Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. citizens aren’t rising to the challenge →
public acquiescence / approval / collaboration →
ready-made excuses for brutality; glory in cruelty
Some follow-up about ’s stories about abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
The story to read is Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article.
Excerpts:
A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in .
Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating.
Specifically, Taguba found that there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib.
This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community.
(The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.)
Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
…The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine — a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide.
On , at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib — seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed.
The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison.
Wisdom said:
SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile… I do not think it was right to put them in a pile.
I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners.
I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage.
The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick… I left after that.
When he returned later, Wisdom testified:
I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open.
I thought I should just get out of there.
I didn’t think it was right… I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.”
I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”
…In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib.
In a letter written in , he said:
I questioned some of the things that I saw… such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell — and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.”… MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.
The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote.
“CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.”…
In , Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies — that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees — was brought to his unit for questioning.
“They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away.
They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower… The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.”
The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”
An encouraging number of bloggers and commenters are making the good point that the American domestic prison system is also one in which torture and extrajudicial execution is, if not commonplace, certainly practiced and with near-impunity.
Hersh notes in his article:
[Sergeant] Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections.
A lot of people are noticing the allegations that some of the interrogations were carried out by “private contractors,” one of whom, as was mentioned in yesterday’s Picket Line, is accused of having raped an Iraqi boy in custody — but is not being prosecuted because nobody seems to have or want jurisdiction.
Phil Carter of Intel Dump shows how this could happen.
Apparently “[t]he Coalition Provisional Authority has decreed that contractors and other foreign personnel will not be subject to Iraqi criminal processes.”
The military doesn’t have jurisdiction over these contractors either.
And while the U.S. Justice Department could decide to step in, in practice it doesn’t. Gee, hasn’t anybody thought of declaring them “unlawful combatants?”
“Armed Liberal” over at Winds of Change leads the pack of liberal hawks putting on rose-colored glasses over the credulous doe-eyes that got ’em this far.
United States troops caught on film abusing Iraqi prisoners?
What’s not to love?:
As others point out, though, the allegations of torture against the United States in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Iraq keep piling up — and the United States is blocking the sort of transparency, oversight or even training that might help prevent abuses from happening (if the abuse were not in fact sanctioned by policy).
The “Armed Liberal” camp will allow themselves to believe that abuse is going on only up to the point where the photographic evidence doesn’t allow them to deny it.
And so long as what cannot be denied is appropriately punished, or at least some of it is, or is investigated, sternly, well then, doesn’t that prove to our own satisfaction that we’re good?
Why should we condemn or stop what we can effectively prevent ourselves from learning about in the first place?
If Frederick and these other soldiers are punished, they will know very well that their crime was in being stupid enough to let the photos leak and that if they’d stuck to abusing and humiliating prisoners they’d still be able to expect to come home to a hero’s welcome from folks like “Armed Liberal.”
Under the Same Sun again hits the nail on the head, commenting on a T-shirt that you can buy to commemorate the actions of the Marine who shot to death an unarmed, wounded Iraqi in Falluja several days ago:
I don’t need to explain much here, all you have to do is reverse the situation.
Imagine a wounded, unarmed marine being left to die in a church in, say, rural Montana by, say, the occupying army.
A day later another group of occupier soldiers come back, notice one of the wounded marines is still not dead, and shoots him, point blank, on camera.
Then, all they talk about is how the shooter had the right to defend himself from the unarmed, wounded, dying man on the ground.
What if he was booby-trapped?
What if he was about to lunge?
¶ Then they sell shirt celebrating the shooter.
And their columnists keep blabbing about how uncivilized we are, and how we don’t value life like they do.
Another great pro-torture piece comes from the Wall Street Journal, which got a good take-down from IsThatLegal?:
[Y]esterday the Wall Street Journal… printed the following gem in a pro-Gonzalez editorial:
If the Gonzales critics are really worried about civil liberties, they might ponder the domestic political response to another 9/11. Do they really think Roosevelt’s internment camps and Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus were merely products of a less enlightened age, and that Americans wouldn’t respond to a dirty bomb explosion in a major city with mass detentions of men with Islamic surnames, closed borders, or worse?
This civil-liberties catastrophe is precisely what “water-boarding” is trying to prevent.
We have to torture foreign Muslims so that we can protect American Muslims from U.S. government lawlessness.
Gonzales has apparently been a little more frank in his written communication with the senators on the Judiciary Committee than he was during the hearings:
Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and other nonmilitary personnel fall outside the bounds of a directive issued by President Bush that pledged the humane treatment of prisoners in American custody, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, said in documents released on .
