Unsuspecting Souls Page 30
And so life never has to officially end—or at least the thought these days is to prolong death’s arrival beyond when it might be expected to come, a goal that can be achieved only by the medical profession devoting a good deal of its time and attention not to healing the patient, but to extending the person’s life. Up to the point of death, the new transhuman desires a life as free of pain as possible; death itself, the source of so much suffering, must be rendered as an experience free of all pain. That is a transhuman imperative, and oddly enough, one that mirrors the pain-free form of death that develops during the course of the nineteenth century. And certainly we have the technology now to make the transition into death—if the person or the family wants it—an absolutely painless one. Life can end the nanosecond that suffering begins.
If all this sounds too far-fetched and expensive, a new generation of genetic marketers has come to the rescue. Navigenics, a California web-based company, launched a personalized DNA test in April 2008. According to Newsweek, the test is an easy one: “spit into a test tube and we’ll tell you your risk for heart attack and other conditions—at a storefront in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood.” In January of 2008, another genetics company called 23andMe dispensed one thousand free tests at a strategic place, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Newsweek article contained this strange line: “Featured photos: Naomi Campbell showing off her test kit, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spitting into his.”
We might ask, When do those moments arise today when we find ourselves exercising our will when it means so much; when do we feel powerfully and totally alive? Perhaps there are not so many of those moments available to us these days. Maybe they come, in our post-everything world, at the strangest of times, in the most bizarre and outlandish of circumstances. I am thinking especially of so-called Islamic fundamentalists wrapping themselves in explosives and blowing themselves up. Do they lead their quiet and fairly unknown lives, only to come totally alive at the instant they explode—that is, the instant they die and achieve martyrdom? It’s odd to think of a living human being exploding into total meaning and significance.
I am thinking also of those who tortured prisoners at Guantánamo prison in Cuba, and at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, for the armed forces. Did those drawn-out moments make the torturers feel exhilarated and totally alive? Did the torturer take the part of the nineteenth-century physician at the side of the deathbed, but with the roles totally reversed—the torturer intending not to alleviate pain but to inflict it, with increasing or decreasing intensity over time; to bring the subject to the very brink of death (indeed, to simulate it in something like waterboarding, or simulated drowning) only to yank the person back into life, the torturer thus playing a perverse kind of God?
The first time the United States used the torture we now so glibly call “waterboarding” occurred during the Philippine-American War, which started in February 1899. America revived that torture in the Vietnam War. (One of the costs a country pays for imperialism may be its willingness to inflict excruciating pain on the enemy through torture.) In the Philippines, the Army called this particular kind of torture, in the way only the military can employ its euphemisms, the “water cure,” making pain sound like a detox treatment or a health fast. The report of the Philippine torture first appeared in a letter to the editor in the Omaha World-Herald, in May 1900, by an infantryman named A. F. Miller. He ratted on his unit by offering detailed instructions for the water treatment: “Lay them [the so-called insurgents] on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth, and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”
As if that were not cruel enough, when the torture victim’s stomach swelled sufficiently, a soldier would then jam his foot into his stomach, making him vomit up all the water; then the torturers would start the routine all over again, pouring water down the victim’s mouth. This rather vicious cycle would not stop, of course, until the victim, at the point of suffocation and near death, had decided to give up the answers that the superior officers so desperately wanted.
The efficacy of torture rests on at least two premises, both of them well suited to the underlying philosophy of the nineteenth century. The first is that the torturer must see his victim as less than human, a task made easier if the victims are people of color. The nineteenth century already had experience with eliminating peoples of color from the Chain of Being, excising them from civilization altogether. And here was a war, in a remote island called the Philippines, against brown-skinned people. And so, to match the philosophy of the period, the military made certain to continually refer to the Filipino people as Flips—as far less than civilized.
General Robert Hughes, testifying before a Senate investigative committee on torture in 1902, said of the Filipino people that “these people are not civilized.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a noted Republican from Massachusetts, threw the horror of torture back at the Filipino people. If they were more civilized, he implied, America would not have to stoop to such tactics. Before that same Senate investigative committee, Lodge insisted that this country’s reliance on the water cure had “grown out of the conditions of warfare, of the war that was waged by the Filipinos themselves, a semicivilized people, with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics, with the Asiatic indifference to life, with the Asiatic treachery and the Asiatic cruelty, all tinctured and increased by three hundred years of subjection to Spain.” What Cabot wanted to say was that “Asiatics” just do not value life in the same way we white Westerners do. Why should we then treat them with dignity or respect? It simply makes no sense. Let us treat them the way they deserve to be treated—with utter disgust and disregard.22
The military physician Henry Rowland defended the “water cure” in an even more offensive way, by arguing that the American soldiers’ “lust of slaughter” was “reflected from the faces of those around them.” Which is to say that those barbarians got exactly what they deserved. It’s their fault. President Theodore Roosevelt, using the newspeak common to the Oval Office, allowed as how, by using torture, “[n]obody was seriously damaged.” (One wonders if he included the Americans in that statement.) On the other hand, using the biblical mandate of an eye for an eye, Roosevelt opined, “[T]he Filipinos had inflicted incredible tortures upon our own people.” Again, they got just what they deserved, or what they had been asking for all along.23
Whether in Abu Ghraib, in Guantánamo, or in Sual, in the Philippines, degradation rules the day. Filipinos must become “Flips,” and Iraqis must become “ragheads.” After that, the physical torture merely completes the work started by the verbal degradation. But there is another factor operating that makes torture acceptable. To work really well, those carrying out the torture—in this case, the military—must acknowledge, albeit unconsciously, the absence of the human being. The fact that most GIs at Abu Ghraib did not know the prisoners’ names—knew them only by their serial numbers (five-digit numbers that made no logical sense)—and could not pronounce them if they did, helped make the prisoners disappear. Hoods also promoted that same kind of anonymity or invisibility, that same kind of ghostly hovering.
