I'd Like To Take Dub & The Dickster Waterboarding!

"We do not torture" is a classic expression of Dub in full-blown bullshitting mode. Sumbitch tells so damn many lies that he can't distinguish a howler like that from all of the rest of the nonsense he spews daily. As Professor Peter Brooks explains, Dub has led us down the slippery slope of going from victims to torturers. Impeachment and conviction are too good for Dub. I vote for waterboarding the sumbitch until he spews no more bullshit. Ditto for The Dickster. We're the equivalent of the French oppressors in Algeria. If this is (fair & balanced) shame, so be it.


[x Slate]
Bush vs. Camus: What Albert Camus and the "little-ease" say about U.S. torture policies.
By Peter Brooks

In the intensifying debate on the U.S. treatment of detainees in its "war on terror," I find myself thinking of a key moment in the monologue of Albert Camus' abject narrator in his novel The Fall. That narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, "empty prophet for shabby times," tells his listener of the medieval prison cell known as le malconfort, the little-ease — a cell of "ingenious dimensions," not high enough to stand up in, not wide enough to lie down in. The prisoner had to spend his life crouching—a way to teach him, says Clamence, that he must be guilty, since innocence consists precisely in being able to move about freely.

It's impossible, Clamence claims, to conceive of a prisoner in the little-ease as innocent. "That innocence could be reduced to living all hunched up is an hypothesis I refuse to entertain for a single second." It would constitute a moral scandal to think that an innocent person could be punished in such a way. Such a possibility doesn't bear thinking about. It's much more comforting to assume that anyone in the little-ease must be, by definition, guilty.

Camus wrote The Fall during the Algerian War, when France was beginning to face a crisis of conscience over torture similar to what the United States faces now. Indeed, clear parallels exist between the French experience in Algeria and the American experience in Iraq: Like the war on terror, much of the French effort to pacify and retain Algeria was waged against a nearly invisible enemy that tended to melt into the landscape. Intelligence-gathering was crucial — and that led to torture.

The French complicity in torture eventually was publicly exposed and denounced in La Question, a firsthand account of his torture at the hands of the French army written by Henri Alleg, editor of the newspaper L'Alger Républicain. La Question was published in February 1958 and quickly banned by the French government—but not before it made its mark. No longer was it possible for the French public to refuse to see what was going on. It was the French equivalent of the New Yorker photos of Abu Ghraib and exploded upon the French conscience in much the same fashion.

An American observer of the various forms of detainee abuse that have been exposed in the past years—including secret prisons, "renditions" to foreign regimes that practice torture, and the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, such as water-boarding—could of course take Clamence's position: Anyone subjected to torture clearly deserves it. Such a person must be guilty. It is morally unacceptable to believe that anyone treated in such a way could be innocent.

While our administration may not be guilty of confining its prisoners in cells as horrible as the little-ease (though reports suggest that some approach that condition), the cells it has built at Guantanamo approximate the name for the deepest and dankest of prisons in medieval castles: les oubliettes, the places you threw people and forgot about them. These were the prisoners with no chance of ever leaving their cells; people with no prospect of legal process ahead of them, people without access to trial or appeal or the simplest forms of justice. In Guantanamo—a location chosen deliberately in order to put detainees beyond the reach of the law—our administration has created such a place of oblivion and fought all efforts to open it up to legal process. We don't yet know what other secret sites may harbor prisoners in still more unspeakable conditions.

The Bush administration's attitude, of course, is that we can't know, and don't ever need to know—because it insists, as did Clamence, that its designation of these prisoners as enemy combatants, terrorists, jihadists, is sufficient to justify such treatment. They should not have access to U.S. courts, and since they are not POWs they won't necessarily be returned home at the end of hostilities—which in any case have no foreseeable end, since the war on terror will presumably be ongoing forever. One suspects that the administration was as unprepared in its dealing with prisoners as it was with all the other sequels of the Afghan and Iraq wars. The prisoners have now become something of a burden and an embarrassment, not to mention an expense.

As for torture—however that word has been parsed by the administration, we know torture has occurred—Jean-Paul Sartre in response to Alleg's La Question made a point ominously pertinent to us today:

In 1943, in the Rue Lauriston (the Gestapo headquarters in Paris), Frenchmen were screaming in agony and pain: all France could hear them. In those days the outcome of the war was uncertain and we did not want to think about the future. Only one thing seemed impossible in any circumstances: that one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name.

I share Sartre's horror at what is being done in our name.

Camus was himself famously unable to take a clear stance on the French colonial war in Algeria—he was, after all, French and Algerian. The Fall is, among other things, an expression of anguish about the difficulty of making any claim to innocence. The repulsive figure of Clamence wants to implicate the whole of humanity in his own guilt—just as President Bush seems to want to implicate the American people in the decision to torture. Camus offers no clear or satisfying message in response to Clamence's insinuating vileness.

