Have Americans become desensitized to the suffering of others?

If you haven't read Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, you should.

Scarry's excellent book on the violent metaphors and rhetoric associated with the human body explores the political consequences of deliberately inflicting pain (physical, emotional, and psychological) on another human being. The text was published in 1985 and it is sad how appropriate it is today given recent revelations of American Government's policies and attitudes toward torture between 2001 and 2008.

Here's just a sample:

"As the body breaks down, it becomes increasingly the object of attention, usurping the place of all other objects, so that finally [...] the world may only exist in a circle two feet out from [the victim].
[...] The voice becomes a final source of self-extension; so long as one is speaking, the self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, occupies a space larger than the body" (33).

In torture, there is an attempt to remove another from their body. Their voice the only salvation which allows them to return to that body, which becomes a much worse prison than any external structure. There is no escape from the pain; it is literally "incorporated" into the body and yet the victim of torture longs to return to the body, and is terrified to do so.

That is the nightmare that is torture. A disembodied psyche which fears and longs for the internal privacy of the body but both spaces (internal and external) are no longer safe.

Really. You should read the book. In addition to the first chapter, "The Structure of Torture," it has some great material on the "Structure of War" (Ch 2) and "The Structure of Belief" (Ch 4).

Definitely Foucauldian (and thereby quasi-Marxist) in its philosophical underpinnings (distribution of power) it is an excellent treatise on the body as both a surface and a vessel, a shell and an imaginary space.

Think about the last time you were in physical pain. You (hopefully) knew it would pass and you knew that it was not created by someone outside yourself. For those who are tortured pain becomes the normative state of the body and the mind--and there is no escape, no reprieve, no release from that pain.

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Torture is torture is torture

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it"

Philosopher George Santayana, volume one of The Life of Reason

One of the lessons I have had to learn as a teacher is that I don't teach my students anything.

They learn.

I am a firm believer in the pedagogical theories of both Dewey and Friere.

We learn by doing and we learn by doing whatever it is we are trying to learn by doing it with others.

Action and collaboration.

As a teacher, I correct students.

They are wrong sometimes. Plain and simple.

I tell them it's nothing personal.

I kind of feel this way about our President.

I knew a lot about him before I worked on his campaign having grown up watching his career from just over the border in northwest Indiana. I knew who I was voting for on November 4, 2008: a moderate Democrat with a good head on his shoulders-- a DC outsider that had the will and the energy to instigate the changes our country so desperately needed.

However, I cannot sit idly by while certain policies and practices by our government leave us standing in the same pile of manure we were standing in November 3, 2008.

Power reiterates institutions and institutions reiterate power (Foucault).

Institutionalizing torture was wrong when Bush and cronies did it and it is still wrong as President Obama fails to take a different course of action.

Being president has one characteristic that no other job does: you get hired to do a job (during a first term) that you have had no prior experience doing. The only ones with any experience are the ones who get rehired for a second term. Sometimes they have learned from their first terms, sometimes not.

I think President Obama's learning curve will be a strong one-- he seems to pick things up quickly and plays well with others.

But we *never learn to do something right* if no one corrects us when we are wrong.

We never learn to do something socially if we don't learn from other's mistakes.

And President Obama is wrong in guaranteeing no prosecutions for those who "legalized" the United States' "interrogation program," a sick euphemism for:

• Pushing detainees against a wall
• Facial slaps
• Cramped confinement
• Having prisoners stand or sit for long periods of time in "stress" positions
• Sleep deprivation
• Waterboarding or simulated drowning
• Playing loud music for hours
• The placing of a detainee into a confined space with an insect or an unfriendly dog

Abu Ghraib was only five years ago.

The types of torture used there were no better than those listed above:

• Urinating on detainees
• Jumping on detainee's leg (a limb already wounded by gunfire) with such force that it could not thereafter heal properly
• Continuing by pounding detainee's wounded leg with collapsible metal baton
• Pouring phosphoric acid on detainees
• Sodomy of detainees with a baton
• Tying ropes to the detainees' legs or penises and dragging them across the floor.
• Sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl by two interrogators
• Having venomous snakes bite prisoners
• Hooded prisoners forced to masturbate
• Forced homosexual acts

Any acts committed against another human being that de-humanizes that person is torture. No exceptions. No passes.

We cannot righteously condemn other countries and governments for doing things we do ~and~ don't criminalize or punish. It places our service women and men and any American in foreign custody in great peril if we do not act to hold those who were in charge accountable.

A simple [rhetorical] question for those who do not see these things as torture:

If any of these were to happen to you or a loved one, is it considered torture?

You are wrong, President Obama. And yes, this is personal.




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