The new mainstream American value of torture is steeped in self-deception, legal justification, and propaganda. We idolize torturers in our favorite TV programs, and are happy to see our enemies (real and imagined) vicariously taken apart in order to protect our beacon of freedom.
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It is an Orwellian undertaking. Only a massive propaganda effort and a healthy dose of self-delusion can explain poll numbers that show a split verdict on the subject of torture’s legitimacy, when it has been proven to be completely unreliable in true intelligence gathering – not even when a “Jack Bauer” is working against a ticking bomb. We must conclude, then, that it is a type of blood sport, or a self-righteous power trip that expresses itself in the sheer enjoyment of the punishment inflicted against evildoers.
Long before there was Jack Bauer to hold a blow torch to someone’s chest, there was the blood-soaked march across the ages, and the planet, inspired by fundamentalist religions. Sacrifices to Gods eventually waned, Inquisitions passed, and formal witch trials disappeared, to be supplanted by a new type of faith: The State.
The slaughters conducted by Stalin, Mao, and other decidedly Left governments, were not to be outdone by the iconoclasts of the Right. It is a cynical admission, but it seems that torture has been around so long, and in so many forms, that it is part of who we are. Evidently, we are easily whipped into a frenzy of self-righteousness that will not stop until the torture apparatus is turned upon the screaming body politic. By then, it is too late. The next generation is left to evaluate what could have led to such horrendous mass insanity.
September 18, 2010
