Some Nasty Thoughts About Torture

Trump has popped back out of his latest rabbit hole declaring that, gosh, he has talked to some people (great people) and found out that, wouldn't you know it, torture actually works, so maybe he will bring back waterboarding after all. This is actually consistency, Trump-style: during the campaign he promised his hungry crowds “waterboarding and a lot worse,” before briefly changing his mind, in a fit of magnanimity after his November triumph. Now he is changing it back.

But it strikes me that here, for once, it is Trump who is taking people literally-but-not-seriously; and we should respond, I want to say, seriously-but-not-literally. Was it ever smart to have opposed torture by claiming that it "doesn't work"? I have never thought so.  Hearing the words, I instantly reflect that of course torture works, in the most immediate and basic sense, very implacably and infallibly, and that anyone who has suffered a bad tooth extraction or had an arm twisted by a bully knows this perfectly well, at some level, whatever he or she may say about it now.

But here I am the one being too literal. The slogan, really, is no flat statement of fact, but more a fiction to live by, true in its way but decidedly figurative. And it is a political formulation, holding together a somewhat uneasy coalition between various different reasons to despise and eschew torture. On the one hand there are mainly practical concerns: that resorting to torture would make America a pariah among nations, destroying our ability to make effective alliances; that the practice of it might prove so demoralizing and disorienting, so corrosive to our belief in ourselves and each other, that society might cease to function. Understand “work” in a broad sense, and “Torture doesn’t work” takes in such pragmatic considerations. But the slogan also offers something to escapists and even, one has to say, with the proviso that this means all of us at least sometimes, to hypocrites who simply prefer not to think clearly about the topic, not until we have to, though we probably know deep down that we would do anything, absolutely anything, to save the life of a spouse or keep that dirty bomb from going off in Times Square. For them (us) it offers a wistful fantasy of mere flesh somehow resisting the irresistible onslaught of the dead-eyed man with the electrodes. I could hold out, we tell ourselves, knowing better. People can do that, so the more practical approach, as Trump was saying a while back, is to offer the bad guy a cigarette and a beer, instantly changing him into a cooperative good guy. What, you never heard of a change of heart?

Often, these days, this fantasy expands into a pseudo-pragmatic argument that on examination is too silly for words, though it is offered with a straight face everywhere, notably in the Senate’s report on torture, and is more or less the official progressive position. The claim is made that torture fails to work because it works too well; because the victim is so broken that he tells the torturer “anything he wants to hear,” and that the torturer is then somehow helpless to sort out the kernels of true intelligence from the chaff of desperate over-reaction, even though (get this) the victim really wants to help his tormentor at this stage. Winston Smith loves Big Brother, but Big Brother can’t figure out how to take advantage of the situation. Right. So we don’t even have to discuss the morality of torture. It is simply ineffective, and we can put it out of our minds.

Of course any child can spot the problem here: the interrogator simply double-checks your answers against other data, and your panicked unintentional prevarications quickly fall away, leaving the nuggets of true information uncamouflaged and crystal clear. Separating truth from falsehood, even culpable truth from virtuous falsehood, is what interrogators are trained to do.

No one, I think, really believes the pseudo-pragmatic take on the anti-torture slogan — not deep-down and lucidly. No one who has ever been to the dentist, anyway. Still, the argument is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is shorthand, rather, and metaphor. A way of saying, I am not going to go there. Not only will I not practice torture or endorse it, I am not going to contemplate it fiercely and fully in the way you ask. I will not enter into those hateful philosophical conundrums into which you try to lure me, asking what I would do if my infant child were suspended by a thread over a tub of acid and the only man who knew where was strapped to the table in front of me, horridly leering, refusing to speak. From those visions I turn away, as if from pornography: I know what is there, in a general way, but I don’t choose to go into it just now. In the incredibly unlikely event that such a situation really presents itself, that will be time enough to decide. This is not hypocrisy, so much, but something more like decency.

Which is fine, except that Trump always knows just how to exploit mere decency. If we say, “Torture doesn’t work,” he emerges grinning from his bunker of self-contemplation to say, “Well, if that was your only objection. . . ” leaving us confused and wrong-footed just long enough for him to close the sale. He proceeds to show that torture has sometimes yielded true intelligence, as of course it has, and that’s that. Later, when we realize that he really didn’t care a shred whether torture “works” or not, that he simply needs to torture somebody (it hardly matters who), giving his base a dose of sadistic pleasure in order to leave them debauched and guilty and all the more surely bound to him — later will be too late. 

Oppose torture on practical grounds, and you find yourself defending a weak position.

So when our decent but evasive slogan is met with the literalistic counter-stroke, we need to be prepared, I think. We must be ready to say, “Well, that is not quite what we meant. Our real reason for opposing torture — for rejecting it utterly, for declining to argue the point — is that no reason is necessary. The overwhelming repugnance I feel when you mention the prospect, the feeling that life saved by such means might not be worth saving, is reason enough in itself. Rejecting torture is just one of life’s fundamentals, sacred if you like. Torture is just wrong, because it is because it is because it is.”

Not logic, really, but adequate to the case, in this imperfect world.

With these provisos — too many, no doubt, and too fussy — I am happy to march under the banner progressives have agreed upon:

Torture doesn’t work.

