Oranges and Tyranny
I don't normally wax political. But this is really bothering me.
I've been reading a few blogs, mainly because my SO has been reading them and it's a more amusing way to keep up on current events. Most of those events are political; I started with Talking Points Memo and went on to Atrios' Eschaton and Washington Monthly's Political Animal. I've been reading enough to keep up, though I'm not the sort to go blogging all day.
So I've been hearing the left's hashing of the torture memos, the Iraq/Al-Qaida connections, and so on. It's not very happy stuff, although there are amusing moments when you realize how irrational a few arguments on the other side actually are; a lot of people are trying to quietly move the ball, and totally deny that anyone saw them do it.
But I digress. Needless to say, I'm up on Ashcroft and Cheney and Rumsfeld at the moment. What happens next? We rented Office Space.
Stay with me on this. If you've seen it, you know that the Bobs are a central feature of the movie: two consultants hired to "streamline" the company. You know what consultants mean, says one long-time employee -- they'll be firing people. And they do indeed, in a series of interviews that range from cheerful and cordial to desperate.
What does that have to do with the Executive branch? Ask my subconscious. I assume those are the two main ingredients that were in the top of my brain last night.... I had a dream. Not unpleasant at the time, particularly, as it felt very normal and fairly calm. But the more I look back on it, the more disturbed I get.
Okay. We're all getting interviewed; the setting looked vaguely like the local community college, but I don't think it was important. Everyone had to get interviewed by this set of two or three people. You had your appointment, you waited, then you went in. It was openly known that this was simply a review of your files and a few questions to determine what sort of person you were and how you work best, much like interviews with consultants at companies. And just like at a company, the consultant meant more than just a talk with a couple of people; it was a determination of how fit you were to be a citizen of this society.
It didn't seem sinister, actually -- it sounds like a good idea on the face of it. Go talk with everyone, and see whether they're mentally sound, ethical, intelligent, and reasonably agreeable. This is the sort of person who makes a good republic. It stands to reason then that anyone else should be separated out, so that the good people aren't troubled by them. And here I was, interviewing calmly with a group of people who decided whether citizens were fit to walk free or should be stashed away forever.
They were nice folks, but businesslike. The first question one of them asked me was, "Where would you like to end up?" I answered, "Out there, walking around." They nodded sympathetically and the lady said, "Okay, let's see what we can do to make that happen." Very nice people. They went through my pockets and asked me questions about my file, which I answered honestly (I always do; it comes across as sincere to people like that). They found a pack of cigarettes in my pocket, with one missing, despite the fact I don't smoke... the man just said I'd have to fill out a form for those, no big deal.
The feeling I had throughout the thing was like I feel during an exam.... tense, apprehensive, but not worried as such. A little keyed-up; I get a bit excited during formalities. I answered their questions for a while, then waited on a bench while they took some time to fill in and check the paperwork. To pass time during the wait, they offered me an orange (did I menation they were nice?). It was a good orange, I remember, and there was one seed in it. Lacking anyplace to put the seed (the rind vanished, I guess), I "dropped" it by semi-accident. The woman reading forms at a desk across from me looked up and asked, "What did you just do?" She had seen me; I hastily picked up the seed from the floor and apologized, and when she continued to stare disapprovingly -- this was one of the people assessing me, after all -- I confessed, "I don't really know why I did that." And I didn't. In a dream, sometimes things don't even make sense at the time.
Looking back, the orange is still what sticks in my mind. Maybe the civilized gesture of offering refreshments, maybe the implication that it was a test to see what I would do with the seed. I think the fumbling for an explanation of what I had done was a mark against me. Whatever the reason, the orange was significant; those of you into dream-analysis can make what you will of it.
The dream ended before I learned their conclusion; I got to see some camera's-eye views of a few people whose assessments hadn't gone well. Panic, disbelief, then getting encased in a "shell" of some kind (it looked like wax) and hung up in a rack with a bunch of others. Think Minority Report, or Monsters Inc. with all the doors. Yet others were still going into the interviews with the attitude one takes to a Social Security or DMV appointment.
