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| George Orwell's fascist nominee for Attorney General |
| 01.05.05 (2:49 pm) [edit] |
Somewhere in the U.S. government is the person who came up with the idea of fusing the wail of an infant with the incessant meow from a cat food commercial so as to torment detainees at Guantanamo. Detainees also were subjected to popular songs by the likes of Eminem and Rage Against the Machine. It is a mad genius who realized that ordinary American culture can, with repeated exposure, be nearly lethal. God help us all.
In George Orwell's novel "1984," it was rats that were used to torture Winston Smith, not because rats could do real damage but because they were his "worst nightmare." He succumbed, denounced his beliefs and went back to wasting his days drinking gin.
The term "Orwellian" is much abused and, back at the actual year 1984, I thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called "the lunatic logic of the bureaucracy." Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years.
With immense satisfaction now, he would have noted the Bush administration's abuse of language, particularly wringing all meaning from the word "torture." Until a recent amendment, the word applied only to the pain like that of "organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death." Anything less, such as, say, shackling to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is - or was until recently - considered perfectly legal.
The administration's original interpretation was promulgated by the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, and the White House, under its counsel, Alberto Gonzales. The result has deeply embarrassed the U.S. Among other things, it produced the abuses of Abu Ghraib, which we were assured were an unaccountable exception. My God, if only higher authorities had known!
Now we all know. The International Committee of the Red Cross has complained that some of what has been done at Guantanamo - Guantanamo, not Abu Ghraib - was "tantamount to torture."
The Bush administration has raised itself above the law. It pronounced itself virtuous, but facing a threat so dire, so unique, that Gonzales found the Geneva Conventions themselves "obsolete." Such legal brilliance does not long go unrewarded. He has been nominated to become attorney general.
The elevation of Gonzales is supposed to be a singular American success story. This son of Mexican immigrants bootstrapped his way to Bush's inner circle. Then he told the President precisely what Bush wanted to hear. He came up with a brilliant definition of torture. Everyone was off the hook. Is it any wonder the Senate will probably soon confirm him? By next year, he will undoubtedly receive a cherished Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to those who successfully serve the President but dismally fail the nation. In the audience, unseen but nonetheless present, Orwell and Kafka look on.
The revelations coming out of Guantanamo are hideous. The ordinary abuse, the incessant lying of the authorities, plus the mock interrogations staged for the press, in which detainees and their interrogators share milkshakes - all this soils us as a nation. It's as if the government is unaware of how Communists and fascists also strained language and ushered the world into torture chambers made pretty for the occasion. We now keep some pretty bad company.
The Bush administration has fused Orwell with Kafka in the same way someone fused the cry of an infant with that of a cat from the Meow Mix television commercial.
The upshot is Gonzales. He's Kafka's man, Orwell's boy and Bush's pussycat. Know him for his roar.
Meow. - http://www.nydailynews.com/ne...
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