Written during a particularly depressing month during the Bush administration. Will the time come when we are able to say that Dick Cheney just plain liked torture?
I’ve been visualizing myself being tortured…
I’ve been thinking about torture lately. More honestly, I’ve been visualizing myself being tortured and because I have a weakness for compulsive thought this ‘self-torture’, if you will, is detailed and obsessive, rising almost to the level of sexual fantasy. There are good descriptions of waterboarding on the internet, and even videos, and my all-too-excellent imagination does the rest. TV is also inspiring, and has given me all the detail I need when it comes to picturing, and feeling, slivers under my nails, or electrical shock, or hanging from my wrists as they’re yanked up behind me. And of course there are far more demeaning and painful forms of torture practiced on males, things I can’t discuss for fear of offending my mother, who reads this blog occasionally.
I know that I’m sharing far too much information, and I’m certain that you are never bothered by unwelcome thoughts of mutilation and pain, given or received. And yet, I must not be entirely alone in my sickness, because we are certainly obsessed, as a culture, with meting out exquisite pain to our enemies. Torture is a staple of popular entertainment, and of course our government is torturing hundreds—or maybe thousands—in not-especially-secret prisons around the globe. I can’t help but wonder if all this torture, real and fictional, is somehow leaking into our—excuse me, my—psyche, making us, I mean me, more fearful, more brutal, more paranoid, and far more willing to go along with whatever evil the government is currently perpetrating.
So I am against torture for purely selfish reasons: I have this idea that if I lived in a country that just said no to waterboarding, I’d sleep easier at night. But it may be that we’d all sleep easier. It’s an axiom of psychology that personal sins repressed and kept secret find expression in psychosis, and it’s an axiom of mine, completely unsupported by verifiable fact, that the same is true on a national level. Perhaps, for example, our largely unacknowledged dependence on sweatshop labor makes us unsatisfiable, and maybe the blithely ignored evils of factory farming and corporate meat production are making us the fat and unhappy people we seem, statistically, to be. And maybe, just maybe, the practice of torture, in our name and with our tacit approval, affects us as a culture and a people, turning us into bigoted monsters.
Of course I could be wrong, though that always strikes me as unlikely. Perhaps there is no link at all between the torturers we employ and our national psyche, and maybe it’s perfectly possible to be a kind, loving people while also perfecting the arts of strappado and sensory deprivation.
But somehow I doubt it. In short, it seems to me that institutionalized torture is a national sin, and that confession and renunciation of that sin will be a form of national healing. And I say we get on with it.
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