In written responses to questions posed by senators as part of his confirmation for attorney general, Mr. Gonzales also said a separate Congressional ban on cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment had “a limited reach” and did not apply in all cases to “aliens overseas.”
That position has clear implications for prisoners held in American custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq, legal analysts said.
The responses confirm what has been manifest for a while now: The Administration has concluded that the CIA, when it interrogates suspected Al Qaeda detainees overseas, may lawfully engage in “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment — i.e., treatment that would “shock the conscience,” and thus be unconstitutional, within the United States — as long as that treatment does not constitute “torture” under the very narrow meaning of that term in the federal criminal law.
It’s taken a whole lot of work by a whole lot of people to chisel away the Dubya Squad’s weasel words and get them to admit this much.
On some occasions, they skipped the weasel words and went directly to flat-out lies, as when White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the world that President Bush had directed that “Consistent with American values and the principles of the Geneva Convention, the United States has treated and will continue to treat all Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees in Guantánamo Bay humanely and consistent with the principles of the Geneva Convention.”
Gonzales now admits that there was an unspoken “* does not apply to actions of the CIA or other agents of the U.S. outside of the armed services” footnote in that directive.
Details, details.
More striking were the arguments against torture by those skeptical of the nomination.
Two dominated.
One was that torture hurts the image of the United States in the world.
In the words of Senator Lindsey Graham, “I can tell you that it is a club that our enemies use, and we need to take that club out of their hand.”
Or in the words of Senator Herb Kohl, “winning the hearts and minds of the Arab world is vital to our success in the war on terror,” and “Photographs that have come out of Abu Ghraib have undoubtedly hurt those efforts.”
The second argument was that enemy forces would torture U.S. forces in retaliation.
In Biden’s words, “This is about the safety and security of American forces.”
Even Gonzales, who declined at every opportunity to repudiate the policies that had led to the torture, was ready to agree that Abu Ghraib had harmed the image of the United States.
But are these the fundamental reasons that torture is unacceptable?
Can this nation now understand pain only if it is experienced by Americans or, through some chain of consequences, it rebounds upon the United States?
Have all the people in the world but Americans become invisible to Americans?
Torture is not wrong because someone else thinks it is wrong or because others, in retaliation for torture by Americans, may torture Americans.
It is the torture that is wrong.
Torture is wrong because it inflicts unspeakable pain upon the body of a fellow human being who is entirely at our mercy.… To abuse or kill a person in such a circumstance is as radical a denial of common humanity as is possible.
It is repugnant to learn that one’s country’s military forces are engaging in torture.
It is worse to learn that the torture is widespread.
It is worse still to learn that the torture was rationalized and sanctioned in long memorandums written by people at the highest level of the government.
But worst of all would be ratification of this record by a vote to confirm one of its chief authors to the highest legal office in the executive branch of the government.
Less-curious and more-credulous members of Congress could once, with some justification, claim that they didn’t know the U.S. was practicing torture by policy.
Anyone who claims that now is either incurious to the point of willful ignorance or is shoveling snow — in either case, at this stage, a willing part of the conspiracy to torture.
The vote on whether to confirm Gonzales will be a good roll-call of those senators willing to join the conspiracy.
Alberto “Obsolete & Quaint” Gonzales released a few more written answers to questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Marty Lederman is on the case:
I’ve wondered how Secretary Rumsfeld, General Counsel Haynes, and other high-ranking DoD officials could have determined — as they did — that techniques such as waterboarding, forced nudity, threatening the death of family members, use of dogs to induce stress, etc., could possibly be lawful in light of (ⅰ) the Uniform Code of Military Justice; (ⅱ) the prohibition in Article 16 of the Convention on Torture against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; and (ⅲ) the President’s directive that the Armed Forces treat all detainees “humanely.”
Well, we still don’t know why the UCMJ doesn’t apply.
But we learned from Judge Gonzales’s earlier responses that the Administration does not think Article 16 applies in U.S. facilities overseas (such as Guantanamo).
And now we learn why the President’s “humaneness” directive is no obstacle to the use of such grotesque techniques.
Judge Gonzales writes that “the term ‘humanely’ has no precise legal definition,” but that, “[a]s a policy matter, I would define humane treatment as a basic level of decent treatment that includes such things as food, shelter, clothing and medical care.
I understand that the United States is providing this level of treatment for all detainees.”
If I’m understanding his answer correctly, Judge Gonzales is suggesting that by requiring the Armed Forces (but not, recall, the CIA) to provide “humane” treatment at a minimum, the President merely meant that detainees must be afforded “decent treatment that includes such things as food, shelter, clothing and medical care.”
