had returned to their home town of Mamudiya reported that several women had been raped. "We've know this for months," he said. "We also heard that some women committed suicide."

While the abuse may have stopped, the US military appears to have learned nothing from the experience. Swadi says that when she last tried to visit the women at Abu Ghraib, "The US guards refused to let us in. When we complained, they threatened to arrest us."
I look forward to hearing from the most dedicated defenders of Bush and our foreign policy that this isn't really all that bad, since Saddam Hussein was so much worse.

Frankly, anyone who finds comfort in that kind of argument and who offers it with any degree of seriousness is not much better, in principle, than Saddam Hussein or our enemies in the "War on Terror."

Certain people, including many of those in this administration and among its advocates, had better try to locate their moral center quickly before they lose it altogether, and for all time.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138897787856947202004-07-26T08:26:00.000-07:002006-02-02T08:32:06.673-08:00The Practice of National Self-Deception and DenialIn connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib (and at many other prisons in Iraq and elsewhere), you can now see the practice of denial raised to a refined art form, an art form that is painfully obvious in its transparency for anyone paying attention:
A new Army report concludes that military detention operations in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from poor training, haphazard organization and outmoded policies, but that these flaws did not directly contribute to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

The report, by Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, the Army inspector general, found no evidence that any systemic problems caused the abuses. Instead, his five-month inquiry blamed the "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate monitoring, supervision and leadership over those soldiers."

The 321-page report, the first of at least seven military inquiries into prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan to be released in the next few months, left many contentious issues still to be addressed by Army criminal investigators and the other inquiries. ...

The report is likely to inflame debate over how far up the chain of command culpability extends. Its findings contradict those of an earlier Army inquiry, by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who concluded military police at Abu Ghraib conducted "systemic and illegal abuse of detainees." A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in February found that "methods of ill treatment" were "used in a systematic way" by the United States military in Iraq.

Some Democrats privately accused the Army of delaying the release of the report until today so it would be overshadowed by news coverage of the final report of the commission looking into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, an accusation Army officials denied. The Army did not post a copy of General Mikolashek's report on its Web site until early this afternoon, and even Army public affairs personnel said they had difficulty gaining access to it.

Moreover, aspects of the inspector general report appear to contradict its central conclusion.

The report said that poor training in the handling of detainees increases the risk of abuse. A major finding of the report was that many military police and intelligence officials were poorly trained for their tasks in detention operations.

The report also found that many of the policies relating to detention operations were unclear, ambiguous and poorly carried out.

The report found that the potential for abuse increased when interrogations were conducted in "an emotionally charged environment by untrained personnel who are unfamiliar with the approved interrogation approach techniques." A major finding of the report was the military suffers from a shortage of experienced interrogators and interpreters.

Finally, the report concluded that "a command climate that encourages behavior at the harsher end of the acceptable range of behavior towards detainees may unintentionally increase the likelihood of abuse." In his testimony to the committee on Thursday, General Mikolashek said that at many detention centers, "It was a less than ideal command climate."
And about this purposeful denial of the obvious, the NYT editorialized as follows:
The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training.

Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly. It does grudgingly concede that "in some cases, abuse was accompanied by leadership failure at the tactical level," but the report absolves anyone of rank, in keeping with the investigation's spirit. The inspector general's staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but merely listed them. It based its findings on the comical observation that "commanders, leaders and soldiers treated detainees humanely" while investigators from the Pentagon were watching. And it made no attempt to find out who had authorized threatening prisoners with dogs and sexually humiliating hooded men, to name two American practices the Red Cross found to be common. The inspector general's see-no-evil team simply said it couldn't find those "approach techniques" in the Army field manual.

...

Mr. Warner has admirably resisted pressure from the White House and Republican leaders in Congress to stop his investigation. But he is showing signs of losing appetite for the fight. Mr. Warner held only one hearing in the last month - on the new report - and agreed to the ground rules on the Red Cross reports. We've always been skeptical that the Defense Department can investigate itself credibly, and now it's obvious that it plans to stick to the "few bad apples" excuse. The only way to learn why innocent Iraqis were tortured by American soldiers is a formal Congressional inquiry, with subpoena power.
I recommend that you read the entire editorial, which contains additional details about how this whitewash is being accomplished.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138842011290548982006-02-01T16:58:00.000-08:002006-02-01T17:01:10.986-08:00The Mythic Reality of War: Denying the Pain, and the DeathSome reflections about the coverage accorded to the injuries sustained by Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt, and about the "mythic reality" of war -- with a large assist from Chris Hedges.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138832920549872172004-12-20T14:21:00.000-08:002006-02-01T14:28:40.566-08:00The Endless Wounds of War, and a Remarkable Story of Hope[At the conclusion of one of the earlier essays referred to below, I wrote:
When the mechanisms of denial become deeply engrained mental habits and patterns of behavior, they will encompass the enemy -- or those "lesser" people we say we are "liberating" -- and finally the members of our own military.

These are some of the additional ways in which the denial continues -- and the horrors go on.

And the corpses pile up.
The fact that stories like that of Alan Babin receive so little attention from those who support our current foreign policy is additional proof of the mechanisms of denial that I discuss in "The Roots of Horror" series.]

Two articles today speak to one of the most revealing symptoms of the depths of the denial that permeates our culture generally, and the attitude of many Americans toward the war in Iraq in particular. In several essays from my series on "The Roots of Horror," I discussed the widespread denial of the death, destruction and suffering endured by Iraq civilians. That is deplorable and unforgivable, but not altogether surprising in view of the remarkable insularity of most Americans: pain suffered by others might be more real to them if it were covered regularly in our media, especially on television. But of course, it isn't for the most part.

What is truly extraordinary is the extent to which many Americans deny the pain and suffering endured by those Americans who are actually fighting the war that the hawks and their supporters lobbied for endlessly. That the Americans who engage in this particular form of denial include Bush and many of those in the administration is much worse than deplorable; it is profoundly contemptible, and it reveals the extent to which the actual lives of individual human beings have almost no significance at all to them.

Bob Herbert discusses this in his current column, which you should read in its entirety. Some excerpts:
Greg Rund was a freshman at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 when two students shot and killed a teacher, a dozen of their fellow students and themselves. Mr. Rund survived that horror, but he wasn't able to survive the war in Iraq. The 21-year-old Marine lance corporal was killed on Dec. 11 in Falluja.

The people who were so anxious to launch the war in Iraq are a lot less enthusiastic about properly supporting the troops who are actually fighting, suffering and dying in it. Corporal Rund was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Because of severe military personnel shortages, large numbers of troops are serving multiple tours in the war zone, and many are having their military enlistments involuntarily extended.

...

We don't have enough troops because we are fighting the war on the cheap. The Bush administration has refused to substantially expand the volunteer military and there is no public support for a draft. So the same troops head in and out of Iraq, and then back in again, as if through a revolving door. That naturally heightens their chances of being killed or wounded.

A reckoning is coming. The Army National Guard revealed last Thursday that it had missed its recruiting goals for the past two months by 30 percent. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, who heads the National Guard Bureau, said: "We're in a more difficult recruiting environment, period. There's no question that when you have a sustained ground combat operation going that the Guard's participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult."

Just a few days earlier, the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, told The Dallas Morning News that recruiting was in a "precipitous decline" that, if not reversed, could lead to renewed discussions about reinstatement of the draft.

...

As the war in Iraq goes more and more poorly, the misery index of the men and women serving there gets higher and higher. More than 1,300 have been killed. Many thousands are coming home with agonizing wounds. Scott Shane of The Times reported last week that according to veterans' advocates and military doctors, the already hard-pressed system of health care for veterans "is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war."

Through the end of September, nearly 900 troops had been evacuated from Iraq by the Army for psychiatric reasons, included attempts or threatened attempts at suicide. Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, an assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997, said, "I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war."
To appreciate how devastating the wounds suffered by our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan can be and how that suffering expands to include many additional people, you should read all of this article in The Washington Post. It's very difficult going but, as I have sometimes said before, attention must be paid to these issues.

The Post story tells the story of the very young Alan Babin:
Pfc. Alan Babin, like everyone else in his 41-man 82nd Airborne Division platoon, had spent the early morning hours of March 31, 2003, crouching beside an abandoned cement factory in Samawah, Iraq, watching the accruing light of day slowly sketch details of the landscape: shallow drainage ditches flanking a road, a clearing of sparse marsh grass, a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. On the other side of the river, minarets rose above the flat tops of boxy buildings. The soldiers had been forewarned that an Iraqi paramilitary group hiding among those buildings might be ready to fight. Shortly after the call to prayer blared from a mosque's loudspeaker, the tight rattle of AK-47 fire confirmed the prediction.

Alan was the platoon's lone medic, and he stayed near the center of the formation to run to anyone who might need him and his rucksack of medical supplies. Officers shouted into their radios, instructing infantrymen to adjust position in response to the sporadic influx of bullets, grenades and mortars. Pfc. Joe Heit, lying prone in a small clearing of grass, heard someone say that an enemy vehicle was approaching, and he rose to his knees to look.

Another call crackled through radio headsets: "Heit is hit!"