Communities create their own sense of normalcy by defining their deviants—by defining, that is, those who do not belong. The more the military sees those prisoners as bad guys—“the worst of the worst,” as Donald Rumsfeld said of them—the more thoroughly and squarely the military defines itself as normal and right and beyond reproach. But there is more than just an expression of righteousness in what the guards were doing in the deserts of Iraq and the hills of Cuba. We need to bear in mind that the torturer comes to feel totally alive in the act of inflicting excruciating pain. Inflicting pain, in these incidences, incites pleasure. Think of the enormous and calibrated sense of power! If I go just a little past the edges of my imagination, I can kill. But do not worry: This i
s sport, and the victims merely, well, victims.
At the Abu Ghraib compound, the behavior of the guards took on a playful, sporting attitude. Recall the newspaper photographs of the guards at the Abu Ghraib compound taking pictures of their tableaux of degradation to send back home, souvenirs of “being there” and of “protecting us from the terrorists.” Remember those same guards and military police playing the most sadistic and juvenile practical jokes on their victims, and in general acting like clowns and fools and school bullies in the midst of their victims’ horrific pain and suffering, piling more humiliation onto the already humiliated and degraded. How clever to slip a pair of women’s underpants over the heads of the Muslim prisoners, or to have them pose as homosexual lovers.
In this context, the torturer sees the body perhaps in one dimension only—as a voice box (give us what we want to hear) connected to nerve endings (let us see how much pain you can endure). The so-called “water cure” posits the human body as a most basic mechanical, hydraulic system: Fill the vessel up with water, and then force the liquid back out through the most extreme violent act imaginable—jumping on the person’s stomach. Death—oh well, that might happen, but, again, so what? Death is only the result of some accident. And besides, no one knows the person’s name, or background, or even the barest outlines of his “story.” The killing of a suspected al-Qaeda member should only be considered a victory for our side—one less terrorist to worry about. And besides, those ragheads are not very alive, are they?
What are we to say about our lives today? For those of us who do not want the future that the transhumanists offer, what do we do about our lives? Must we become a new kind of Luddite to make it out of this mess? Another election, a new regime, a change of address, will not do it. That much we know. To back away from this abyss, we need to know what has happened to us. And that is the story that this book has tried to tell. For without all the preparation from the nineteenth century, all the erasure of our essence, we would not find ourselves in this horrible predicament at this moment. Contrary to every declaration made by George W. Bush, this country, the United States of America—this so-called democratic bastion in the free world—engages in torture. The fact is clear and obvious. And this says a lot about our attitude toward human life in the world.
As I write this, the United States marks its fifth anniversary in Iraq, which is to say, though few people put it this way, we enter our sixth year of the war in Iraq. We have been bombing for an even longer time in Afghanistan. The president of the United States said, on that fifth anniversary, that we would be fighting the war against terror for a very long time—perhaps forever. Americans are afraid, and they have been particularly afraid every day and every hour and every second since those two airplanes flew into the Twin Towers, in downtown Manhattan, on September 11, 2001. We know how to feel afraid very well, we Americans, and not only in movie theaters or in amusement parks. Many Americans also know it in airports and in dark alleys and in strange neighborhoods. And many Americans know it when talk turns to immigrants and African Americans, to jobs taken and daughters wooed by “those other people.”
White racist politicians used fear to grab votes in the sixties and seventies and they use it today, in the twenty-first century, as well. We are docile, in our managed lives, and we demand more and more cops on the beat, just as every police chief of every major city tells us we should want them. We may live in fear, but, damn it, we will feel safe—no matter the cost. So be prepared to remove your shoes at the airport.