Beyond that, apparently they can be waterboarded, they can be threatened with the death of their loved ones, dogs can be used to prey on their fears — and even the clothing that is otherwise part of the basic “decent treatment” can be stripped from them for certain periods — all without implicating the presidential directive.
Defining humaneness down.
, I described the upcoming vote on Gonzales’s nomination as being “a good roll-call of those senators willing to join the conspiracy” to authorize torture.
Apparently the Democrats, at least those on the Judiciary Committee, have had second thoughts about signing up on this list.
The vote to send Gonzales’s nomination to the full Senate was a party-line 10 to 8.
“People who wanted a public discussion of this issue of interrogation methods have had it, for almost a year now,” said John Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor who played a key role in helping craft the administration’s policies on torture when he was a Justice Department official .
“There has been debate, press leaks, hearings.
Sen. [John] Kerry could have attacked President Bush on torture during the election campaign, but in fact, he tried to outflank the president on the right on terrorism.
Congress could have expanded the statute on terrorism to tighten interrogation rules, but it hasn’t. The election and the confirmation of Gonzales are a sign of general support of the administration’s anti-terrorism policies, which include interrogation and the Patriot Act.”
Excuses, excuses: Between working hard at this contract and experiencing a two-day internet outage at home, I haven’t been able to update The Picket Line much lately — which is too bad, because there has been plenty to write about.
As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.”
He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function.
They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.”
If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment.
He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.”
He said, “The issue is dying out.
The public has had its referendum.”
And yet there’s activism afoot:
With the sort of astute planning that has made the U.S. peace movement so effective, Northern California War Tax Resistance held a workshop for prospective war tax resisters in the middle of the afternoon on .
Still, the event attracted a dozen people who were determined to start resisting their taxes and were eager to find out how.
The invitation for some of these troops effectively to desert comes from members of the Irish parliament and even a former Irish army commandant, Ed Horgan — who made it clear he wouldn’t make such a suggestion lightly.… ¶ Irish and international law on refugees makes it clear that soldiers are not excluded from making asylum applications, which can be made to any Irish police officer (Garda) or immigration official.
Soldiers who face being forced to obey “unlawful orders” are explicitly mentioned in the refugee statutes.
And that’s just what I was able to filter from the krill while I was busy doing other things.
Remember the dead guy on ice in those Abu Ghraib photos?
The one that Charles Graner and Lynndie England posed with in their beaming smiles and their green surgical-gloved hands in thumbs-up poses?
Today the Associated Press told us the story of how he died.
Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA’s “ghost” detainees at Abu Ghraib — prisoners being held secretly by the agency.…
Al-Jamadi died in a prison shower room during about a half-hour of questioning, before interrogators could extract any information, according to the documents, which consist of statements from Army prison guards to investigators with the military and the CIA’s Inspector General’s office.
One Army guard, Sgt. Jeffery Frost, said the prisoner’s arms were stretched behind him in a way he had never before seen.
Frost told investigators he was surprised al-Jamadi’s arms “didn’t pop out of their sockets,” according to a summary of his interview.
Frost and other guards had been summoned to reposition al-Jamadi, who an interrogator said was not cooperating.
As the guards released the shackles and lowered al-Jamadi, blood gushed from his mouth “as if a faucet had been turned on,” according to the interview summary.
The military pathologist who ruled the case a homicide found several broken ribs and concluded al-Jamadi died from pressure to the chest and difficulty breathing.
Andrew Sullivan, one of the few conservatives who seem to be in the least bit troubled by this, notes:
Why is that detail so important (that it was a CIA interrogator who ordered the abuse)?
Because the Dubya Squad have been trying hard to distinguish the ostensibly unauthorized torture that we have photographic evidence of — the shenanigans at Abu Ghraib — from the “our lawyers tell us it’s not torture” that they’ve authorized the CIA to conduct or oversee.
If the CIA was running interrogations at Abu Ghraib itself using techniques that have already been ruled torture by international courts (Turkey got caught using the “Palestinian hanging” technique) — there goes that attempt at an excuse.
But the Dubya Squad’s main strategy in all of this has been neither obfuscation nor secrecy — the size of the tip of the iceberg that’s already leaked out amazes me.
Nope: their strategy is to assume that even if the truth comes out, the American people and the other branches of government probably won’t make a big deal about it.
So far, it’s working.
Susan Pace Hamill, a law professor at the University of Alabama, has spent a lot of time trying to persuade people that Jesus (yes, the Jesus) had a strong opinion about tax policy that just happens to coincide for the most part with the sentiments of liberal Democrats.
Seriously.