A bullet had shattered Heit's glasses, nicked the soft skin at the corner of his eye socket, punctured the cartilage of his ear and exited the back of his helmet. He was dazed and a little bloodied, but otherwise fine.

Alan had no way of knowing the injury was minor. ...

Alan ran about 15 feet across the clearing toward Heit before he himself was hit. The bullet cored him, blowing a hole in his gut roughly the size and shape of a football. It grazed his liver, caught the spleen, destroyed 90 percent of his stomach, nipped the pancreas and bored numerous holes in the coils of his small intestine. He spun on his heels and fell onto the seat of his pants, his legs stretched straight out in front of him. His back was propped against his rucksack, and his helmet slipped over his eyes. To some of the other soldiers catching a glimpse of him there, he appeared as a figure in casual repose, a catnapper with a dark stain spreading under his shirt.
In a series of events which is close to miraculous given his injuries and also a testament to the great advances in medical technology, Babin survived. But the ordeal he and his family have been through was agonizing, and it continues to be, every single day:
Of the more than 3,500 U.S. military casualties from Iraq treated at Walter Reed, none has spent more time there than Alan. In seven months, he underwent more than 70 surgeries that related to his still-gaping abdomen, his tracheotomy, the drainage shunt that ran from his brain down his neck and felt like a stiff vein to the touch. He fell under the spell of aggressive infections from a fugitive strain of bacteria that kept skipping from one bodily system to another. The burns on his arms and legs required a series of skin grafts. His compromised immune system opened the door to meningitis and a stroke.

The doctors in the surgical intensive care unit kept saying they hoped for reconstructive abdominal surgery and a full recovery -- walking, talking, eating. Then they'd add it was too early for definite answers.
It should also be noted that, in addition to the horrific physical and emotional costs, the financial demands imposed on families like Alan Babin's are incomprehensibly enormous. In the Babins' case, those expenses were offset in an amazing manner by the generosity of their friends and neighbors:
On this day, several of the friends waiting with Al Sr. at the Air Force base were the same ones who had spurred a fundraising effort that helped Al and Christy afford to travel to and from Washington on his policeman's salary. The town held carwashes and golf tournaments, appealing to Round Rock's patriotic instinct to help a kid everyone was calling a local hero. The regional home builders' association went so far as to build an addition onto the Babins' house -- a customized, wheelchair-accessible downstairs bedroom and bathroom that Alan could use as he gained the strength to walk on his own. They furnished it with a flat-screen TV and a SurroundSound stereo system. Not only did they install hardwood flooring in that room, but they extended it throughout the rest of the ground floor. When Al Sr. called Rosie in Washington to tell her about that surprise, his voice was choked with tears.
Even some very well-known people involved themselves in Alan's story:
People all over central Texas had heard about Alan through periodic local news reports and word of mouth, which spread mostly through the civic organizations such as the Lions Club, which Rosie had been deeply involved in before Alan's injury. In March, Rosie found herself on the phone with a familiar male voice: high-pitched, with a Texas twang that seemed to come straight from the nose.

"This is Ross Perot . . ." He had gotten the Babins' number through someone in the Texas governor's office who'd heard about Alan, and within days had arranged for Alan to see his doctors for a new CAT scan and MRIs. He then surprised the Babins with a customized van: a 2004 Ford Econoline with 57-inch raised side doors and a wheelchair lift. Soon, they negotiated a deal with the rehab center that let them take Alan home on weekends to try out the new bedroom that had been added onto the side of the house. Al Sr. would sleep outside the bedroom door on an inflatable mattress, so he'd be close in case anything went wrong. He and Rosie sometimes likened their lives to those of the parents of a newborn.

"It's not that bad," Al Sr. said after he had rolled off the mattress one morning.

He put a pot of coffee on in the kitchen before getting Alan ready for the day -- a body wash, a clean shave, a change of clothes. Things had settled into a routine. The scans performed by the doctors provided by Perot reconfirmed that the ventricles that carry cerebrospinal fluid in the brain were swollen, but the swelling didn't appear as significant as had been feared, and its effect on Alan's brain was unclear. The scans didn't rule out brain damage, but by the summer Alan was dispelling the worst of the family's fears on his own.

By early September, Alan was responding in his physical therapy sessions more quickly and was able to lift his fingers more easily on command, even though the effort still wiped him out. His lips, if he concentrated, began to form words, and he was almost to the point where he could push enough air through his throat to vocalize -- but not quite. Very slowly, he was becoming himself again.
I urge you to read the entire article -- and marvel at the ability of people of incredible strength and determination to withstand the most unimaginable suffering, and still survive. I doubt you will be able to read the Babins' story without at least a few tears coming to your eyes; I certainly couldn't.

And then wonder about the studied refusal of our leaders and of many hawks ever to discuss, or even to note, stories like this one. I could offer my own judgment of such people, but it would hardly be polite. Besides, I am certain you can draw the appropriate conclusions yourself -- as I am sure you will.

So read it. It would seem to be the very least we can do -- those of us who can walk, and talk, and pursue our dreams without requiring others to bathe us every day, and without needing others to be able to do...anything at all.

In the end, and despite all the suffering he has endured, the story of Alan Babin and his family is one of hope, and a testament to the ability of people to endure and struggle for more life, even when most people would have given up long ago. And such a story seems particularly appropriate for this time of year.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138831360900175742004-11-20T13:56:00.000-08:002006-02-01T14:06:33.350-08:00To Destroy the World, II: The Case of Fallujah, and Ralph PetersA few days ago, I quoted one expert on the Middle East as follows:
The insurgents don't need a safe haven like Falluja to run down the clock. "In fact, Maoist tactics would argue against trying to settle in a city and hold it at this stage of a weak insurgency, and for using the population as a sea to swim in," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It is absurd, Mr. Cordesman adds, to believe that destroying Falluja and then rebuilding it will win support for the Americans and the interim government. The American military said it has put aside $100 million for reconstructing the devastated city. But that does not solve the much bigger problem of unemployment, now at 60 percent nationwide. That is a motivating factor for young men joining the insurgency.

"How much money and aid effort does it really take," Mr. Cordesman said, "to jump-start an economy rather than provide welfare for Falluja?"
For those who still want to believe that completely destroying various parts of Iraq will end the "insurgency" -- when such destruction ensures, among other things, that growing numbers of ordinary Iraqis hate us virulently enough to do us grave harm -- consider just part of today's news [link no longer working]:
Insurgents battled American troops in the streets of Baghdad on Saturday, killing a U.S. soldier in an ambush and gunning down four government employees in signals that the guerrillas remain a potent force despite the fall of their stronghold of Fallujah. Nine Iraqis also died in fighting west of the capital.

In Fallujah, where U.S. Marines and soldiers are still battling pockets of resistance, insurgents waved a white flag of surrender before opening fire on U.S. troops and causing casualties, Marine spokesman 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert said Saturday without elaborating.

Al-Arabiya television quoted Iraqi guerrillas fleeing Fallujah as saying they had run out of ammunition and many fighters who stayed behind were badly wounded.

U.S. troops in the northern city of Mosul found the bodies of nine Iraqi soldiers Saturday, all shot in the back of the head. The military first reported that seven of the victims were beheaded, but a second statement issued later Saturday said those reports were false.

Four decapitated bodies found earlier in the week in Mosul have not been identified, the military said Saturday. American and Iraqi forces detained 30 suspected guerrillas overnight in Mosul, the U.S. military said. ...

But the widespread clashes in Baghdad -- which broke out early Saturday in at least a half-dozen areas -- and other areas of central and northern Iraq (news - web sites) underscored the perilous state of security in this country after 18 months of American military occupation -- and just more than two months before vital national elections.

One American soldier was killed and nine were wounded in an ambush in central Baghdad. Five other U.S. soldiers were injured in a car bombing on the road to Baghdad's airport -- considered by U.S. authorities among the most dangerous routes in the country. ...

The heaviest fighting in the capital took place in the Azamiyah district, a largely Sunni Arab quarter, where insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades and small weapons at a police station, killing one policeman, Iraqi officials said.

Anger among Sunnis rose after Iraqi troops backed by U.S. soldiers Friday raided the Abu Hanifa mosque in Azamiyah -- one of the most revered sites in Sunni Islam. Three worshippers were killed, witnesses said.

A number of U.S. armored vehicles were seen in flames, including a U.S. Army Humvee with what appeared to be a body in the driver's seat. Smoke rose from burning shops along a commercial street as U.S. helicopters circled overhead and ambulances raced to the scene. ...

A suicide driver blew up his vehicle shortly after noon at an intersection on Saadoun Street, a bustling commercial street. One Iraqi civilian was killed and another wounded in the blast, which sent black smoke rising above the city center and set several cars ablaze.

Gunmen chased down a vehicle carrying Ministry of Public Works employees on their way to work Saturday, opening fire and killing four of them, a ministry spokesman said. Amal Abdul-Hameed -- an adviser to the ministry in charge of urban planning -- and three employees from her office died, spokesman Jassim Mohammed Salim said.

To the west of the capital, U.S. troops clashed with insurgents Saturday near the local government building in Ramadi, and hospital officials said nine Iraqis were killed and five were wounded. ...