Fear is an emotion that makes us feel totally alive. Along with anger, perhaps, it’s surefire, it’s bodily; fear grabs us in the muscles and throat and joints. We come alive in the great rush of adrenaline. We even cultivate it, in driving fast, ingesting super drugs, participating in extreme sports like cage fighting, and going for broke in Las Vegas. We need to feel fear. Fear got us to Afghanistan and it got us to Iraq. It appears that fear will also keep us in those places for a very long time to come. And, by God, the rest of the world had better fear us.
SIX | Coney Island and the Mind
AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ENDED, one hundred years of the most unsettling scientific and technological activity came to rest in two seemingly unrelated events. In the year 1900, a couple of businessmen broke ground on the third and last park to open at Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York. They called it Dreamland. (Steeplechase and Luna had opened several years earlier.) That same year, 1900, Virginia and Leonard Woolf published the first English translation of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams at their Hogarth Press, in London. Historical coincidence—a mere accident of time; that’s all we can legitimately call that confluence.
Those two events, however, reveal the true nature of the nineteenth century. It may seem odd to mention a couple of crass businessmen and one of the great couples of English literature in the same paragraph. But that’s the very quirky nature of the period: Remember, we’ve seen famous philosophers talking to ghosts and well-respected scientists inhaling nitrous oxide. Contradictions, in an odd way, gave the century its coherence. Take only one subject, cocaine. While that drug seems frivolous and even dangerous to us today, and certainly illegal, scientists conducted serious research about the nature of human essence while under its influence. One of the most popular literary characters of the nineteenth century, Sherlock Holmes, could not have solved crimes, he claimed, without his cocaine.
As the twentieth century opened, we get to see the classes diverge in a most obvious way. The people who frequented Coney for its seemingly unbounded fun came mostly from the middle and lower classes, and those few who went to visit Freud for the “talking cure” came from the upper class. Coney offered mass entertainment, most of it outdoors, in the clear sunlight of day, which made it hard to hide anything, or to hide from anyone at the park. Even the postcard, Coney’s favorite literary form, which had recently dropped in price to one penny, made it difficult to keep secrets. Freud, on the other hand, offered the most exclusive kind of privacy, behind his closed doors, to one patient at a time. Few people knew the names of his clients. Sigmund Freud had built his considerable reputation on secrets—secrets of childhood, secrets of the bedroom, secrets in general of the privileged class. Freud made people see just what secrets they did hold.
Coney and Freud represent the two threads that will tie the conclusion up. On one hand, Coney Island offered people the chance to forget the deep blues of the big city through fun and cheap thrills, and on the other, psychoanalysis offered people the opportunity to remember the events in their lives, no matter how painful or dangerous, and to finally pay them their strictest attention. Adam Phillips, the child psychoanalyst, points out that “people come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget.” Americans and Europeans had been handed a choice—forgetting and remembering—and they went, overwhelmingly, for the former, for fun and good times—especially in this country. In a way, that drive toward fun builds and builds until it explodes in the singing and dancing and drinking that we know, in this country, as the roaring twenties.
Again, as disparate as they seem, both George C. Tilyou, the financier of fun at Coney, and Sigmund Freud, the doctor of the soul in Vienna, delighted in some of the same things: dreams—daydreams, nighttime dreams, and even, perhaps especially, those frighteningly dark and heavy dreams that go by the name of nightmares—and amusement. Freud believed that the work of uncovering repressed memories should and could be interesting and even amusing. He seized on jokes as a way into understanding the unconscious mind.
It’s appropriate that the century should come down to essentially one motif, however, for dreams provide the appropriate prism through which to best observe the age. To begin with, the entire century, day by day, seemed to be unfolding as one large and collective dream: experience reduced to a gauzy reflection, living reduced to feelings of suspended animation. Dreams took over the age. One of the great poets of the period, Walt Wh
itman, used the word dream some seventy-five times in the last version of Leaves of Grass, four of those times in a single line of the poem: “I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers.”
Every once in a while, in the nineteenth century, one comes upon a few outspoken and bold souls, like Nietzsche, Marx, Emerson, Darwin, or Freud, who began to stretch and groan awake and coax and cajole the great masses of people to wake up; they kept at it even if only a few people listened. Thus Nietzsche on the rage for life: “Death. One must convert the dumb psychological fact into a moral necessity. So to live, that one keeps hold also at the right time on one’s will to death!”1
Those five original thinkers came alive in the manner of Rip Van Winkle, the hero of Washington Irving’s eponymous short story (1819), who runs away from his wife, cavorts with ghosts, and falls asleep under a tree for twenty years—his first name, Rip, a pun perhaps on “Rest In Peace”; his last name perhaps a pun on “forty winks”—only to wake up to a world so totally changed he believes that he may be living inside a long, drawn-out dream. Rip finds, for instance, that he is no longer a subject of England, but a citizen of the United States. In 1865, the American actor Joseph Jefferson starred in a production titled Rip Van Winkle at the Adelphi Theatre in London, under the direction of the master of ghost production Dion Boucicault. By the 1880s, Jefferson had played Rip onstage more than 4,500 times.