Check this out:
I… provide a complete theological framework that can be applied to any tax policy structure.… I prove that tax policy structures meeting the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics must raise adequate revenues that not only cover the needs of the minimum state but also ensure that all citizens have a reasonable opportunity to reach their potential.
Among other things, reasonable opportunity requires adequate education, healthcare, job training and housing.… I also establish that flat and consumption tax regimes which shift a large part of the burden to the middle classes are immoral.
Consequently, Judeo-Christian based tax policy requires the tax burden to be allocated under a moderately progressive regime.
I discuss the difficulties of defining that precisely and also conclude that confiscatory tax policy approaching a socialistic framework are also immoral.
Inspired perhaps by the mighty guffaw that Hamill’s scholarship gave me, I decided to take another look at what Jesus actually said about tax policy.
I wasn’t able to find the verse where he says “give unto Cæsar what Cæsar needs to provide job training and housing to those of his subjects in Judaea who need an opportunity to reach their potential” but I’m no biblical scholar.
In in Bolivia, a Jehovah’s Witness named Alfredo Díaz Bustos was drafted into the military and attempted to avoid military service as a conscientious objector.
The authorities, recognizing no conscientious objector exemption, granted him an exemption certificate that classified him as unqualified for service, but demanded a special “military tax required of persons declared exempt from military service.”
He asked to be released from this requirement for the same reasons of conscience that did not allow him to serve the military directly.
This was denied.
Bustos then appealed to international law, in this case the American Convention on Human Rights.
Incredibly, it worked! The government of Bolivia backed down and released Bustos from any obligation either to serve in the military or to pay the exemption tax.
Furthermore, the government agreed to formally recognize the right to conscientious objection to military service.
With that in mind, I noted a handful of confrontational real-world protests that seem to be reaching for new tactics and new targets, and which seem worth keeping an eye on:
I’ve been letting wood s lot accumulate in my feed reader like so many New Yorkers on the end table.
Here are some fragments I stumbled on while catching up:
I daily encounter graduate students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism.
Yet these students’ sentient years, unlike the formative years of their teachers, have been spent entirely in a xenophobic Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush America where “liberal” is, if anything, a taboo category and where “secular humanism” is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect, while a vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct intercourse with multiple invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and God.
…[T]he force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context, like the one assumed in Foucault’s early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place.
Why bother exposing the rules of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system?
In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret.
Despite what the American left believes, we cannot blame politicians and corporations for everything.
At some point waaaaay back there it was our human and social responsibility to stand up, throw ourselves “onto the wheels of the machine,” as Mario Savio put it forty years ago.
And we did not.
Instead we allowed and continue to allow the persecution of those who did or still do.…
…For instance, there is the cherished notion among liberal and left leaning Americans that all this is recent, and sprang up simply because George Bush was elected.
I don’t think so friends.
No one man can establish cruelty in 300 million people in eight years.
He can only heighten it by squeezing the people harder, encouraging fear and alienation and coldness of spirit.
Biden is one of the immense tribe of Washington savants who were gung-ho for the invasion of Iraq but who edged away from their support once it became less popular.
Of course, the opposition is not based on any belated appreciation of the invasion’s illegality, immorality, ruinous cost, or geopolitical imbecility.
The default “opposition mode” is to criticize the invasion because there weren’t enough troops.
Morally, this argument is cretinous, like condemning Operation Barbarossa solely because the Wehrmacht didn’t go in heavy enough.…
To explain why the American political class invades the wrong countries, indemnifies criminals, picks people like Joe Biden for responsible positions, and engages in so many other destructive acts, we modestly propose Werther’s Law, or the Iron Law of Adverse Political Selection: in decadent political systems the most damaging policy option tends to be the one chosen.
The problem with American style democracy is that it is all well and good to say, “I owe no man anything.
And no man owes me.
I am free unto myself.”
And, unfortunately, alone.
No grasp of the common weal.
And so we are left to depend entirely upon the state to do everything man does collectively, while we are each left to seek out the latest personal comfort or amusement.
As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience.
That is not our problem.… Our problem is civil obedience.
Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.
And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war.
Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty.
Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.
That’s our problem.…
We are talking about obedience to law — law, this marvelous invention of modern times, which we attribute to Western civilization, and which we talk about proudly.
The rule of law, oh, how wonderful, all these courses in Western Civilization all over the land.
Remember those bad old days when people were exploited by feudalism?
Everything was terrible in the Middle Ages — but now we have Western civilization, the rule of law.
The rule of law has regularized and maximized the injustice that existed before the rule of law, that is what the rule of law has done.
Let us start looking at the rule of law realistically, not with that metaphysical complacency with which we always examined it before.