Elsewhere, saboteurs blew up an oil well near the northern city of Kirkuk -- the sixth such attack in the last 10 days, oil officials said. Insurgents regularly attack Iraq's oil infrastructure, which provides much of the revenue for reconstruction.

Clashes occurred between U.S. troops and insurgents in Qaim along the Syrian border and in Samarra, where mortar shells struck a U.S. base but caused no casualties. Five Iraqis were hurt in the Qaim fighting, the local hospital reported.

In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said gunmen killed an Iraqi police colonel and his driver as they headed south to Baghdad.
After reading all these details, we then happen upon this delusional passage, delivered straight from The Twilight Zone:
In New York, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations (news - web sites) said his government has "a good chance" of being able to hold the elections in January but might have to postpone them if violence escalates or Sunni Muslims decide to boycott.

Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie told a news conference Friday that "what happens in the next weeks will be important" in determining whether the insurgents can rally after losing their Fallujah base.
Yeah, "losing their Fallujah base" seems to have done the trick.

You truly have to wonder how much evidence it will take before the war planners begin to question the assumptions upon which they rely. How many people have to die for God's sake, before they start to grasp that what they are doing is not working? This is why I have said many, many times that the psychological imperatives that ultimately explain what is happening in Iraq are beyond and inaccessible to reason. There is no number of deaths that will satisfy these monsters without consciences.

All of which reminds of a profoundly repellent column by neocon hawk extraordinaire, Ralph Peters. There is a great deal that could be said about this piece of absolutely sickening garbage, especially in light of the fact that it is an almost perfect clinical example of an eliminationist pathology of immense, unreasoning hatred. So much evil concentrated in one newspaper column is an achievement rare to behold. So I will confine myself to noting one aspect of Peters' hate-filled rant, as captured in these excerpts:
We should move against Fallujah immediately -- with the support of Iraq's interim prime minister. We have an ideal window for action while our enemies, from al Qaeda and the French to al-Jazeera and the BBC, are bewildered by their failure to dictate our election's outcome. Their vicious attempts to change our government failed. Now they're wondering what on earth to do.

While they're scrambling, we should be shooting. ...

And when the president gives the order to finish the job in Fallujah, the Washington civilians need to get out of the way of our Marines and soldiers. Send the lawyers on a Caribbean cruise. Our troops know how to do this job. We need to trust them.

We must not be afraid to make an example of Fallujah. While we always seek to fight humanely, the most humane thing we can do in that tormented city is just to win, to burn out the plague of fanaticism and prove to Iraq's people that the forces of terror will not be allowed to enslave them.

We need to demonstrate that the United States military cannot be deterred or defeated. If that means widespread destruction, we must accept the price. Most of Fallujah's residents -- those who wish to live in peace -- have already fled. Those who remain have made their choice. We need to pursue the terrorists remorselessly.

That means killing. While we strive to obey the internationally recognized laws of war (though our enemies do not), our goal should be to target the terrorists and insurgents so forcefully that few survive to raise their hands in surrender. We don't need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement. We need terrorists dead in the dust. And the world needs to see their corpses.

Let potential terrorist recruits get a good, hard look at their probable fate. And let them see a U.S. Marine standing proudly and fearlessly in the center of Fallujah. ...

Many other difficult tasks lie ahead ahead, from helping the Iraqis conduct their country's first free national elections, through assisting the Afghans as they consolidate their remarkable progress, to hunting down Islamic terrorists wherever they go to ground.

We can do it. And the American people know it. They just said so.

Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it. We need to demonstrate our strength of will to the world, to show that there is only one possible result when madmen take on America.
Note the number of extraordinary details in this one piece: our enemies apparently include all "the French" and "the BBC" (and al Jazeera as well) -- so I assume they, too, will be hunted down and eliminated in the near future, since Peters lists them along with Al Qaeda; "We don't need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement" -- no matter how well-founded in fact (and videotape) those complaints might be, and no matter how counterproductive and self-destructive our behavior might have been; and so on.

But the most striking aspect of Peters' opening of his rotted soul is his entire perspective: "We must not be afraid..."; "We need to demonstrate ..."; "We must accept the price..."; "We can do it..." It's all about us -- despite the fact that we invaded a country that didn't threaten us, and despite the fact that we are killing an unconscionable number of innocent civilians. And regardless of the fact that our actions create more terrorists by the minute. Never mind any of that. We must show them that we mean business now! We must demonstrate that we can kill every single goddamned one of them, even if we have to completely destroy an entire country to do so.

And even when that inevitably will mean that more terrorists will take up arms against us, and try to do us much more significant harm next time. None of that matters to Peters. It's all about us -- which means it's all about him.

This is as pure an example of the deeply destructive mechanism identified by Alice Miller as you are ever likely to find (from Breaking Down the Wall of Silence):
This year [1991], another war has come to an end. Once again, it is clear that even the most efficient weapons cannot eliminate hatred. Even the most sophisticated weapons are powerless against the will of one single individual who would not hesitate to destroy the world so long as he could achieve his goal--to revenge himself for his repressed injuries, to amass power, govern, and take possession of the world around him, all to avoid his feelings of pain.

One might expect that the millions of people who, thanks to television, watched the events of the Gulf War unfold would be eager to understand the causes of this urge to destroy. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true, at least in the public domain. Neither politicians, experts of various sorts, nor even the majority of journalists asked the essential question: What makes a person wish to destroy the world? ...

We must acknowledge what can already be acknowledged, in order to prevent the destruction and self-destruction of humankind. The oils wells burning in Kuwait confront us inescapably with the sad truth that technology alone is not sufficient to protect us from the consequences of denied, and thus uncontrolled, emotions. Without facing up to their origins--the production of hatred in childhood--we will be unable to resolve such hatred and put an end to the work of devastation. ...

Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom. People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they have are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin, Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter arguments. As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.
There is still more from Miller in that earlier entry.

Men like Ralph Peters reveal the truth of Miller's observations, including this statement: "The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason." Reason did not lead them to their conclusions, and no amount of evidence will dissuade them from the course they are determined to follow.

Give up trying to reason with them. They will stop when the insurmountable accumulation of failures -- and of deaths -- finally grinds their efforts to a halt and not one moment before, just as the catastrophe of Vietnam demonstrated.

Just pray that they don't destroy the world before we reach that point. Pray as hard as you can.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138829914563604412004-07-18T13:30:00.000-07:002006-02-01T13:55:48.333-08:00"Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill"In a number of essays in this series, I have talked about the emotional dynamics underlying the phenomenon now amply and horrifyingly documented in the following article.

Here are some extended excerpts from an LA Times piece [link no longer working]:
NAJAF, Iraq (news - web sites) -- Tucked behind a gleaming machine gun, Sgt. Joseph Hall grins at his two companions in the Humvee.

"I want to know if I killed that guy yesterday," Hall says. "I saw blood spurt from his leg, but I want to be sure I killed him."

The vehicle goes silent as the driver, Spc. Joshua Dubois, swerves around asphalt previously uprooted by a blast.

"I'm confused about how I should feel about killing," says Dubois, who has a toddler back home. "The first time I shot someone, it was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever felt."

Dubois turns back to the road. "We talk about killing all the time," he says. "I never used to talk this way. I'm not proud of it, but it's like I can't stop. I'm worried what I will be like when I get home."

The men aren't Special Forces soldiers. They're just ordinary troops with the Army's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment serving their 14th month in Iraq, much of it in daily battles. In 20 minutes, they will come under attack.

Many GIs and Army psychiatrists say these constant conversations about death help troops come to grips with the trauma of combat. But mental health professionals within and outside the military point to the chatter as evidence of preventable anguish.

Soldiers are untrained, experts say, for the trauma of killing. Forty years after lessons learned about combat stress in Vietnam, experts charge that avoidable psychological damage goes unchecked because military officials don't include emotional preparation in basic training.

Troops, returning home with untreated and little-understood mental health issues, put themselves and their families at risk for suicide and domestic violence, experts say. Twenty-three U.S. troops in Iraq took their lives last year, according to the Defense Department -- an unusually high number, one official acknowledged.

On patrol, however, all that is available is talk.

"Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill," Hall says. "It's like it pounds at my brain. I'll figure out how to deal with it when I get home."

Home is the wrong place for soldiers to deal with combat experiences, some experts say.

"It's complete negligence," says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired psychology instructor at West Point who trains law enforcement officers and special operations soldiers.

"The military could train soldiers to talk about killing as easily as they train them to pull the trigger. But commanders are in denial. Nobody wants to accept the blame for a soldier who comes home a wreck for doing what his country asked him to do," he said.

The emotional and psychological ramifications of killing are mostly unstudied by the military, defense officials acknowledge.

"The idea and experience of killing another person is not addressed in military training," says Col. Thomas Burke, director of mental health policy for the Defense Department. "Training's intent is to re-create battle, to make it an automatic behavior among soldiers."

...

Much of the military's research on killing and battle stress began after World War II, when studies revealed that only a small number of troops -- as few as 15% -- fired at their adversaries on the battlefield.

Military studies suggested that troops were unexpectedly reluctant to kill. Military training methods changed, Grossman and others say, to make killing a more automatic behavior.

