Twilight of the Hero

I’ve been listening heavily and with concentration to Wagner’s entire Ring Cycle, for personal and professional reasons. Personally, well, I enjoy it more and more. It’s one of the great works of drama in cultural history and Wagner is absolutely one of the most accomplished seducers in music. He makes you feel, and believe in, what he has to say. That there’s been a cult around him for 150 years is easy to understand.

Professionally, I’m listening to it because I’m developing ideas for how I as an opera composer respond to the work. This means that I’m going to be doing my own version of the heroic myth Wagner himself adapted from folk sources. It’s a continuing dialogue with the past, which itself is alive every time the music is produced, or heard, or studied. It’s also a retelling of the story of the Hero, which has been around in human culture since people first started telling stories to one another. What strikes me especially powerfully in this regard is the cult of the hero that we have now in America, which is, frankly, perverted. The Bush Administration and it’s courtiers have been promoting the idea, since September 12, 2001, that the existing President and now the new GOP nominee are the one who can protect American lives. The idea being that the presidency is a position for a hero, some amalgamation of Captain America and Superman, who will protect American society. The political-cultural-religious right have been fervent in this.

I call them fearful. Certainly, they seek a daddy-like figure to hide behind and assuage their anxieties. This does not make such a figure a hero. The Hero, to properly protect and preserve society, must sacrifice himself for the greater good. The thought of Bush sacrificing himself in any way is ridiculous, like asking a spoiled child to share toys. Instead, Bush seeks to preserve society by sending people to kill and die, for no reason whatsoever, and to torture people, again for no reason whatsoever. This combination of misguided hero-worship and sadism is about the most poisonous, decadent mix I can think of. So-called conservatives in this country represent the worst kind of moral perversion.

Torture Porn

There is a good, brief article in the March 2008 issue of Vanity Fair (no link) that discusses the cultural origins of the small, important group of horror film directors who debuted in the late 60s – early 70s; George Romero, Wes Crave, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter. It’s an adjunct to a superb IFC documentary on the same subject, The American Nightmare, that dates from 2000. I recall watching it again Halloween night, 2001, with a group of friends, waiting to see if any kids would come by for treats, but John Ashcroft had successfully scared parents away from trick-or-treating, based on no other foundation other than his “Christian” superstitions.

One comment in the article repeated something I’ve had in my mind, inchoately; the notion that this new horror genre of torture movies is pornography to the likes of Dick Cheney. I don’t doubt it. Bush and Cheney are clearly physical and moral cowards, obsessed with the shallow and flaccid American political idea of ‘toughness,’ and they bully as a matter of course in trying to prove their strength. Since what they are actually doing is ordering others to carry out their most inhumane wishes, this makes them both sadists and voyeurs, so it’s a natural that White House movie screenings would feature Saw and Hostel.

What interests me is why these movies draw enough audiences to turn profits and ensure sequels, while movies about the root cause of torture vanish without a trace. America tortures because it can, because it has the power to torture and nothing can stop that. And America tortures because peoples we have conquered don’t understand that we’ve conquered them, that we control them, that they are subject to our power. Now, why we conquered them . . . I have no idea, other than we conquered them to prove our power, and to intimidate. So it makes sense that, since they won’t do what we tell them, we have to torture them to make them understand who’s boss. But no one wants to see this depicted in film, yet they want to see torture. Is this a thrill? I tend to think that it is. After all, torture in popular entertainment is nothing new. The greatest interest and thrill in shows like “Survivor” and “Big Brother” is in the audience enjoying the emotional torture of the contestants. America generally sees people as disposable commodities, so it boils down to the projection of cultural power. We don’t need or even want people to like us, they just want us to like what we like.

We’re Not Repeating The Past

A good article in the latest New Yorker, pointing out that there’s really nothing new about America torturing people, or even “regime change” or bringing “freedom” to people by shooting them. What strikes me as a major difference between the occupation and pacification of the Philippines and that of Afghanistan and Iraq is not that we tortured, and are torturing, people in all those places, but that early in the 20th century some Americans were actually prosecuted for waterboarding Filipinos, while early in the 21st century the Executive and Legislative branches are cooperating to make sure that absolutely no one is ever prosecuted for torturing anyone. So, forgotten history doesn’t always repeat itself . . .

Oh, And Have You Heard?

That Liberals are Fascists? There’s a book about it . . .

Hey, I’m an equal opportunity provocateur! And not without a sense of humor. For example, I think this is pretty funny (h/t to The Poor Man);

His own words. Doughy Pantload is clearly no Premature Antifascist, not him. No, he has identified evil, and it is Liberalism, Socialism, yadda yadda. Strange, though, because Milt Wolff, fighting actual Fascists, was a socialist. And Jonah, is all for torture, the same kind the Gestapo used. But he’s a crusading anti-Fascist . . . man, this makes my head hurt. Mainly because Pantload has a job, and I’ve been looking for one for six months.

Naming Things

How can we honestly address anything that matters to us unless we can call the thing exactly what it is? Euphemism and newspeak are worse in this regard than lies. The lie merely points out the intentions of the liar; when the Bush administration tells the world America doesn’t torture and spends political capital to ensure no government agent or temporary mercenary is ever punished for drowning someone within an inch of their life, their active agency is clear.

