Reverse Torture Porn

(X-posted over the Edge of the American West.)

I challenge anyone currently being critical of Wesley Clark to disprove his point on its face.  I don't want to hear anything about Clark's own military record or Barack Obama's lack of one.*  I want you to list the specific executive qualities cultivated by twenty-three bombing missions and five years in a POW camp.

Yes, I'll hold.

Zoom zap a do do walla do dop diddly do dum dum dum dap da dap da doom—

Hi, I was waiting to—yes, I'll hold.

Do do do doop da da dap dop dop diddly do dapa dapa dapa dap zoom a zoom—

Hello?  No, I don't want to be transferred to—yes, I'll hold.

Bam bam biddly bam dop dop bam oof oof zoom zoom boom a dam dam dam—

I don't need to speak to your supervisor thank you very much.  But I would like an answer.  Because you know what I think?  Your addiction to torture porn has become so all-consuming it now encompasses its opposite: reverse torture porn. 

For almost six years, you've drifted off to sleep play-acting Jack Bauer.  A dark foreigner planted a ticking bomb in a Major American City and only you can discover its location before millions die.  You tumesce at first thought of the necessary force this mission requires. Which method will you use?  You weigh the pros and cons of all the law allows, but the bomb is ticking, so you consider those it forbids.  You delight in cataloging the sadistic acts the situation necessitates. Your decision made, you apply the screws, water, electricity, heat, cold, Manilow, &c.  You save America.  You are a hero.  Men want to be you, women to be with you.  You fall asleep.

But just as legal coercion lost its luster, so too have the techniques implemented outside the law.  You can do no more harm to these imagined bodies without imagining yourself a murderer, so you shift from the torturer to the tortured.  Where before the tortured man made war upon America, in John McCain, mind and body are broken in its service.  Your heart swells with pride when you consider his sacrifice.  Your beloved car battery acquires menace, as the means by which you once saved America nightly becomes the means by which they would have you betray it. 

You are now addicted to reverse torture porn, and John McCain is your enabler.  You are incapable of thinking about politics outside a primal scene of human suffering.  You shape your policy in rooms whose walls perspire, on improvised furniture carelessly shat on a bloodstained concrete floor, and you ignore the damnable hypocrisy of it all.**  Whatever McCain learned in a hole like this qualifies him to lead the free world.  We teach terrorists something different.

What exactly?  I don't know.  You don't either.  But it's categorically different than what McCain learned, whatever that was; and whatever that was, it is now a quality desired in a President; and because whatever it is, Obama lacks it, McCain is the better candidate. 

I think that about covers it.

---

*The comparison doesn't work because, as Clark himself said: "Barack is not—he is not running on the fact that he has made these national security pronouncements. He's running on his other strengths. He's running on the strengths of character, on the strengths of his communication skills, on the strengths of his judgment—and those are qualities that we seek in our national leadership." 

**Overwritten, certainly, but considering I initially wrote "walls perspire fungal rot," you should be thankful I somehow managed to rein myself in.

Comments

[Darleen Click]

Oh for heaven's sake, Scott, one would think you never heard the phrase "damned by faint praise."

[SEK]

I have, but I'm not sure why it's relevant. Who's damning who, here? Clark damning McCain? Obama damning Clark? Still, I note that you didn't accept the challenge. Not that I'm keeping a list, mind you.*

*I am.

[happyfeet]

Jeez it's like you're prejudiced against strawmen or something. Wesley put forward a perfectly good one and the least you can do is acknowledge it I think. Experience shapes leadership and wisdom but more importantly in this context it informs character. McCain's experience as a POW was really unpleasant and involved extensive dental work after. However it impacted the guy he is now is unknowable, but no less real for that. Baracky's bad experience is he's just mad cause he never had no daddy. In terms of compare and contrast, I think McCain's experience probably informs his views on national security and military issues every but as much as Baracky's does.

[happyfeet]

Oh. *bit* I mean.

[David R. Block]

I did not know that McCain had set those criteria forth as executive experience material. The first I heard of it, Clark set it forth as such. It's preemptive (sorry, I know how you hate preemption) media preening. So I don't know why one would think that, but you need to ask General Clark.

This is, IMHO, just like the preemptive (sorry, I know how you hate preemption) playing of the race card by Obama before a single McCain commercial has hit the air.

It's offputting and insulting. But it's OK if you do that to a Republican.

[happyfeet]

And also it's not irrelevant that Wesley Clark is a big girl who just wanted to shake his Obama pom-poms and really hadn't thought about this nonsense before it came babbling girlishly out of his mouth on the tv.

[Ahistoricality]

I'm reading Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible right now.

I'm not sure that's entirely relevant to the situation, but it has something to do with the resonances the writing touches off at the moment.

The best I can say about military experience -- POW time being part and parcel of it, in many ways -- as furher-bildung (and I just mean that in the sense of "leader"; just because it's German doesn't mean it's a Nazi reference!) is that dealing with the military and paramilitary is a significant (much more so lately, it seems) part of the job, and the active experience of it should give the erstwhile candidate both some empathy for the people under their command (though they have many more civil servants in that category, they rarely send them into dangerous situations, except for IRS agents) and some communicative and leadership skills which will ease that relationship somewhat.

But after a while that expires and it's overshadowed by policy, character, allies, etc.

[happyfeet]

And you know what else? I don't think I like your tone. Flip and impertinent you are, Mr. SEK.

[JPool]

Ignoring the visiting shouters, who seem to have migrated over to EAW anyway...

I would think that reverse torture porn has a much longer history in representational culture, going back at least to the WWII German interrogation scenarios of the 1950s. Withstanding the worst that the enemy can throw at you nicely combines American notions of masculinity with Christian martyrdom fantasies. It'd be interesting to set something roughly coeval like Alias against 24, in terms of representation of torture.

[KWK]

I think Clark's statements are tactically similar to Charlie Black's comments last week that another terrorist attack would give McCain a bump in the polls.
Tacky, yes; but probably also true. It seems like people are worked up by the idea of McCain's military service somehow being denigrated, even if Clark actually has a reasonable point.

How does that saying go, "the first casualty of Politics is the truth"?

[Ahistoricality]

Actually, it's the first casualty of war. Truth and politics haven't been on speaking terms in some time.

[David R. Block]

Truth and politics would not recognize each other.

[todd.]

Deep Thoughts with David R. Block is brought to you by Doritos.

[Cash]

Three qualifications: First, leadership is an executive quality. John McCain demonstrated leadership in his conduct as a prisoner and also as the commander of a US Navy training squadron after the Vietnam War.

Secondly, I would argue that quality of character is an executive quality. When the executive makes a promise or signs up to a policy we need to have faith that he will stand by his promise. John McCain's conduct while a prisoner of war demonstrate quality of character in spades. He had the opportunity to be sent home early, but seeing that it would give propaganda points to the enemy he refused, sticking to the agreement that POWs would be released in the order of capture, meaning Everett Alvarez should have been the first to be released. McCain remained true to his country and to his fellow POWs.

Sen. Obama, on the other hand, has demonstrated he will stand by no one. He started off by throwing his grandmother under the bus to perform damage control regarding Rev. Wright. When he began to lose political support he threw Rev. Wright under the bus.

Third, moral courage. John McCain demonstrated moral courage throughout his ordeal as a prisoner of war.

Others' mileage may vary.

Cash

[David Block]

Doritos? Nah, Frito-Lay makes that awful (to my taste buds, anyway) Diet Pepsi. Brought to you by Dr. Pepper.