Bull's-eye targets used in basic training were replaced with human-shaped objects. Battlefield conditions were reproduced more accurately, Burke says. The goal of these and other modifications was to help soldiers react more automatically.

The changes were effective. In the Vietnam War, 95% of combat troops shot at hostile fighters, according to military studies.

Veterans of the Vietnam War also suffered some of the highest levels of psychological damage -- possibly as many as 50% of combat forces suffered mental injury, says Rachel MacNair, an expert on veteran psychology. Most notable among the injuries was post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition contributing to violent outbursts years after soldiers leave battlefields.

"The more soldiers ignore their emotions and behave like trained machines rather than thinking people, the more you invite PTSD," says Dr. David Spiegel with the Stanford School of Medicine.

Military officials say there have been changes in treating psychological trauma since Vietnam. ...

The men of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's Alpha and Charlie companies are resting and playing cards in the shade of a staircase here, and the talk turns to killing.

"I enjoy killing Iraqis," says Staff Sgt. William Deaton, 30, who killed a hostile fighter the night before. Deaton has lost a good friend in Iraq. "I just feel rage, hate when I'm out there. I feel like I carry it all the time. We talk about it. We all feel the same way."

Sgt. Cleveland T. Rogers, 25, avoids dwelling on his actions.

"The other day an Iraqi guy was hit real bad, he was gonna die within an hour, but he was still alive and he started saying, 'Baby, baby,' telling me he has a kid," Rogers says. "I mentioned it to my guys after the mission. It doesn't bother me. It can't bother me. If it was the other way around, I'm sure it wouldn't bother him."

...

Grossman says training troops to have therapeutic discussions about killing is "not that hard." His curriculum, used by law enforcement officers and in the wake of traumas such as school shootings, focuses on mental and physical techniques to consciously manage anxiety and other emotional reactions to killing.

"To make killing instinctual, rather than conscious, is inviting pathological, destructive behavior," Grossman says. "We have to give soldiers a vocabulary to talk through emotions and teach them not to be embarrassed by troubling feelings."

Grossman says his suggestions have been overlooked by military commanders who are uncomfortable with the emotionally destructive aspects of military service. ...

"During the heat of the battle the adrenaline is such you don't really think about it," says Capt. Brandon Payne, 28. "Once that adrenaline wears off, though, it gets tough. Some kids, it rolls right off their backs. Some, it's like they break down a little more each day."

Payne is as conflicted as his troops about making sense of war. Reconciling duty with ethics, he says, seems more complicated in Iraq.

"I'm a Christian. I feel I'm saving my soldiers' lives by destroying as many enemy as I can. But at the end of each day, I pray to God. I worry about my soul," he says.

"Every time a door slams, I flinch. I'm hoping it will just go away when I get home."
It won't "just go away." This kind of lasting emotional damage is still another reason, among many others, why war should always, always, always be the very last resort -- and not the first. And it is an unanswerable objection to so-called "optional" wars -- at least, it should be unanswerable to anyone who is remotely humane and civilized. I can also confirm one part of the above story from my own experience. I have known a number of Vietnam War veterans in my life, well over ten as I review them in my mind. Almost without exception, they have exhibited severe emotional problems (of which most of them were also very painfully aware themselves), and the memories of what they experienced have never left them. But they will almost never talk about the horrors they witnessed with anyone, which is yet another part of the problem.

And from an earlier post, here is a very brief summation of part of the mechanism lying beneath the psychology of a soldier who feels "exhilaration" about killing or who "enjoys" it:
By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."
It is one thing for a soldier to have to kill genuine enemies who are trying to kill him -- although even in that circumstance, one might expect a reaction along the lines that a necessary action was taken, together with an acknowledgment that it is nonetheless tragic in a more general sense that lives were lost (particularly since, in this case, there is no compelling reason of national self-defense for us to be in Iraq in the first place). Killing another human being should be hard, and not automatic, even when it is absolutely necessary and, I would submit, even in war. If it is not, you practically guarantee that you will end up with ex-soldiers with emotional problems that will inevitably cripple them for life.

But whenever a soldier feels any kind of pleasure or even joy in killing, you can be sure that some underlying emotional dynamic has been tapped into -- along the lines discussed by Alice Miller in her work. And in that case, it is absolutely necessary to address those underlying issues, if lasting damage is to be avoided. Given the fact that the military -- just as is true of our society in general -- studiously avoids all these issues, since the great majority of people find them far too painful to deal with, it is hardly surprising that a significant number of soldiers commit suicide (as I discussed in The Suicide Taboo, and that discussion also analyzes the military's great reluctance to acknowledge suicide at all, since it supposedly represents some terrible kind of "weakness"), or inflict horrendous violence on family members (and/or others) after they return home.

Avoidance of crucial psychological issues comes at a great price -- and one would think that the mounting costs of all kinds would cause both our military and our culture more generally finally to take note of the ultimate causes of these kinds of problems. But as I have often noted before in this lengthy series on "The Roots of Horror," the human capacity for denial is unending, even when the cost is tremendous loss of life and an infinite amount of suffering.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138749460091169242006-01-31T15:16:00.000-08:002006-02-01T09:36:01.503-08:00The Limits of Politics, I: The Roots of the Politics of PowerPosted at Once Upon A Time.

AND: See Bush's Renewed Declaration of War on Dissent.

ALSO: Bush and the Legions of the Damned.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138734900955357892004-02-17T11:09:00.000-08:002006-01-31T11:17:27.163-08:00THE ROOTS OF HORROR: Instilling Obedience and Denial in ChildhoodAs I indicated in an entry last week, just at the time I became so deeply discouraged about the state of public debate (yet again), I had been about to begin a series of articles concerning a subject which is almost entirely neglected -- a subject which is crucial to understanding the precise manner in which world events are now playing out, and which is indispensable to grasping why people cling to ideas and theories which facts repeatedly demonstrate are incorrect and, what is much worse than being merely false, are profoundly destructive.

I have decided that I will go ahead with these posts -- although I do not delude myself that they will be widely read, or much discussed. For reasons which will become clearer later in this discussion, this failure to pay attention to these issues, and the stubborn refusal to acknowledge their demonstrable importance and explanatory power, are in themselves confirmation of the crucial nature of these ideas. For the majority of people, certain identifications -- no matter how well-documented and how strongly proven -- are simply too dangerous to be countenanced. And thus the tragedy of world history is reenacted over and over, and into our own times.

Before proceeding to my primary subject, I want to note two recent stories which reveal the reasons for my profound depression about the lack of seriousness in current public debate. In fact, and to be blunt about it to the point of rudeness, my reaction is much more than depression, sadness and discouragement: it is, in a word, disgust. The first story is the one which led to my recent outburst: the one concerning John Kerry's alleged adultery. It should be noted that there is an element of this "controversy" which is genuinely worthy of Pirandello, the playwright noted for his blurring of the lines between art, reality and theatrical artifice. What is reality? What is pretense? Who can discern the difference? Is there any difference worth noting? Those are some of the questions that Pirandello placed at the center of his work.

And with the Kerry story, Pirandello has fully entered our political discourse (although one could convincingly argue that the writer had taken over the reins of our public discussion long before). Note that the original story on Drudge did not concern the actual story itself: Drudge's story was the story about the story. In other words, Drudge was reporting on the reporting allegedly being conducted by certain news organizations. Subsequently, certain of those news organizations denied they were pursuing the story at all -- but in all cases, the news organizations in question had not yet carried the story. If they were pursuing it, they had not yet found anything worth reporting.

But Drudge reported the "story about the story" nonetheless, confident in the belief that the story would soon become about the underlying "story" itself. And so it did. With barely a blink, the story focused on whether the underlying allegations were true -- whether Kerry in fact had had an affair. But again, please note that no one had even made such an allegation yet, and no news organization had reported it. This is media irresponsibility carried to the edge of dementia -- when one individual (albeit with a huge readership) can literally create a "controversy" out of absolutely nothing, out of a meditation, as it were, on the nature of media considering whether to report a story that another news outlet might have considered reporting if only they could have discovered facts to support the allegations in question, if only...

And the elements that are entirely dispensable in this deplorable exercise are facts and, of equal significance, relevance. In the final analysis, even if the allegations had been true, they are irrelevant to Kerry's policy views, and what he would be likely to do if ever elected President. That is all that ought to concern us, but in the current media climate, that is precisely the last subject that anyone cares to address. (There are certain circumstances under which Kerry's "affair," if it had ever occurred, might have conceivably been relevant, depending on how Kerry himself dealt with the charges -- but those circumstances were not present here.) For the resulting continued deterioration in the nature of public discussion of supposedly "important" issues, I hold everyone responsible who discussed, or continues to discuss, the "merits" of this story at all. It deserves only to be ignored entirely.

The other current "controversy" that I want to mention briefly is the one about Bush's National Guard service. The strongest case for its relevance now is that, in the recent past and continuing into the present, Bush has misrepresented his service during the Vietnam years -- that he portrays himself as a man who was willing to serve his country, and that he did his duty and allegations to the contrary are scrurrilous and not to be credited. According to the view of certain of Bush's critics, Bush thus seeks to divert attention from the fact that he unfairly took advantage of the privileges conferred by his family connections, and his family's power and wealth. And that may well be true.

