Book Review: The Dark Side

Jane Mayer sums up her book on "The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals" with the opinion of Phillip Zelikow, a historian and lawyer who had been Executive Director of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and then aide to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. His view:

In time, [Zelikow] predicted, the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen as akin to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It happened, he believed, in much the same way, for many of the same reasons. As he put it, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools." (335)

The Dark Side describes this "descent into torture." It's a disturbing look at the way "zealots and fools" in the Bush Administration – folk like Cheney, Addington, and Rumsfeld, along with a slew of people seduced or bullied by their rhetoric (it's hard to say where Bush falls in this list – driving policy, or seduced by it) – created quasi-legal justifications for the use of torture against suspected terrorists – many, if not most, of whom were innocent, sometimes obviously so – and then subverted Congress's and the Supreme Court's attempts to reign in the abuses.

Mayer's title comes from an appearance by Cheney on Meet the Press just a few days after 9/11 (Sept. 16, 2001, to be precise):

"We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will," Cheney explained.... "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies – if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh , so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objective." (9-10)

I'm embarrassed to admit that in the immediate shadow of 9/11, I wouldn't have been too dismayed by such rhetoric. The "fear and anxiety" that Zelikow points to, and the sense of helplessness, made it easy to want a strong response, even one that dealt with the bad guys on their terms. But, like many, I (finally!) grew increasingly uncomfortable when bits and pieces of what this "dark side" comprised found its way into the press: the "black sites" (secret CIA prisons), "extraordinary rendition" (exporting suspects to countries know to use torture), Guantánamo and its lack of due process for "unlawful enemy combatants," and – of course – Abu Ghraib.

Even so, I had no clue about the breadth and depth of the Administration's disregard for the rule of law. The problem is that any one of these issues, though raising serious concern, could be dismissed as a mistake, maybe even a right-minded one. But Mayer's book brings all these issues together, building a narrative that demonstrates a concerted expansion and abuse of executive power that flouted international law – not to mention U.S. law and the Constitution that executive power is supposedly sworn to uphold.

Waterboarding offers a good case study for what I'm talking about here. There was lots of discussion – in Congress, in the press – about whether or not waterboarding should be considered torture. Some people decried the practice unequivocally; for example, though I'm not a fan, John McCain made his opposition perfectly clear, even while other Republican candidates waffled around him:

All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today [in Myanmar].... It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture." (171)

Others supported waterboarding, in theory and/or practice, arguing that – in carefully supervised conditions, or with a short enough duration, or with the right motives – it does not rise to the level of torture and should therefore be part of U.S. interrogators' arsenal.

Mayer's book, though, suggests that this focus on waterboarding actually served as a distraction. Alberto Mora – General Counsel of the Navy and, in fact, a strong Bush supporter – reviewed transcripts of one interrogation and concluded that the media "focused too narrowly" on allegations of torture, especially on waterboarding (the "sine qua non of criminality"). The problem, for Mora, is the notion of "state-sanctioned cruelty":

"If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationships of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America – even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles." (219)

Focusing attention on waterboarding drew attention away from larger, more important issues, both at a macro and a micro level. At the micro level, it drew attention away from the (appalling) laundry lists of sanctioned interrogation techniques, in which each item might pass muster, but in combination with others – often the practice – clearly crossed the line. (I must emphasize that each item might pass muster; many items in these lists are decried by human rights groups as being clearly examples of torture.) And at the macro level, it drew attention away from deeper human rights questions about whether we even want to be playing in the neighborhood of what Mora called "cruelty" – and not cruelty in an abstract, touchy-feely sense, but as a Constitutional issue of human rights.

As with the issue of waterboarding, it's easy to get lost in individual issues – losing sight of the forest, as the cliché goes, for the trees. Mayer's book brings the forest into focus, highlighting patterns that can only materialize when seen in relationship to a larger set of issues.

In the end, Mayer convinced me that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is right:

When asked what he thought of President Bush's policy on torture, he peered over his glasses and paused [ah, purple prose!]. Schlesinger's The Imperial Presidency had described Richard Nixon as pushing the outer limits of presidential power.... With his trademark bow tie askew, Schlesinger considered, and finally said, "No position has done more damage to the American reputation in the world – ever." (9)

Book Review, sort of: A Scanner Darkly

I'm not going to review Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, other than to say that if you haven't read it, you should. It's a wonderful mix of humor, pathos, and paranoia — and Dick's paranoia is among the best, up there with Delillo's and Pynchon's.

(Speaking of Pynchon: unlike The Disappeared, which I reviewed earlier, Dick's prose does not suffer from being read while still working through Against the Day.)

Instead, I'm going to take a look at how A Scanner Darkly caused me to re-examine a position I've held (and taught) for some time about what critical theorists call the "expressive theory" of writing or, more generally, art.