Trump and the Art of Insult

Wow you are the biggest snowflake give your vagina a wipe you're bleeding all over the interweb lol

 A fellow named Mike Kirchner, of Vancouver, BC, recently inscribed this witticism on the Facebook page of a good friend. She had posted that meme (you may have seen it) which gives side-by-side pictures of Clinton and Trump, with the caption “The saddest part of 2016 was seeing how many people believed the worst rumors about a woman while ignoring the worst facts about a man.” This led to a flurry of largely like-minded comments and some polite caveats. Then a couple of trolls showed up, my friend grew ever so slightly heated in her rejoinders, and little Mikey delivered his show-stopper.

The volatility of online discussions is an old story by now — but to this extreme? Vulgarity so absolute and uncalled for, delivered with such nasty feigned jocularity (that “lol” at the end really is the cherry on the sundae, rendering the rest somehow twice as creepy) calls for a slightly new explanation. And the new element in the equation these days, pretty obviously, is Trumpism.

Mikey, it seems, has been learning at the feet of the Master, via TV no doubt and perhaps Twitter. He may still lack a bit of his hero’s finesse, but he has clearly absorbed the essential lesson driven home by Trump in this disaster of an election: that insult beats civilized argument, every time. Confronted with inconvenient facts, insult your opponent. Confronted with more facts and an idea or two, repeat the insult, perhaps with a cute twist. It’s a simple technique that anyone can learn — that in fact nearly everyone does learn, by age five or so — and after its startling success in the primaries, then the general, seems to have inspired a frenzy of imitation.

Trump’s “thank you rallies” (with the menacing undertone that leads some of us to hear another word in place of “thank”), like all the rallies before, have promoted a joyous mass reversion to nearly infantile modes of imagination and feeling. Trump never quite said, “Stop thinking; follow me, and I will make you masters.” That was Mussolini, and (with variations) Hitler and Hirohito, in slightly different times. But the president-elect’s big idea is much the same, and his followers get it.

Trump may not really get you your old job back, probably won’t in fact. But he gives you an excuse to vent in the crudest terms possible, while all around you a horde of allies shrieks its approval, and damn, that can feel good. What comes next will take care of itself.

As part of this larger liberation from the hated curbs of rationality, the Movement (English teachers take note) has featured a joyous return to preadolescent modes of self-expression and argument. Hair-trigger irritability, reflexive combativeness, and a potty mouth are no longer childish vices to be overcome, but essential aptitudes for all who dream of going viral.

Of course, just switching from argument to insult doesn’t necessarily make your job all that easy. There is an art in all things, and to be a really accomplished insulter takes talent and hard work. You need a hunter’s eye for human vulnerability, a sexual predator’s keenly non-empathic awareness of other people’s sensitivities. You need to be as versed as a lawyer or court eunuch in the ways of hierarchy, knowing all the nasty codes people use to rate, rank, and demean one another. Add a safe-cracker’s cool and a bridge player’s strategic smarts, and you are maybe halfway to where Donald is. Face it, though: no one else will ever do it the way he does.

But even a lowly first-degree brown belt like Mikey knows what you do in an argument with a woman. You put her in her place, of course. Early or late (your choice entirely), you remind her who has a penis and who has a vagina, and that is the whole game in one move. Shut up, bitch, a man’s talking. See how easy that is?

Will such gamesmanship, such resort to codes and hierarchies one had thought moribund, result in real changes in behavior? The Republic waits breathlessly to find out. My money is on yes. Mikey and his pals are not yet roaming the streets throwing acid in the faces of women who displease them; but they are patrolling the internet in a way that suggests real potential in this line. Give them time. 

Ever since the 11/9 disaster, portions of the commentariat have been prattling about the Democratic party’s failure to “understand” Trump voters. They were not really racists, sexists, or xenophobes, we are told, just economically anxious people who wanted a change and felt that they were not being listened to. When we talked about things like racism and sexism and xenophobia, when we appealed to the facts all the time, we offended them and made them feel that we still weren’t listening. Instead of convincing them with our charts and figures and logical appeals, we made them feel dumb. This got them so angry that they went and elected a certifiable sociopath to the most important job in the world. That should teach us a lesson, all right, about being so smug.

To all this I cry BS, citing Mikey’s post as my Exhibit A. In my reckoning, Trump voters generally are not quite as stupid as they pretend. They voted for Agent Orange because he is a racist, a sexist, a thug, and all the rest, not in spite of those things. Beneath his idiotic promises to take everyone back to the 1950s they discerned the outlines of a dream that might actually be achievable: to take us back to the 1150s, so far as our basic values are concerned. They wanted someone who would license all their own worst instincts.

If we have elections in 2018 and 2020 (we still might), Democrats will face the question of how to talk to the Mikeys of the world. Should we listen more politely and at length, before trying to nudge them a step or two in the direction of civilized discourse? Should we try really, really hard to see things their way, sampling the euphoria that comes from blaming problems of every size and kind on the Other? Hug the flag and hate on a few Mexicans, just to be good sports?

For my money, hell no. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. If the other side has chosen ridicule, scapegoating, and the big lie as their weapons of choice, there is little choice for now but to reply in kind. When both sides are thoroughly sick of the destruction wrought by the infantilist approach to political conversation, then will be the time to start bringing back all those values that Trumpism has swept aside: values like courtesy, fairness, objectivity, circumspection, and on down the quaint and dreary list.

Meanwhile, Mikey’s post offers invaluable insight into Hillary’s key mistake in the campaign, the same mistake from beginning to end. She had a vagina. That meant she was wrong by definition, no matter what she did. Now we all get to see just what it means to prefer even the worst of men to even the best of women.