But if one wants to make the case that Bush is not worthy of respect, or that his reputation as a man of "honor" and "service" is not merited, or that (in my own view) he is worthy of the deepest condemnation, there is a much simpler way, which almost no one appears to want to make. Or, to be more precise, people's sense of moral priorities appears to be damaged beyond repair at this point.

Consider the following. It is now indisputably clear that Iraq presented no serious threat to the security of the United States. In addition, it is obvious from any number of news reports that the Bush administration had decided to invade and occupy Iraq regardless of whether that nation represented any threat to us at all. The only remaining justification for the invasion of Iraq is the Utopian delusion -- the "reverse domino theory" by means of which we will "democratize" the Middle East, the fatal defects of which I have examined in detail. In subsequent parts of this series, I shall discuss why people continue to cling to this dangerous delusion, despite overwhelming evidence as to its falsity and its potential for uncontrollable and deeply damaging consequences.

In other words -- and this is the central and completely damning point -- Bush went to war for no reason connected to the demonstrable, genuine security interests of the United States. And in the course of that war and in the subsequent occupation, at least 540 Americans have already died (to say nothing of those Americans who have been horribly injured, and whose numbers appear to be criminally underreported) -- and without doubt, more Americans will die in the coming months (and years, most probably). To put the matter plainly and simply, which appears to be the one thing that almost no one is willing to do: Bush condemned innocent Americans to death for no justifiable reason.

And what makes it even worse is that these innocent Americans, the ones who are now dead, are precisely those Americans who had volunteered to fight for the defense of their country. But most of them probably did not volunteer to take part in deluded, doomed attempts at "nation building," attempts of the kind that Bush himself once derided (before he decided that such campaigns might be useful in pursuit of other political aims). If one is looking for a reason to damn Bush as he now deserves, what more reason could one possibly need? I will repeat the point, to drive it home:

Our own President condemned innocent Americans, those Americans who had volunteered to fight for the defense of this nation, to death for no good reason, and for no reason connected to the legitimate requirements of our nation's security.

If you want a reason to damn someone to the lowest rung of hell, I do not know what other reason you could possibly require. In the face of this truly monstrous fact, who gives a damn what Bush may or may not have done thirty years ago in connection with his National Guard service? Yet again, this reveals how deeply distorted our media coverage has become (a phenomenon which carries over in spades into the world of weblogs) -- people are faced with a hugely significant fact, which they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge or deal with, and instead spend endless amounts of time dealing with issues which are tangential at best, and probably irrelevant, even if one could ever ascertain a full version of the facts, which one can't.

I have discussed these two stories to make one point above all: in our current cultural climate, people will do almost anything to distract themselves from the issues and the facts that ought to matter. The great majority of people spend almost all their time discussing issues about which it is close to impossible to obtain a complete version of the facts, issues which are largely irrelevant in any case -- when facts which are staring them in the face, and which carry unmistakably significant implications, are completely ignored.

If you have followed me along thus far, I think you might agree that this phenomenon is one worthy of note. One might well wonder at this point: what could possibly explain this studied refusal to acknowledge what is staring one in the face? Why would so many people be so resistant to facing what is plainly right in front of them? And the majority of people will not even acknowledge the existence of this problem: they will not admit that they are ignoring a crucial topic that is lying in plain view.

Nonetheless, they are. When the world continues to hurtle to what may well be its destruction, and when people refuse to even acknowledge what is happening, you are witnessing a worldwide version of The Big Lie: the lie is so huge, that its very size prevents people from identifying what it is right there in front of them, screaming the fact of its existence in their face.

Now I will share with you a story from last week. It is not a story that received much notice -- and that lack of attention is the most significant confirmation of what I have been saying, as will become clear. Here is the story, in its entirety [link no longer working]:
RICE, Texas - A fifth grader with a rare deformity says two teachers put him on display for a science lesson.

Robert Will Harris has Stahl's ear, which causes points to form on the ears. He and family say two fourth-grade teachers at his school used his deformity to teach a lesson in genetics.

The boy says the teachers pulled him from his class twice in one day and took him to their classrooms to show his ears.

Officials with the Rice Independent School District acknowledge the incidents happened, but say the teachers meant no harm. They say the teachers were simply trying to teach genetics and family traits.

The family says the boy's ears have nothing to do with genetics. His parents say they no longer want their son used for show and tell.
Several aspects of this exceedingly brief report deserve the most serious attention -- and as I indicated, that very brevity is central to its significance. First, note that the adults involved -- who were teachers, keep in mind -- insist that they "meant no harm," as if that insistence on their "innocent" motives exonerates them of responsibility, and blame.

Second, and much, much more important: please note what is not mentioned in this story. How do you think these incidents affected the child? Robert Will Harris is in elementary school -- and he is probably no older than nine or ten. How do you think a ten-year-old would feel about being used for "a lesson in genetics," because of "his deformity"?

Despite my very deep revulsion at the unnecessary deaths in Iraq, the deaths of both American soldiers and of innocent Iraqis, I have to say that this may well be the most deeply disturbing and most disgusting story I have read in the last year. And I say that for the following reason: it is society's refusal to acknowledge the profound damage that is inflicted on innocent children in innumerable ways, every single day, that is the deepest root of most, if not all, of the evils that confront us today.

Most adults reading this news story will probably react by saying something on the order of the following: "Well, yes, that is terrible, but after all, all of us are exposed to cruelty as children. And we all survived, and we're okay. It's just part of life. So it's not that bad. Remember, too, that cruelty is part of life, so it's probably just as well that children learn what life is truly like at an early age."

And that is the other part of this overwhelmingly significant and largely ignored problem -- this denial by almost all adults of the pain that was inflicted on them as children. This is the manner in which adults demonstrate how disconnected they are from their own pasts, how they deny and become dissociated from their own souls, and how they become so willing to pass on unthinking cruelty to children of the next generation.

And this is also why people are willing to cling to political beliefs and ideologies which lead to nothing but destruction and death, as we shall begin to see in the next parts of this series.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138635677792609752004-05-09T07:32:00.000-07:002006-01-30T07:41:47.370-08:00THE ROOTS OF HORROR: The Dynamics of Suicide, RevisitedIn several earlier posts about suicide and its underlying dynamics, I referred to Alice Miller's discussion of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and her mother. Miller makes a number of crucial points, which are applicable to many families:
Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter's life, she never would have published the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her daughter would have been too painful to bear. ...

If a sensitive child like Sylvia Plath intuits that it is essential for her mother to interpret the daughter's pain only as the consequence of a picture being damaged and not as a consequence of the destruction of her daughter's self and its expression--symbolized in the fate of the pastel--the child will do her utmost to hide her authentic feelings from the mother. The letters are testimony of the false self she constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar). With the publication of the letters, her mother erects an imposing monument to her daughter's false self.

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Many parents are like Sylvia's mother. They desperately try to behave correctly toward their child, and in their child's behavior they seek reassurance that they are good parents. The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child--well behaved and dutiful--of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.
As I commented: "And that is the most important, the absolutely crucial point: suicide is the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Most people do not grasp this at all." The balance of the earlier essay discusses how these mechanisms are now playing out with regard to many of our troops who have served in Iraq -- and the mechanisms include remarkable, but completely predictable, levels of denial on the part of the surviving family members.

And today, I came across this story [link no longer working]-- which shows, yet again, how these dynamics reveal themselves. As you read the following, notice the clues: the mother's desperate need to find an external agency to blame for this tragedy; the obvious distance that existed between the mother and her son (evidenced by, among other things, the mother not even knowing about the earlier suicide attempt); and the mother's clear, but unadmitted, guilt. On the basis of the mechanisms identified so convincingly in Miller's books, I can guarantee you that the ultimate causes of this tragedy do not lie in any of the events that immediately preceded this tragic death. They lie deep in the son's childhood, and in the family dynamics that shaped him:
HARWICH - Four years after the suicide of her 27-year-old son, Barbara Felton is still angry.

She's angry at her son, Mark Christopher Felton, for ending his life and scarring hers. But mostly she's furious with her son's friend for leaving an unlocked shotgun where her son could find it and use it during a moment of despondency.

"I told my counselor, 'I like being angry,'" Felton said. It not only feels good, the elementary-school computer teacher says, it's helping her do good.

Felton is among a group of Cape women who are converging on Washington, D.C., today for another Million Mom March to protest gun violence in America.

"This is what I feel I can do," Felton said during an interview at her house in Harwich. She promised during her son's eulogy in May 2000 that she would march in the new gun protest known as the Million Mom March.

The first march, held on Mother's Day 2000, came too soon after Mark's death for Felton to participate. The second march, occurring today, calls on Congress to renew a ban on assault weapons. The existing ban expires Sept. 13. ...

According to a fact sheet prepared by the organization, on average a person is killed by a gun every 18 minutes in America, giving the United States the highest rate of deaths from gunfire in the industrialized world.

The fact sheet also includes suicide statistics: It says that 1,273 children or teens have committed suicide with a firearm each year over the last 10 years. Each year more than 145 gun-related suicide victims were younger than 15. ...