Clamence wants to proclaim the guilt of everyone—only generalized guilt can assuage his own culpability. In the wake of the Algerian war, the French were forced to continue to face up to their complicity in torture: Memoirs and histories have only confirmed Alleg's testimony and Sartre's verdict. It is not too difficult to foresee a day when Americans will also have to assess, in a sober retrospect we can't yet have, how their rulers dragged them into the torture regime.

As for Camus, earlier on, in an essay published in the newspaper Combat in 1946, he summed up the moral ground he was seeking in an arresting phrase: "Ni victimes ni bourreaux." In Dwight MacDonald's translation for the review Politics, Camus' phrase is "neither victims nor executioners." The word bourreau means torturer as well as executioner. "Neither victims nor torturers." From the one—from the legitimate American sense of victimization following 9/11—we have passed to the other. To the complicity with torture proposed by Bush and his rationalizers, there seems to me only one response: an absolute "no." As to Clamence's wily insinuations, so to our administration's renditions, secret prisons, and enhanced interrogations: no.

Peter Brooks teaches English and law at the University of Virginia.

Copyright © 2005 Slate

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Don't Know Much Geology

Fundamentalism in any shape is scary. Islamic fundamentalists and Protestant fundamentalists are intolerant and willing to punish heresy. The intelligent design crowd is the American Taliban; biologists and geologists beware. If this is (fair & balanced) dissent, so be it.

[x Salon]
Reformed School Girl
By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Christine Rosen attended a fundamentalist Christian school, but the doctrinaire teachings -- and the scary sex-ed classes -- couldn't stem the tide of her questions.


With all the hubbub about intelligent design these days, we don't seem to hear much about creationism. The word sounds musty. But while intelligent design is the theory that believers take out in public, you can't help suspecting it's creationism that many of them really love. So there's something refreshing in Christine Rosen's account of her fourth-grade science class at Keswick Christian School in the early '80s. In My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, Rosen recalls that the students had no need to lug around a science textbook. For geology lessons, they turned to Genesis 1:1. The way her teacher presented natural selection, it sounded more like an insult than a theory: "Evolution says we all come from apes and monkeys!" she exclaimed. "Who do you think is right, Darwin or God?"

In that face-off, the competitive edge enjoyed by omniscient beings was further enhanced by home team advantage. At Keswick, and in the surrounding town of St. Petersburg, Fla., religious faith was as pervasive as the heat. This entertaining memoir re-creates Rosen's childhood in St. Petersburg, a land of malls, old people and Jesus. Few sociological indicators are more straightforward than bumper stickers, and Rosen repeatedly invokes them to convey Floridian culture. In parking lots, bumper stickers on white Buicks bragged, "I'm spending my children's inheritance!" For Keswick parents' vehicles, popular choices included "Jesus Saves!" and "God Is My Copilot!"

Rosen has strayed far from those origins. Now a resident of Washington, D.C., she has married a Jew (the legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen), earned a Ph.D. in history, and authored a previous book, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. As a contributor to the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, she is not a total apostate to her conservative upbringing, but she has gone "entirely secular." In the streets on which she now drives, a good number of cars probably sport disintegrating Kerry-Edwards '04 bumper stickers.

This crowd also appears to be her memoir's target audience. My Fundamentalist Education promises a glimpse into a world we soy latte addicts don't understand but can no longer dismiss. Controversy about evolution, Christian blockbusters in Hollywood, a president who speaks in biblical code: Christianity is hot, and Rosen's background is, suddenly, marketable. With her intelligence and tongue-in-cheek tone, she comes across as the ideal liaison: a former insider who will explain fundamentalism while allowing us to chuckle at it.

Rosen was born in 1973 to perfunctorily Methodist parents. Her father and stepmother sent her to Keswick without quite registering the degree of its zealotry. (The school was affiliated with the Moody Bible Institute, a Chicago-based fundamentalist Protestant institution committed to "separation from the world" and "winning souls to Christ.") But as a kindergartner, Rosen latched on to the teachings, developing a love for the Bible and a "spiritual crush" on Moses. To a Floridian, she muses rather cutely, the Bible came in handy for making sense of the landscape she inhabited. "The Bible stories I heard every day -- stories about burning bushes, plagues, and other freakish expressions of God's power over nature -- seemed sensible in a place where we shared our world with sharks, scorpions, sting rays, snakes, fire ants" and other exotic organisms.

With a sharp eye, keen wit and agile prose, Rosen looks back in amusement at Keswick's rituals. In a "Walk Thru the Bible" seminar, second-grade students learned to illustrate biblical events with hand gestures: "We drew squiggly lines in the air to represent major rivers in the Middle East, and vast expanses of Numbers and Deuteronomy were dispatched with a grand sweep of the arm." As for sex education, there were naturally no demonstrations involving condoms on bananas. The preferred pedagogical prop was a brick. During junior year at Keswick, boys and girls would be paired off with joint responsibility for a "Brick Baby," symbolizing the inevitable consequence of succumbing to the lust of the flesh. In addition to "harlotry," Keswick educators sounded the alarm against rock music, dancing, communists and the local 7-Eleven, whose insistence on stocking Playboy sparked a faculty-mandated boycott.

