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A few years ago, sitting in my San Francisco apartment, I watched a documentary that within the first half hour had me reduced to a sad-eyed puddle of nostalgia. Most of it was shot in Louisiana and Mississippi and as I watched outdoor shots of that flat green, almost jungle-like landscape with its levees and bayous, as I listened to the soft accents of the people being interviewed, I found myself yearning to go back. God, how I missed those velvet summer nights, the spicy food, the way people talked… Why, oh why had I ever left?
And then, in the course of an interview with a lovely, white-haired southern lady, the subject of the Civil Rights era came up, specifically the case of three young Civil Rights workers who had been murdered by the Klan in Mississippi back in 1964. This lady’s delicate nostrils quivered with revulsion, her small mouth hardened, her eyes grew slightly dreamy and cold and she said that when certain people come south just to make trouble, just to stir the black people up, well, bad things can happen to them. It was unfortunate really, but they brought it on themselves…
My nostalgia vanished in an instant. If I’d stayed in Louisiana, at some point one more lady like that would have made one more comment like that in my presence. And I may very well have reached across some perfectly set table and strangled her with her pearls.
This is an exaggeration. Obviously, I would not have murdered someone at a dinner party, but by the standards of southern society I might have committed a crime just as bad. I might have said something. I might even have said it with enough of an edge in my voice to bring my host or hostess hurrying over with a strained smile.
Biting my tongue for the sake of “politeness” when an educated, presumably moral individual utters socially accepted nastiness is a southern tradition I gladly shed many years ago. I’m not going to get into the habit again. Not in Louisiana, or North Carolina, or California, or Pennsylvania, or anywhere else north or south of the Mason Dixon Line.
Which is awkward because an especially repulsive breed of nastiness is becoming more and more socially acceptable everywhere.
By “nastiness” I don’t mean dirty jokes, or even ethnic jokes. No, by “nastiness” I mean the normalization of brutality. I mean the increasingly widespread habit of treating torture, religious persecution, and racism as if the morality of these things were something upon which ethical and reasonable people can disagree.
They aren’t. And I am not, for the sake of “politeness” going to pretend that rules of common decency change when the victims are Moslems.
This does not mean that I’m planning to canvas people about their views at the next party I attend and then shriek invective at anyone who tells me that sleep deprivation, stress positions and water boarding are not torture. What I will do, if the subject comes up, is argue courteously, without raising my voice, and without cracking so much as the ghost of a reassuring smile.
And I will keep arguing as long as the conversation continues which, experience has taught me, is rarely for very long. In most cases, the torture apologist will very quickly adopt the posture – perhaps because it’s a sincere reflection of their feelings – of the reasonable soul bewildered by the attack of an irrational dogmatist. Frequently they’ll gaze off into space and say something that includes the word “just,” like, “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” or, “That’s just the way I feel,” or “I just don’t want to talk about it.”
Again, I should emphasize that no voices have to be raised to get this reaction. No insults have to be uttered. All that’s required is a request that they expand on statements like, “what happened at Abu Ghraib wasn’t torture.” And heaven help you if you are so tasteless as to bring up the fact that water boarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions were used by such icons of evil as the Nazis, the KGB and Spanish Inquisitors. That’s when you start getting dirty looks from other people in the room and the host comes over, fixes you with a freezing glance, and loudly suggests a change of subject.
Yes, it may be rude to argue with someone who was plainly not expecting an argument. But advocating or even countenancing torture while smiling blandly at someone over a cocktail is something much, much worse.
It is a working demonstration of the banality of evil. It is a sign of how morally degraded we, as a society have become. It is whiff of filth, a stink so powerful I can’t understand how anyone in the same room with it can refrain from publicly gagging and holding their nose. The very fact that torture apologists so often evince surprise and dismay at being challenged is the stuff of horror, and I have no intention of indulging it by biting my tongue.
A “just” comment I frequently encounter when I argue with someone about torture is that venerable attempt to personalize the debate -- “I guess I’m just a horrible person.” It’s meaningless as an argument because I don’t casually divide the world between “good” and “horrible” people. But I can’t, in good conscience, hold my tongue when I hear people – even people I like and respect -- advocate horrible things.
This may make me a social liability. So be it. Better that than coming away from a night out feeling as though even the longest hottest bath in the world isn’t going to cover up the smell of moral complicity.
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