What bothers Felton and other marchers is how quickly a suicidal idea can turn into reality if a gun is handy.

The afternoon that Mark committed suicide, he had just found out that a co-worker to whom he felt romantically attached was moving back in with an old boyfriend. He apparently took this move as a rejection, Felton said, and was thrown into despair.

After leaving his job at a Barnstable elementary school, where he was an aide for a student with special needs, Mark went to the apartment of a friend with whom he'd gone target shooting in the past.

According to Felton, the friend wasn't home, but the apartment was unlocked and guns, including a shotgun, were "laying around."

Felton's voice fills with fury when she talks about the guns.

"I don't believe this suicide was planned. I believe it was spur of the moment," she said. "I will never get over my anger at this negligent S.O.B. who left the apartment open with the guns available for anyone to get them."

In fact, Felton encouraged the district attorney's office to prosecute Mark's friend under a relatively new law that criminalizes unlawful storage of weapons. As a result, the friend was ordered to perform community service in a clinic for head injury patients. The case was continued without a finding, which means that if the young man did not commit another crime the case would be closed after a year.

In many ways, the prosecution helped Felton deal with her own despair. ...

Felton said she forgives Mark. "I don't believe this suicide was planned," she said, pointing out that the week before he died he bought two kayaks, one for himself and one for a long-term girlfriend. ...

But Mark also suffered from clinical depression and his dose of Paxil, a medication used to treat depression, had been increased right before his suicide, Felton said.

Looking back, it seems Mark struggled long before being diagnosed. His high school years were lackluster academically. While he loved Dean Junior College, the two-year Franklin college where he discovered sports broadcasting, he left the University of Utah without earning a four-year degree.

Moving back home with his mother, he discovered a niche in education and child care. He was a camp counselor and a special education assistant for a child with Down syndrome.

"People liked Mark," Felton said.

He didn't always like himself. After Mark's death, Felton found out from his girlfriend and a colleague that Mark had attempted suicide at least once before, by trying to suffocate himself while running a car engine. When that hadn't worked, he'd swallowed a bunch of over-the-counter medicines, only to throw up. ...

Felton said she wishes she'd known about the earlier attempt. And she believes that if the guns had not been available in his friend's apartment, Mark might have taken the time to think or seek out people for help.
As someone who has suffered from terrible depressions in my own life, I cannot tell you how angry Mrs. Felton's remarks make me. Certainly, I understand the deep agony and pain that she feels, but I still find it difficult to overlook certain of her comments -- particularly when they so clearly reveal the causes that led to this tragedy.

For example, it is rather immaterial at this point whether she "forgives" her son, and to talk about it in this manner reveals that she deeply blames him for taking his life, as if he hasn't already paid the greatest price possible. By implication, she also blames him for the emotions which led to his actions. But Mark is dead, he doesn't exactly give a damn about her forgiveness at this point. And to say that the suicide "wasn't planned" -- when he had previously tried to kill himself, when she was completely ignorant about that earlier attempt, and when he had been diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression -- and to justify her belief that it "wasn't planned" because he had just bought two kayaks, reveals a desperation to avoid the obvious that is painful to see, and verging on the ludicrous.

But this shows the lengths to which people will go to avoid facing profoundly uncomfortable truths. For Mark's mother to face the truth, she would have to be willing to set aside the obvious mythology that she has built up about her family relationships. Mrs. Felton ought to recognize that, in the final analysis, she didn't pull the trigger; her son did. In that sense, she is not responsible for her son's death.

But here is what she, and every other parent who engages in this kind of psychological dishonesty (which is the majority of them), is responsible for: she is responsible for not recognizing the enormous emotional distance that clearly existed between her and her son, and probably between all the members of this family. She is responsible for not seeing that her son probably had always felt unable to reveal his true feelings to his mother or to anyone else. Remember Miller's comment about Plath: "Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person."

Those words probably describe precisely how Mark Felton felt throughout most of his life, beginning in his childhood. And that is one of the major causes for his death. And his mother is responsible for refusing to admit, or it appears even honestly to seek for, the truth. Instead, she pretends that gun control laws would have solved this problem, and searches for any semi-plausible outside source to blame, rather than looking inward. It is remarkable to see that her search for an external villain even led her to encourage the prosecution of Mark's friend, a move that Mark himself might well have condemned.

This is the kind of family tragedy that is enacted every day, in countless families, only usually without this particularly horrible tragic ending. But this kind of emotional distance, the absence of the belief that one may communicate one's genuine feelings and not be "blamed" for them, and this sort of denial are common to almost every family. One of the results is the sort of deep, unreachable emotional numbness that can be seen in so many people today.

In these ways, too, the denial goes on...and the tragedies continue. And people still refuse to see the truth, even when it is screaming in their faces.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138635091188423232004-05-09T07:23:00.000-07:002006-01-30T07:31:31.210-08:00Instilling Obedience and Denial, ContinuedFrom an entry of mine only several days ago, about the obedience-denial mechanism so crucial to the military and prison command structure:
With regard to the comments that [Jeremy] Sivits would only have done this if "he was ordered to do it," one would think that people would not be so eager to fall back on the "I was only following orders" excuse, given that excuse's historical provenance and uses in the twentieth century. That observation, of course, depends on people's knowing the relevant history and understanding its significance, which many of these people might not. (The article is also disturbingly similar to all those stories about the "boy next door" who turns out to have been a serial killer -- when all his neighbors talk about what "a nice, sweet, gentle boy" he was. All that such stories reveal is how unperceptive the majority of people are about psychology, and how they allow themselves to be deceived by superficial appearances.)

The more important point is that there is a certain kind of person -- a person with a strong, genuine sense of self, who knows what he thinks is right and wrong, what is permissible and humane and decent, and what is not -- who, when ordered to commit acts which he considers to be monstrous, will simply say, with full and absolute moral conviction, "No, I will not do that." And he will also be prepared to suffer the consequences.

But it appears, not surprisingly, that not too many individuals of that kind are to be found in the military, or in our domestic prison system. I should immediately state that I do not believe that most of those in the military are capable of the kind of torture and abuse that appears to have gone on at Abu Ghraib, or even a majority of them. But neither is this kind of behavior that unusual in my view, and the American public -- aided and abetted by the equivocations that now flood over us hourly, from every source -- is now engaged in a dangerous exercise in denial. It is dangerous precisely because it denies important, and crucial, facts -- and thus makes the likelihood of the repetition of such horrors in the future that much more likely.

I say it is "not surprising" that many persons who will follow orders -- even when those orders may concern horrific kinds of behavior -- are to be found in our military for many reasons. Some of those reasons have been explained in my series on "The Roots of Horror." Here is a description of how these mechanisms work in part . ...

Note the elements that are present here, and how easily adaptable these elements are to the military, or to a prison system: idealization of the authority figure, which figure can be the military itself and/or a commanding officer; a loss of autonomy or, in other words, the lack of a genuine self - which means that "self" can be filled in with "values" provided by those in authority; and, most important of all, the total and absolute premium placed on obedience, as the greatest of the virtues. This is the kind of person who will never say "no" when confronted with a monstrous order -- and it is precisely for that reason that many such individuals are attracted to this sort of command structure in the first place.
Given the dynamics identified by Alice Miller, it was all too easy to predict precisely what is revealed in this story:
HYNDMAN, Pa. (AP) — The first U.S. soldier to face a court martial in connection with the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison grew up in a military family and "knows how to follow instructions," his father says.

Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits, 24, was trained as a truck mechanic, not a prison guard, and would have gotten in trouble had he not followed orders to photograph the abused prisoners, father Daniel Sivits told The Associated Press in an interview late last month.

"Apparently, he was told to take a picture and he did what he was told," Daniel Sivits said. "He was just following instructions."
With regard to where the ultimate responsibility lies, Daniel Sivits is correct about the following:
But Daniel Sivits, in an interview from April 30, said he thought the abuse scandal stemmed from a lack of leadership.

"All it is lack of leadership, lack of instruction and lack of standard operating procedure and everyone at the top is covering their butts," Daniel Sivits said. "My only question is this: Where was the leadership?"
But as to why Jeremy Sivits himself was willing to obey these particular orders, this is still the key to the explanation:
Daniel Sivits said he spent 22 years in the military and his son grew up in the military. "He knows how to follow instructions," he said.
One of these days, people will begin to acknowledge the truths identified by Miller -- and will start to alter the ways in which they raise their children, insisting on obedience and adherence to rules above all, insisting on the denial of the spontaneous, vital, authentic self, and insisting all the time that they do it "for the child's own good."

But until that day comes, horrors will continue to be unleashed on the world. And stories like the ones from Iraq will never end.Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138605104877675392006-01-29T23:10:00.000-08:002006-01-29T23:11:44.890-08:00Why Alito Should and Must Be Filibustered: The Power of "No," RevisitedPosted at Once Upon A Time.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138559498209069922006-01-29T10:30:00.000-08:002006-01-29T10:31:38.260-08:00To the New Empire BuildersPosted at Once Upon A Time.Arthur email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-20668498.post-1138557666716810642004-06-04T09:55:00.000-07:002006-01-29T10:03:25.946-08:00When Life and Happiness Are Not Enough: The Tragedy of the Unborn SelfIn his latest column, Justin Raimondo examines the gathering backlash against the neoconservatives' policies. At one point, Raimondo inquires into certain of the sources of the neoconservatives' goals, and he points to an extraordinarily revealing article by Corey Robin that I hadn't seen before.