I had the impression that their conclusion was that I was a good person, but a bit of a bumbler, a bit awkward. What keeps coming back to me is the question of whether that would have been enough to put me away. The trouble with selecting a population is that no matter how well-intentioned the selectors and process may be, the difference between the chosen and the discarded always lies in the one doing the selection, not the subjects.
Why is this a political rant? Because it's not the first time. I can say with absolute honesty that the people in this administration, the top figures in the Executive branch, are giving me nightmares. Not the typical cynical "this is bad" muttering; true, sleeping nightmares. Maybe I'd have bad dreams on these lines regardless -- but I doubt it, not without the news feeding my fertile imagination.
No, I don't really expect Ashcroft to decide that the best way to combat terrorism is to go through the entire population individually and cull out possible threats or even just non-contributing people. I'm not that much of a conspiracy theorist. Nor do I think people would take it calmly, like those in Logan's Run were so complacent about the need for Renewal. But it still bothers me that I could even conceive of it happening here; I don't think I could have four years ago. It would have been laughable.
I'm not laughing now. I haven't since the last nightmare I had; a few days after Ashcroft testified before the Congressional Committee about one of the "torture memos", I watched Brazil for the first time. I knew little about it, only that it was the middle film in Terry Gilliam's little film trilogy... what Nick failed to mention was exactly how dark a comedy it really was. It left a few scabs on my conscious that are starting to heal up -- but the huge echoing chamber, where people were "questioned" by a dapper Graham Chapman, sank hooks into my brain. I discovered how deep they went when I had a screaming, sweating nightmare that night -- one of a set of three bad dreams where the name "Ashcroft" popped up with disturbing regularity. The extremely gory mental images from that nightmare won't go away, and they crop up every time I hear more about "waterboarding" and some of the practices described so graphically in the paper on human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. Whether or not our government ever condoned questionable techniques, those methods are getting a hell of a lot of press lately, and it's too easy to see the people who defend so fiercely the right to use them (a former Senate Majority Leader comes to mind) waving pompoms as human beings are interrogated with "determination". After all, "You don't get information that will save American lives by withholding pancakes."
I would say that I'm done ranting -- except for the fact that I ran across mention of Rumsfeld vs. Padilla in a section of Discourse.net. Michael writes:
Does that sound over-wrought, given there's only one person so far, and he hasn't by all accounts, been tortured (other than being confined in solitary with no prospect of emerging) or killed? I don't think so for two reasons.
First, we don't call them "precedents" for nothing. If we set the precedent that people can be grabbed off the street, next time Ashcroft, or some future Ashcroft, or some horrible cross between Nixon, John Adams and Burr, won't bother going through the civilian justice system at all (which is how Padilla's case got attention -- he was first held as an ordinary criminal, and it was only when the government realized it didn't have the evidence to try him that they decided to reclassify him as an enemy of the state illegal combatant, and put him in the brig). Next time, whenever that is, the victim will just vanish.
That's bad enough. But I don't think I understood how much was a stake until I read the Torture Memos. Those memos claim the right to legally inflict hideous intentional pain -- what I and most people would call torture -- on enemy combatants. That's right--on people whom this administration considers equivalent to Padilla. So the US government is not only asserting the right to Disappear people, but to torture them in secret as well.
Again, I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe that this is just around the corner, that we're about to turn into Argentina. But the blog is right in that it sets a precedent for someone in future to point to and say, "You didn't say he had rights, so why should I grant them in this case?" Rights are like copyright law: if you don't enforce it, you lose it.
And I'm a lot less complacent these days about good sense and ethics prevailing. It's a loss of innocence in a way, and the sort of fear that the terrorists probably want to inspire. It just bothers me that, in my case, the fear is directed at the people in charge.
--A