Untitled Document

18 May 2004

Wrestling With a Pig

The thunderstorms cleared out the humidity last night. I roused briefly at three, glanced at the clock and drifted off again, strangely content, considering the news of the last two weeks, and the prospects of what is still to come.

The alarm clock did its raucous thing at 0445 and I got up and ground the coffee and poured the fine grounds in to the white filter in the trusty blue drip percolator. I could here it bubbling over the classical music as I turned up the radio and lay down just until the coffee is done.

I listened in a gentle haze as the music ended and the crisp announcement for the BBC came on. Dan Damon was not reading this morning, instead, there was a pert young woman with crisp British diction. I thought about Vicki Barker, and the contrast with her brisk American accent.

It is about velocity in the broadcast business, and I have little of that this morning. My car is in the shop, not ready, so I do not have to plunge into the mass transportation system and retrieve it before the start of the business day.

I do not have to be at the Council meeting until 1000 this morning. It would be pointless to drive downtown only to turn around and drive back out to the suburban Hilton.

So I lay on my back in the darkness, listening to the bubbling in the kitchen.

There was no catastrophe to report. There was only analysis of horrors past.

There were reports that Sarin nerve gas had been found in the aftermath of an improvised explosive device detonated by an American bomb squad. Two troopers were exposed, but not seriously, they say.

Secretary Rumsfeld was cautious about what it all meant, having been burned so well and so often in the past.

"It could have been a very old 155mm round from the days of the Iran War," he said. "We are doing some additional testing."

The very existence of the Sarin would validate the twisted path by which we got into this war, so I was surprised that it did not get more play. I suppose they have to be absolutely certain, or they could be completely wrong.

But all the reports of suspicious "white powder" I got after the Anthrax attack, at the Department of Health and Human Services and at the Department of Homeland Security, they were all wrong.

And will be. Until the first one that isn't.

I lay back and let the coolness of the fan wash over me caressing my flesh. The air is moist and soft and cool. The passage of the great storms last night has brought temporary peace in the seasonal war in the heavens, as we seem to have today in the affairs of men.

There were reports from Baghdad of first-hand survivors of the brutality in abu Ghraib prison. It sounds exactly like what was reported the first time, nothing new, yet the testimony is reported with breathless intensity. It was what it was. There were no pliers, or industrial wood chippers, or swords or dismemberment or electrocutions. No tongues ripped out.

No graphic beheadings caught on video.

The court marshals in Baghdad begin tomorrow, and the soldiers who took their own pictures and sealed their own doom will begin. The radio speculates that the former prisoners can attend the trials of those who are about to be prisoners.

I can't believe that will actually happen, but it is an interesting concept in justice. The testimony seemed a little nostalgic for the days when Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay fed prisoners into the wood-chipper.

One captive said he had been tortured by the Baathists. He said that while they twisted his flesh, they did not make him disrobe.

So in that was the difference, and precisely the point. The abuse had been to humiliate. The pictures were part of it, and the hajasa unclean dogs, and the nudity and the rock music and the sleep deprivation.

It sounds to me like someone did some homework on what was liable to bother Muslim men, and I think about techniques intended to quickly extract information. We did the loud music thing to Manuel Noriega, the erstwhile Dictator of All Panama, when we had him holed up in the Papal Nuncio's Residence in Panama City.

The West Virginian Military Police were eager learners. Though it occurs to me that this sort of thing can go on right here, all around us. There were 2.1 million people in state or federal prison in 2002. At the same time there were 1.5 million in uniform. Even if you throw in the Reserves, there are more people more people behind bars in American than there are under arms.

The prison populations are so huge that the guards have turned over middle management of the populations to contractors- the leadership of the inmates themselves.

Of course the point in the slammer is not to extract information- by the time you get to the long-term storage the time for that is long past.

I can't but think of the proud British Regular troops surrendering to the Colonials at Yorktown, turning their hats around and band playing "The World Turned Upside Down" as they marched out of the lines and into parole.

They were not abused, unless you count the honorable pain of surrender. Those regiments returned to Great Britain and fought again in the Empire's wars. I have seen their battle pennants, before and after Yorktown, in the chapel at the fortress of Edinburg in Scotland.

They kept their essence, their humanity, in the most uniquely human of businesses.

I lay on my bed, exulting in the languor of my skin. Maybe that is the nexus of this titanic clash of cultures. Perhaps if the Muslims were more like the French, this would not be happening.

An appreciation for the body, for the egalitarian nature of the relations between men and women, and the nature of love. No need to hide yourself from a vengeful deity.

What an odd line of thinking with which to come to consciousness.

One thing you can say about this war on terror, it has revealed a lot more about us and them than anyone needed to know.

I'd like to forget the lessons, or not to have learned them at all. Because of the many things this is, it is not a war on terror.

It is a war on people, us and them.

Some of them started it. We need to kill them. It is just awfully hard to sort out who is who.

They say that when you are wrestling with a pig, sometimes the people watching have a hard time telling who is who. It would be a better analogy if pigs were not considered unclean, though I am told that they fastidious animals.

Or maybe that was exactly the point.