Here are a few key excerpts from the Robin piece:
In 2000 I spent the tail end of the summer interviewing conservative patriarchs William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. I was writing about the defections to the left of several younger right-wing intellectuals and wondered what the conservative movement's founding fathers thought of their wayward sons. But Buckley and Kristol were less interested in these ex-conservatives than they were in the sorry state of the movement and the uncertain fate of the United States as a global imperial power.

The end of communism and the triumph of capitalism, they suggested, were mixed blessings. Americans now possessed the most powerful empire in history. At the same time, they were possessed by one of the most anti-political ideologies in history: belief in the free market as a harmonious international order of voluntary exchange requiring little more from the state than the enforcement of laws and contracts. This ideology promoted self-interest over the national interest -- too bloodless a notion, Buckley and Kristol argued, upon which to found a national order, much less a global empire.

"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." Kristol confessed to a yearning for an American empire: "What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?"
Note the disdain for a state which merely enforces "laws and contracts." This kind of minimal role for the state necessarily leads to the assumed, but unexplained, negative result of "self-interest over the national interest." And conservatism's "emphasis" on "the market" is "boring." The article goes on:
But because of its devotion to prosperity, he added, the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial power. "It's too bad," Kristol lamented. "I think it would be natural for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world affairs. . . to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world -- Africa in particular -- where an authority willing to use troops can make . . . a healthy difference." But not with public discussion dominated by accountants. "There's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what?" he said. "I think it's disgusting that . . . presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."
I previously analyzed Kristol's reverence for a government that will "command" and "give orders," and his view that "[p]eople need that." I have not referred to the neoconservatives as neofascists for no reason; in fact, as my earlier post indicated, I had many reasons for the designation -- and these comments of Kristol's clearly reveal what some of them are.

Robin then turns to the neoconservative reaction to 9/11, and the following paragraph is the key in many ways to the underlying phenomenon that concerns me here:
To understand this reaction to 9/11, we must examine the state of mind of American conservatives after the end of the Cold War. For neoconservatives, who had thrilled to the crusade against communism, all that was left of Ronald Reagan's legacy after the Cold War was a sunny entrepreneurialism, which found a welcome home in Bill Clinton's America. While neocons favor capitalism, they do not believe it is the highest achievement of civilization. Like their predecessors -- from Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge and Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger and Michael Oakeshott -- today's conservatives prize mystery and vitality over calculation and technology. Such romantic sensibilities are inspired by questions of politics and, especially, of war. It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and markets.
The terminology employed here must be translated, so that we can grasp what is actually being said. When Robin (and/or the neoconservatives themselves) refer to "mystery and vitality," what they most likely mean is mysticism or faith, and emotion -- but emotion divorced from thought, "pure" emotion as an end in itself. And when they refer to "calculation and technology," they mean logical, rational thought, and applied thought, or applied science, i.e., technology.

As I noted in my earlier examination of Kristol's article "The Neoconservative Persuasion," a religious outlook permeates the neoconservative mindset; indeed, mysticism and faith are the foundation of the neoconservative perspective, in every important respect. The terms in which the dichotomy is presented by Robin reveal, once again, another variant of the mind-body dichotomy: the idea that there is an inherent conflict between man's mind or soul, which represents his "higher" aspirations, and man's body, which embodies the "lower" earthly realm, and which for reasons that are never named is markedly inferior and somehow unworthy. Thus, according to the neoconservatives, we need " a world that is about something more than money and markets" -- i.e., a world which is "aspirational" and devoted to some sort of "ideals," rather than merely being devoted to "money and markets," or in other words, to the life of man here on earth, dealing with such unworthy matters as goods and services.

But here is the key, which most people do not or will not grasp: when neoconservatives (and many others, including many liberals as well) deride "money and markets" and "mere" self-interest in this manner, what they are attacking is an individual's right to "mere" personal happiness. For such people, your own personal happiness is not enough to justify your existence: you need something more, something that will make your life "meaningful" and "important."

And that is where 9/11 comes in:
Immediately following 9/11, intellectuals, politicians and pundits seized upon the terrorist strikes as a deliverance from the miasma Buckley and Kristol had been criticizing. Even commentators on the left saw the attacks as stirring a sleeping nation; Frank Rich announced in the New York Times that "this week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream."

What was that dream? The dream of prosperity. During the 1990s, conversative David Brooks wrote in Newsweek, we "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills." This ethos had terrible consequences. It encouraged a "preoccupation with one's own petty affairs," Francis Fukuyama wrote in the Financial Times. It also had international repercussions. According to Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy, which made it "easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.'"

But after that day in September, the domestic scene was transformed. America was now "more mobilized, more conscious and therefore more alive," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine. Writers welcomed the moral electricity coursing through the body politic, restoring patriotism and bipartisan consensus.

Internationally, 9/11 forced the United States to reengage with the world, to assume the burden of empire without embarrassment or confusion. The mission of the United States was now clear to conservatives: to defend civilization and freedom against barbarism and terror. As Condoleezza Rice told Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, "I think the difficulty has passed in defining a role. I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen." An America thought to be lulled by the charms of the market was now willing to sustain casualties on behalf of a U.S.-led global order.
An important distinction should be kept in mind here. I would never deny that the attacks of 9/11 required a response (and I think almost no one has advocated such a position, despite some hawks' contentions to the contrary); in fact, I have indicated on numerous occasions that I believe they did require a decisive response. But if one were genuinely concerned with eliminating future terrorist threats, one would focus on all the causes that led to them. None of those causes excuse such acts of barbarity, but they explain some of the forces that led to such a horrifying result -- and they also point the way to changes in our foreign policy that would minimize the risks to us. Among those changes would be a drawing back from, and finally the ending of, our aggressively interventionist foreign policy, a policy of meddling all over the world which has led to blowback in countless forms.

But what we see in the reaction of the hawks and the neoconservatives to 9/11, a reaction which includes their grand design of remaking the world one continent at a time, is something altogether different: their response is not directed only at eliminating the terrorist threat. Actually, the truth is even more dangerous than that: in the deepest sense, I do not think their response is genuinely dictated by that goal at all. Remember: as the Robin piece points out, the conservatives' dissatisfaction with a minimal government devoted "only" to enforcing laws and contracts, and which "merely" promotes "self-interest," long predated 9/11. They were aching and impatient to put a much larger plan into operation -- and 9/11 tragically became the perfect launching pad for their global design.

Robin provides even more evidence to support this view:
For some conservatives, Clinton's promotion of free trade and free markets was anathema. Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine -- all the comforts of bourgeois life -- they disdained Clinton for his pursuit of these very virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its sense of depth and political meaning. "In that age of peace and prosperity," Brooks would write, "the top sitcom was 'Seinfeld,' a show about nothing."
Thus does David Brooks -- the perfect embodiment of utterly conventional, conservative thinking -- reveal the petty, ugly truth of the conservatives' "ideals": concern with peace, prosperity, affluence (read: "comfort") and personal happiness is...nothing. If anyone still believed that conservatives were concerned with ideals or with the intellect -- or with the individual's right to the pursuit of happiness -- they have no excuse to believe it any longer.

Robin then goes on to describe the desires of certain conservatives in terms that recall some of the rhetoric of the most despised dictators from history, including several of those from the twentieth century:
Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtu, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity. But there was another reason for the neocons' dissatisfaction. Clinton, they claimed, was reactive and haphazard rather than proactive and forceful.

Sept. 11 has given the neocons an opportunity to articulate, without embarrassment, the vision of imperial American power that they have been harboring for years. Unlike empires past, this one will be guided by a benevolent goal -- worldwide improvement -- and therefore will not generate the backlash previous empires have generated.
As Raimondo points out in his column, and as events demonstrate daily, this hope for a minimal or non-existent backlash appears to have been badly misplaced, to understate the problem considerably.

And, of course, none of these appeals of the hawks and those who share their vision would be complete without the call to sacrifice:
For the Kristol-Buckley model conservatives, this is a heady moment, when their ambivalence -- not about capitalism per se, but about the culture of capitalism, the elevation of buying and selling above political virtues such as heroism and struggle -- may finally be resolved. No longer hamstrung by the numbing politics of affluence, they believe they can count on the public to respond to calls of sacrifice and destiny. With danger and security the watchwords of the day, the country will be newly sanctified. The American empire, they hope, will allow America to have its market without being deadened by it.

The fact that the war against terrorism has not yet imposed the sacrifices on the population that normally accompany national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term," wrote the New York Times's R. W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy self-indulgence stay focused?"
We see, then, that even though this problem lies primarily with the neoconservatives and those who have been driving our foreign policy, it also extends to liberals and many others. All of them decry the obsession with personal happiness alone. Almost with one voice, they all cry: "Why, personal happiness isn't enough! All the great thinkers have said so! You must have some greater vision, some cause greater than yourself, in which your petty concerns will be submerged -- and which will raise you up! It is only by means of sacrifice, suffering, pain and death that your paltry existence can be sanctified, and justified. That is what idealism means, and what it demands!"