Ask students what writing is, and the majority will fall squarely within this "expressive" theory: writing is expressing your feelings, presenting your ideas, showing what you think, etc. (And yes, they almost always use the second person pronoun.)

Students, whether they know it or not, are largely 19th-century Romantics.

In a comp class, the expressive theory is seen most clearly when students say, "I know what I want to say; I just can't find the words." This complaint assumes that they have their idea preformed, ready, just waiting to be spilled out onto the page, and if they could just find the words to match up with that idea, to ex-press it, to press it out, then their thoughts would be accurately reflected on the page, and the reader would know what they think. And, of course, they'd automatically get an "A."

Now, I suppose there are instances where finding the words really is the problem. A Spanish speaker, for example, may have well-formed ideas in Spanish but not be able to get them down in English. But for the most part, I don't buy it. Students often can't find the words to match their thoughts because their thoughts aren't clear enough to find words to match them – even assuming language is up to that task.

In Creative Writing, it's no different. Poems are meant to express your feelings, so the trick is simply to find the words that do that. Yet even in narrative or drama, where students are consciously working in fiction, students will say, as one said this semester, that no matter how hard you try, when you write, a part of you will be revealed in the writing. So don't buck it, bucko. Write, as the adage goes, what you know.

Express yourself.

One of the most important things I offer as an English instructor — more important than issues of organization, or clarity, or focus, and certainly more important than mechanics or grammar — is the theoretical view that writing is not merely expression.

Of course, I'm not saying that writing is never expression. But students need to understand that writing can be — and, I would argue, almost always is — much more. Writing is thinking; we think by writing. Putting words on the page, whether by pen or word processor, is the process of thinking. Students need to see themselves as working through their ideas, not merely reflecting them.

Why is this distinction so important? After all, if a student "works through" her thoughts, the resulting writing subsequently expresses those thoughts, right?

There are several answers to this, but the one that I find most compelling involves issues of self-esteem and self-efficacy. Understanding that we think by writing can free students from that "stupid" feeling — expressed (yes, expressed) in that complaint I mentioned earlier: that they know what they want to say but just can't find the words to say it. Instead of believing that their struggle with language confirms that they just are "no good at English," for example, students can see that their language will struggle most when they are grappling with new, complex, or sophisticated thoughts. Bad writing becomes a sign of growth, not inadequacy.

Clean, clear, concise poetry or prose thus may express deep and provocative thought, and with the best authors, who make writing look effortless, it's probably true. But it also may express shallow, cliched, and stale thought. Student writing, in my view, should struggle.

But the problem is not merely that the expressive view is generally wrong; it serves as a bad excuse. Students write bad poems and then dodge criticism by saying, "But that's what I felt." Memoirs, or short stories written from personal experience, remain beyond critique because "that's how it happened." And so on.

I hit this pretty hard in my classes by designing writing assignments that force students not to write about themselves, and by challenging the expressive theory whenever it raises its head. And I rarely, if ever, regret doing so.

Enter A Scanner Darkly, which Dick announces explicitly arises from personal experience. In fact, in his afterword, he announces, "I myself, I am not a character in the novel; I am the novel."

Talk about hackles rising. This seems to challenge everything I try to instill in my students. It took a couple weeks – and writing this blog entry – to realize that the "rules" I'm inscribing in my class aren't really rules at all; they are guidelines or suggestions, and as such should be tested, challenged.

Basically, I lost sight of the pedagogical nature of my position. It took A Scanner Darkly to remind me that I don't want so much to squelch self-expression as simply to expand beyond the "bad excuse" reflex that discourages revision or openness to critique.

A Scanner Darkly does feel like it expresses a life – and it does so better than just about any biography, autobiography, or memoir that I've read, despite its departures from the conventions of realism. The skilled writer, I am reminded, need not fear expression.

And since a number of my students are, in fact, quite skilled, perhaps I need to fear it a bit less as well.

Republican Kitsch

I don't really want to say much about the Republicans right now. I'm bemused by the popularity of Limbaugh, who was just awarded "Defender of the Constitution" at CPAC 2009. And then there's the charge that Congressional Republicans' refusal to play nicely somehow marks a failure on Obama's part to fulfill his promise of bi-partisanship.

John Taplin's comments on Dying Conservative Intellect help clear things up for me. I especially enjoyed--in both the sense of anagnorisis and, frankly, gloating--his comments on how conservatism has degenerated into Kitsch:

When the best selling intellectual tract at the CPAC show is written by Joe the Plumber, one can posit that the intellectual movement called conservatism has evolved into "Kitsch"--"a creative gesture that merely imitates the superficial appearances of thought (via repeated conventions and formula), thus, it is uncreative and unoriginal." The great Milan Kundera described Kitsch this way.

Kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult with which to come to terms, offering instead a sanitized view of the world, in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions".

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptable consensus; by contrast, "everything that infringes on kitsch," including individualism, doubt, and irony, "must be banished for life" in order for kitsch to survive.

Amen.