When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this.
We have to transcend these national boundaries in our thinking.
Nixon and Brezhnev have much more in common with one another than we have with Nixon.
J. Edgar Hoover has far more in common with the head of the Soviet secret police than he has with us.
It’s the international dedication to law and order that binds the leaders of all countries in a comradely bond.
That’s why we are always surprised when they get together — they smile, they shake hands, they smoke cigars, they really like one another no matter what they say.
It’s like the Republican and Democratic parties, who claim that it’s going to make a terrible difference if one or the other wins, yet they are all the same.
Basically, it is us against them.…
We are asked, “What if everyone disobeyed the law?”
But a better question is, “What if everyone obeyed the law?”
And the answer to that question is much easier to come by, because we have a lot of empirical evidence about what happens if everyone obeys the law, or if even most people obey the law.
What happens is what has happened, what is happening.…
We all grow up with the notion that the law is holy.
They asked Daniel Berrigan’s mother what she thought of her son’s breaking the law.
He burned draft records — one of the most violent acts of this century — to protest the war, for which he was sentenced to prison, as criminals should be.
They asked his mother who is in her eighties, what she thought of her son’s breaking the law.
And she looked straight into the interviewer’s face, and she said, “It’s not God’s law.”
Now we forget that.
There is nothing sacred about the law.
Think of who makes laws.
The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond.
If you have any notion about the sanctity and loveliness and reverence for the law, look at the legislators around the country who make the laws.
Sit in on the sessions of the state legislatures.
Sit in on Congress, for these are the people who make the laws which we are then supposed to revere.
Although Albert Camus died before baby boomers took charge of the world and placed their redoubtable imprimatur on the political scene, he foreshadowed their eventual devolution in this prescient statement:
“Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history.
It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity.
And so explains the twentieth century.”…
We can’t blame Nixon any more, although it would be fun to still kick him around.
No, we have to look inward.
We’re the ones who created this mess.
We’re the ones who abrogated our political idealism and slowly but surely conformed to establishment power and corporate materialism.
And we’re the ones who allowed George W. Bush, a baby boomer of the worst sort, to slime his way into the presidency and bankrupt the country both economically and morally.
If all this talk of passivity and surrender by the multitude has got you down, check out this Boing Boing post… and then read the comments further down on the page.
Nausea and vomiting are very unpleasant, as well as socially awkward: Wouldn’t it be nice if we could abolish them?
Maybe we could find a drug that would successfully eliminate nausea, or develop a surgical technique that would interrupt the part of the nervous system that causes it.
Well, maybe we could (naysays a naysayer) but we wouldn’t want to.
Nausea and vomiting, as unpleasant as they are, are important tools in the arsenal of an animal that doesn’t want to be poisoned to death.
If you were to get rid of them, you’d be much more likely to do yourself some even worse harm by digesting something you oughtn’t.
Some folks are beginning to wonder whether the same is true for depression.
It’s unpleasant, socially awkward, certainly worth avoiding if possible, but maybe is also a valuable, evolutionary-honed response that should not be artificially repressed as a matter of course.
Depression seems to promote analytical, introspective thinking, and careful cost-benefit analysis, and to reduce sources of distraction.
It may be a natural way for people in a sub-par place in life to “cocoon” and develop a new game plan.
I was on antidepressants for a while, and they seemed to help give me a boost out of problems with periodic depression that I’d had at least since adolescence and that seemed to be getting worse.
I haven’t had any trouble with depression for years now, and though I might have just grown out of it, I’m inclined to give the antidepressants some credit for introducing me to a new headspace and allowing me to develop some skills in living a non-depressed life.
On the other hand, I remember the time when I was on antidepressants also as being a time when I was uncharacteristically callous towards other people.
Superficially, my social behavior had improved — I was more outgoing, less withdrawn, more conversational — but on a deeper level, it had become more pathological — I was more likely to disregard my friends’ inconvenient needs, and more willing to participate in back-biting and other malicious intrigue.
I was also more reckless — less cognizant or less concerned about the possible negative consequences (to myself or others) of my actions.
Again, maybe some of this was just a phase I was going through anyway.
But, again, I’m inclined to give antidepressants a lot of the credit.
I’m not certain these things are common side effects of antidepressants, but I have my suspicions.
They aren’t the sort of things that would show up as side effects during drug testing protocols, I don’t think, so even if these sorts of side effects were near-universal, it might go without much notice.
I can’t help but think that giving 10% of Americans drugs that suppress their ability to boost their analytical, introspective problem-solving in times of distress, and that promote callous, uncaring, anti-social behavior, has been a dangerous experiment.