However, when parties who claim to clear-eyed, serious and responsible use terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or call water-boarding “simulated drowning,” when the drowning is real and the goal is to simulate death (I believe it’s also called simulated drowning since to name it as it actually is means to define it as torture even under the savage, immoral reasoning of John Yoo), all we can discern is that those parties seek to deceive. Mainly, they seek to deceive themselves, to refute their own knowledge and awareness in favor o comfort and the security of being assured about one’s worldview.

Which all leads me to Nicholas Kristoff again. It’s not that I set out to beat him up, he just provides material that can’t be ignored. On opposite sides of the Op-Ed pages in The Week In Review section of the Times, I read the following statements:

Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues. Saying a man is honest is a compliment. Saying a man is “generally” honest or honest “quite often” means he lies. The mistreatment of detainees, like honesty, is all or nothing: We either do stuff like that or we do not.

Facing it is this:

It is true that Mr. McCain sometimes weaves and bobs. With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is. On Wednesday, for example, he retreated on his brave stand on torture by voting against a bill that would block the C.I.A. from using physical force in interrogations.

His most famous pander came in 2000, when, after earlier denouncing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism,” he embraced it as “a symbol of heritage.” To his credit, Mr. McCain later acknowledged, “I feared that if I answered honestly I could not win the South Carolina primary, so I chose to compromise my principles.”

In short, Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.

One of these writers is the former chief military prosecutor at Gitmo, the other is Kristoff. I won’t ask anyone to guess. If you can’t name the thing, you can’t do anything about it, except make sure it endures.

Why I Fight

So, one of the voices of the Establishment has finally found that it’s safe to point out that America tortures, and that torture is a bad thing. Well, at least it makes it harder for us to get the Arab World to like us. And that’s what they Establishment is very concerned about – we’re very likable, why don’t they like us? What did we ever do wrong?

Kristoff, who is considered a good liberal by the Establishment, writes in re Gitmo:

Most Americans, including myself, originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were “the worst of the worst.” But evidence has grown that many are simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest.

This firmly placing oneself on the side of popular opinion, when it was popular to have that opinion, in order to excuse oneself from whatever mess one may have on one’s hands is a cheap little Establishment trick. The prison at Gitmo was built in 2002, and already pictures of prisoners, hooded and their ears covered in complete violation of the Geneva Convetion had been easy to view on television. Kristoff had to have seen them. What did he think was going on?

The gap between word and deed, and the disregard for empirical reality, were already a demonstrated fact of the Bush presidency. Thinking citizens who could read and had a bit of curiousit and interest in affairs could see the big lies, and see through them. The tissue lies about Gitmo, terrorism and Iraq were in plain sight. It just wasn’t popular to point this out, it took a bit of courage. And of course, no one in the Establishment has the courage to speak out against that mix of conventional wisdom and received opinion, since they’d be kicked out of their sinecures writing for the newspapers and appearing on news shows.

Dangerous negotiators of the monkey-bars, kept from fearful columnists

The worst of the worst? There was a bounty offered for ‘terrorists,’ and no one cashed in on that, grabbing someone in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is the liberal conception of humanity as inherently good that separated from reality? The worst of the worst? When our ally in the GWOT, Pakistan, was allowed to airlift 4,000 Pakistani Taliban out of Afghanistan with the silent okay of the Bush administration? The worst of the worst? I’ve seen the video of the Al-Qaeda supermen training, it didn’t make me shit my pants, but then I’m no Christopher Hitchens.

The Establishment fearful and trusting, looking for daddy to protect them. Then daddy turns out to be crazy, scary and cruel, which was obvious all along but he promised not to do mean things! So now, the Establishment finds its outrage. Face it, America tortures, it tortures people who are completely innocent, and it does so only to be powerful and cruel. Torture has no other purpose than cruelty, and as such is inherently evil.

But the Establishment doesn’t want to know too much about it, and would rather be safe and not feel scared. So a clean-cut man in a suit sits down in front of the Establishment and tells them that although we do a lot of stuff, not pretty stuff, it’s not torture, because we say it isn’t. And the Establishment says okay. Even John McCain, who was tortured, says it’s okay.

The odds that one of those guys o the monkey-bars will come to America and rub out Kristoff are so low as to be non-existent. It doesn’t take much courage to live without being in fear of that. Most Americans walk the streets everyday free of that fear. If only the Establishment could have summoned the slightest bit of courage, we may never have seen America disappear.

First Things

This won’t be an easy run, and not for everyone, but this is what I do, and this is for anyone who shares my concerns.

I make music, and sound, and music drama. I am working my way towards some kind of electronic performance. And my subject matter is torture: What it is, what it does, why it’s done, what we can do about it.

In the shallow, unthinking and mildly hysterical political environment of contemporary America, torture, and the fact that America, of all countries, tortures people, is somehow seen as a political issue. That is, the question of whether we should and do torture comes down to an equation of political power, of left and right. This is utter, deracinated nonsense. Torture is an inherent and irredeemable moral wrong. The equation, therefore, is balanced between morality and immorality. And those of us who are American citizens, and believe in the ideas and promise of this country, must first accept that since our government tortures, we are all torturers, like it or not. Then we can do something about it.

Stick with me, and maybe we can do something about it.