To which I would submit the only proper reply is: "Oh, really? Why? Who said so? My personal happiness is more than enough for me. Why isn't your own happiness good enough for you?" I'll come back to that question in a moment.

In fact, this search for a grand design by the neoconservatives goes back further than Robin's piece indicates. In the final part of my first foreign policy essay over a year ago, I wrote:
In the last 40 years, the Republicans and the Democrats have been slowly morphing into one undifferentiated whole. This process had been going on earlier, but in recent decades, it has accelerated significantly. Now both parties explicitly want and support a huge, oppressive regulatory state, and they argue over only which particular interests should be the beneficiaries of government favors. And, as is always the case, there is only one consistent loser: the average American taxpayer, who foots the bill for the entire pernicious enterprise, who is not "well-connected" and who has no special "interest group" to lobby on his behalf.

Moreover, just as the Republicans and the Democrats have become one nearly inseparable "big government" party, the Republicans -- and especially the neoconservatives (and now even some alleged libertarians) -- have adopted the language of the progressives of the early twentieth century: these people now speak of "national greatness," and of our "mission" to spread our "democratic institutions" around the globe. And how are we to do this? In the manner proposed by the earlier progressives: by massive foreign intervention, to be supported and paid for by the American taxpayer -- and also to be paid for with the blood of Americans.

Now, you would think the fact that neoconservatives and libertarians are now proudly proclaiming the slogans of those they used to deride would give them at least a moment's pause -- but it doesn't. Two unusually perceptive observers, Virginia Postrel and Jim Glassman, noted this phenomenon six years ago (highlights added) [Ed: I must now unfortunately add that it appears that neither Postrel nor Glassman at all appreciates the relevance of their own earlier observations to the current foreign policy crisis]:

"How you feel about the state of 'conservatism,' and of the world, depends on what you want to conserve. Simply conserving free institutions--which define the neutral rules of the game--is not enough for many conservatives, who confuse small government with no government, and neutral government with vice.

"Freedom makes them very nervous. 'Wishing to be left alone is not a governing doctrine,' wrote William Kristol and David Brooks on this page [in the Wall Street Journal] two weeks ago. They offer their own governing doctrine, 'the appeal to American greatness'--a kind of wistful nationalism in search of a big project.

"Unfortunately, for them the Cold War is over. So what's a national-greatness government to do? It could go looking for the next war, hope for another Great Depression, or sponsor a trip to Neptune. Or, as we would prefer, it could step back and let the inventiveness, passion, imagination, and technological genius of Americans produce American greatness. Toward that end, government could start exercising some self-restraint: cutting taxes, regulating and spending less, treating its citizens as equals before the law. ...

"These conservatives view America's very creativity and exuberance a cause for dismay. Conserving free institutions doesn't satisfy their desire to discipline a rambunctuously productive country. Freedom makes them uncomfortable, because it entails a dynamic, open-ended future rather than prescribing a static, politically determined one. ...

"We now worry that the conservative movement has abandoned the ideal of conserving simple rules in favor of a governing doctrine indistinguishable from the manipulative statism of its opponents.

"Indeed, the pessimism of this weekend's international congress reflects the fear that Hayek attributed to conservatives. So does Messrs. Kristol and Brooks's proposed governing doctrine, which is best understood as William James's 'moral equivalent of war'--a desire to engineer a purpose for Americans who seem too dangerously decadent to be left to their own devices.

"But it's one thing to pursue genuine national interests through foreign policy, quite another to cook up schemes just to give government something to do and the American people something to rally around. Harking back to the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and New Republic co-founder Herbert Croly, Messrs. Kristol and Brooks seek the promise of American life in collective pursuits directed from Washington according to their own cultural prejudices. They have embraced Croly's claim that it is not enough to allow America's future to emerge 'merely by virtue of maintaining intact a set of political institutions and by the vigorous individual pursuit of private ends.' Or, as Mr. Brooks put it in the Standard, if Americans 'think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose.'"

Now, confronted by the threat of terrorism, conservatives and many libertarians have all jumped on the same bandwagon -- but now their program is not simply the "moral equivalent of war." They have an actual war -- and if we take them at their word, it is only the first of many.

These conservatives and all others who propose a series of wars to topple despotic regimes, to be followed by perhaps decades of nation-building so as to inculcate other countries with our "democratic institutions," are the Herbert Crolys of today: they endorse statism as a political philosophy, with an increasingly powerful central government dictating and intruding into more and more aspects of our lives.
And now we must come back to the underlying question: what are the causes of this ceaseless quest on the part of so many for some "grand design," some great cause which will give their lives "meaning"? And what do they mean by "meaning" in this context? Why isn't personal happiness a sufficient goal? What is the emptiness in their souls that they are seeking to fill, and how did it arise?

I firmly believe that one of the major keys, if not the major key, can be found in the critically important work of Alice Miller, which work has been the basis for a long series of essays I have been writing, entitled "The Roots of Horror." At the beginning of an early installment of that series, I summarized some of the major elements of Miller's theory (and it should be kept in mind that Miller refers to "poisonous pedagogy," by which she means the multitude of abuses that virtually all children are subjected to under current methods of child rearing, and many of those abuses need not be physical in nature at all):
By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."
The dynamics identified by Miller can be seen in the refusal of most hawks to question authority -- and they also can be seen as underlying the abuses of Iraqi prisoners, as Miller herself has discussed [see the Miller excerpts toward the conclusion of that essay].

But here you have the deep tragedy which underlies the endless search for "meaning," and the inability of many neoconservatives (and many others, to be sure) to find fulfillment in "mere" personal happiness. Because autonomy in the sense discussed by Miller never existed for these people -- that is, because a genuine, authentic self was never allowed to develop -- such people have no self to be satisfied, or to be happy. The achievement of personal happiness, in the deepest sense, first requires the existence of a firsthand, genuine, vital self -- which both knows itself and knows those particular values which will lead to its happiness. But if that self was never allowed to be born in childhood, and if the adult is unable or unwilling to develop an authentic self later in life, genuine personal happiness is a phantasm that will never be actualized.

In such a case, the person will be driven to search for "mystery," "vitality," a great "crusade," or some version of "national greatness" -- and he will view with scorn such things as "markets," and the enforcement of laws and contracts, and peace, and prosperity. In this way, too, death, suffering and destruction become "romanticized" -- because they carry the promise of greater "meaning."

This underlying mechanism also explains two other related issues. The first is one I commented on in explaining why I was driven back to a consideration of Miller's work:
With regard to Miller's point that the idealization of authority figures is easily transferrable for those who have not been allowed to develop a true sense of self, events of the last few years have provided numerous examples. Let me emphasize one other point before moving on to some of the more notable ones. Nothing I am discussing here should be construed to mean that the ideas that people accept do not matter. In fact, as most of my writing here demonstrates, I view ideas, and whether they are true or false, as of critical importance. But the truly notable phenomenon is the following one: many of the ideas that people have accepted, in some cases even for thousands of years, can easily be shown to be wrong. So the obvious question arises: if the ideas are demonstrably wrong -- and as is often the case, when the consequences of certain ideas can easily be shown to be disastrous, and even horribly destructive -- why do people still cling to them so desperately, and absolutely refuse to give them up?

And this is where Miller's work is invaluable. Such tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence cannot be explained simply by saying, "Well, they just refuse to think. And when someone refuses to think, no one else can make him." Obviously, certain people refuse to think at a certain point. But the question remains: Why? If one looks at the life histories of the great majority of people, keeping in mind Miller's work and her detailed personal histories of a number of individuals, the answer is clear: they dare not question the goodness of the authority figure, the dare not acknowledge the pain they have experienced as the direct result of the actions of the authority figure, and above all they dare not say: the authority figure is wrong. This underlying mechanism of obedience is set very, very early in life -- and the thought of dislodging it later on literally causes the adult to panic, in a sense that threatens his precarious (and false) sense of self. So the adult will do anything to avoid having to question the authority figure.
And the second, related issue that Miller's work explains is that, no matter how many times in history our nation and many others have stumbled across the tragedies of imperial ambitions, no matter how many people have died, and no matter how great the destruction, humanity seems determined to repeat the same errors over and over again, without end. That fact alone would suggest that an underlying cause has still not been addressed, and continues to exact its fearful price.

I think that cause is the one identified by Miller: that for far too many people, their genuine selves were never permitted to develop, and many of them are thus led to find meaning in domination, control, conquest, war, and death. It is almost as if, because they themselves were never born in the deepest, most meaningful sense, they are capable only of bringing suffering or death to others, thus reducing the rest of the world to the state of their own still-born souls.

The real tragedy today, of course, is that one of the ultimate causes of all these horrors has undoubtedly been identified -- but most people find the subject far too threatening and are unwilling even to discuss it. Thus the horrors continue, even into our own times -- and perhaps still further into the future.

And all that is required to stop those horrors is the willingness to see the truth, and to name it. Surely that can't be more difficult than to endure the death and destruction we continue to see, day after day and year after year. Can it?Arthur firstname.lastname@example.com