A Stranger Here Myself

a stain on our nation's history

Posted on October 18th, 2006 by Karen.

I try not to post a lot of politics in this space, because I get embarassingly earnest and I dislike public ranting, but I don't know what to do with all this anger.

What sparks the anger is policy decisions screwing over people's lives in concrete ways. But underneath that is a subtler anger over how easy it is to squelch the democratic process in this country. Governments will always screw you over, but outside of a dictatorship, we shouldn't be feeling quite this powerless to affect anything that they do. No amount of disagreement, protest or discussion seems to matter. In dealing with this administration, you've got two choices: either accept it/ride it out/be apathetic, or have your head explode day after day.

It comes down to George Bush's personal style: he's bizarrely impervious to criticism, aggressively contemptuous of dissent. You're with him or you're against him; he doesn't even pretend to acknowledge that there are ideas, alternatives, ideologies in the world other than his own. He seems utterly uninterested in the social or moral repercussions of killing people, except to frame the action in terms of triumph. He comes across to me as a sociopath, boastful and sadistic, entirely lacking in compassion, self-doubt, or empathy.

As a pivotal moment in understanding what kind of man he is, I always think of the interview with Tucker Carlson, quoted by Molly Ivins in Shrub. Bush, then governor of Texas with a record number of state-sanctioned executions under his belt, was asked about Karla Faye Tucker. She had been on death row for murder committed during a robbery; during in her fourteen years in prison she'd become a model prisoner, a born-again Christian, counselling other prisoners and generally working to redeem her life. She'd asked the state governor to commute her death sentence to life in prison, and the case had attracted international attention from many people (even the Pope) who appealed to Bush to show mercy and let her live. He didn't, and she was killed. Carlson wrote:

In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker.

"Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?'"

"What was her answer?" I wonder.

"'Please,'" Bush whimpers, like a repentant preacher, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "'don't kill me.'"

I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.

This is a repulsive moment by any human standards, and while he's learned to be less blatant about it, that callous smirking jerk is never too far away from his public persona. As I see it, there's a direct line from there to Abu Ghraib. Bush's attitude characterises his style of governing, carries over into the people he surrounds himself with, and sets a tone for the population he influences. It's as though he's telling the country that it's cool to be a complete asshole, and people respond to that message. His presidency is, depressingly, the clearest example of "leadership" I have ever witnessed.

John Niland of the Texas Defender Service said, "If there's one thing that struck me — as somebody originally from Texas and then returning from out of state — it was the apparent glee with which the executions were carried out … on several days holding two executions, as if one had lost the impact. Sometimes it just seemed that rather than [the state] seeing the executions as carrying out an unfortunate aspect of the law, it was as though they enjoyed it."

It feels like nothing short of setting yourself on fire in front of the White House can make an impact on the juggernaut, and even that would just get scoffed off as terrorist activism. Short of mass immolation, do we just wait out the awful until 2009, hope we'll get a better option then? I'm proud of Senator Feingold, and I suppose it's too much to ask that he filibuster this bill on top of everything else he's doing, but what the hell happened to the rest of them? What does it take to get people worked up enough to undermine the illusion of mandate?

A lot of this anger is going into my book, because how could it not, though it's not an overtly political story. I believe in fiction as one of the most powerful ways to help frame a popular understanding of reality, but fiction's hold on the imagination tends to fade unless we're given exciting new stories for our time. I hope someone's busy right this moment scribbling up a new 1984. Because dystopias-R-Us:

Bush Signs Bill on Terror Prosecution

The Supreme Court ruled in June that trying detainees in military tribunals violated U.S. and international law, so Bush urged Congress to change the law during a speech on Sept. 6 in the White House East Room attended by families of the Sept. 11, 2001, victims. He also insisted that the law authorize CIA agents to use tough — yet unspecified — methods to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Six weeks later, after a highly publicized dispute with key Republicans over the terms of the bill, Bush signed the new law "in memory of the victims of September the 11th."

[…]

Civil libertarians and leading Democrats decried the law as a violation of American values. The American Civil Liberties Union said it was "one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history." Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin said, "We will look back on this day as a stain on our nation's history."

"It allows the government to seize individuals on American soil and detain them indefinitely with no opportunity to challenge their detention in court," Feingold said. "And the new law would permit an individual to be convicted on the basis of coerced testimony and even allow someone convicted under these rules to be put to death."

A couple of articles I linked in my previous post on the subject:

Bruce Ackerman in the L.A. Times:

Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops "during an armed conflict," it also allows him to seize anybody who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Vladimir Bukovsky in the WaPo:

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

I wanted to quote the entire Bukovsky piece; you really should read it if you haven't already.

I'm fascinated by American history, and if I could time-travel, I'd visit this country's past and future. I'd want to visit our own turn-of-millenium era, if I weren't already living here; I do believe that right now has a lot going for it. 2006 is a dynamic period, socially and technologically, and in some ways things are getting better. But it's also the first time in American history that Congress has effectively permitted the use of evidence obtained through torture.

Interesting times!

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