Christine, dutiful and devout, heeded her teachers. But as she was also smart and inquisitive, subversive questions were bound to pop into her head. In science class, she wasn't about to ditch God for Darwin, but, having learned about fossils over the summer, she groped for a way to reconcile the two. Sounding just a few mental acrobatics away from inventing intelligent design herself, she wondered, "Perhaps the Grand Canyon had been created by the Great Flood, as my teacher said, but the Great Flood actually happened much, much longer ago? Perhaps the dinosaurs lived long before the Bible happened..."

As for sex, she had no intention of performing the act, not least because she had no notion of what it involved. In the eighth grade, when her teachers launched their initial campaign against fornication, her fantasy life was restricted to imagining alternative endings to "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. Under Keswick's tutelage, she developed a terror of premarital sex. But the warnings did awaken her curiosity, leading her to mine a friend's father's medical books and the "Sweet Valley High" series for clues about the forbidden subject. Rosen documents her nascent skepticism as she started to chafe against all the no-nos, although in the narrative it never grows beyond the budding stages.

School occupies the foreground of this memoir; in the background is a portrait of a split family. Rosen lived with her father, stepmother Pam, older sister Cathy and younger half-sister Cindy in a loving, relaxed household. On weekends, she visited her biological mother, who left the family not long after Rosen's baptism. Through the light-hearted humor, an unsettling fact emerges: Rosen is deeply estranged from her mother, also known as Biomom. Typically, the fraught mother-daughter relationship would be the anguished focus of a memoir. Here, its subplot status feels disorienting, like the memoirist's equivalent of burying the lead of a news story. The novelty is ultimately welcome; we have no need for another saga of family dysfunction. But those stories are compelling for a reason, and in this case, the book's emotional energy definitely lies in Rosen's feelings about her mother. Discussing them, her tone sobers up, grows careful. Her mother "was different from the other adults I knew -- and not necessarily in a good way." She compares her mother's affection to the cape in a bullfight. "Seeing it before me -- bright, alluring, as riveting as crimson -- I charged headlong toward it. Just as I came close to reaching it, however, it would elude me."

Despite those somber sentiments, some of the book's funniest passages are those starring her mother. She found religion after Christine did, yet embraced it with equal fervor. But her Christianity was evangelical rather than fundamentalist. (That the two branches differ dramatically might come as news to some readers. Indeed, the more ignorant among us would have appreciated further elaboration on their contrasts.) "At school we praised the Lord through soothing organ music and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer," Rosen writes. "In Mom's churches, they praised the Lord with a Pearl Forum Fusion five-piece drum set and electric guitar with wa-wa pedal." Miracle cures and speaking in tongues, encouraged in evangelism, were frowned upon in fundamentalist circles. Christine and her mother alike, however, anticipated imminent end times, or "the rapture," which proved a useful disciplinary technique. Faced with misbehavior, her mother would sigh, "There's nothing I can do if you don't get raptured with me."

Rosen's mother, like many of the Christians in the book, comes across as something of a parody. That is one reason "My Fundamentalist Education," for all its humor and vivid prose, disappoints. Readers might have expected alarming revelations of extremist beliefs and behavior; or we might have hoped for soothing assurances that we're all not so different from each other, no matter our beliefs. We get neither. Instead, Rosen colors in the details of our vague stereotypes.

Also disappointing is the epilogue, a chapter called "The Hereafter," in which Rosen provides a series of updates. (Here we learn that her mother turned out to be mentally ill with what sounds like bipolar disorder. But she is alive, if not well, making her public christening as Biomom a little shocking.) In an elegiac mood, Rosen concludes that her teachers at Keswick fostered a "respectful yet questioning tone," and a "combination of engagement with the text and the first glimmerings of skepticism." But this generous assessment finds little support in the earlier portraits of hectoring schoolmarms. That Rosen did begin to question their teachings was a tribute to her, not to them.

At the end of her account, when Rosen is 12 and finishing the eighth grade, her parents belatedly recognize Keswick's extremism -- thanks to the 7-Eleven boycott -- and decide to transfer Rosen and her sister to another school. At this point, she's begun to itch with curiosity: "The longer I spent inside this closed world, the more eager I was to see what was on the other side of that wall." But when she finally scales the wall, the action takes place offstage. Fast-forward to the epilogue: "In the end, I found I could not do the many things I wanted to do in the world if I continued in a faith whose first principle is separation from it." Instead of telling a story, this memoir sets a scene. Just as momentum starts to build, the author vaults over its culmination. The chronicle of Rosen's fundamentalist education shares a shortcoming with its curriculum: too little evolution.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn. She covers education for The Village Voice.


Copyright © 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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