Friday, August 03, 2007

Presidency of the absurd

Writing in this week's Phoenix, James Parker offers a lively piece on how limericks and surrealism offer considerable insight into the torture policies backed by the Bush administration:

History will have trouble digesting the irony of it — that George W. Bush, a man who claims Jesus as his favorite political philosopher and the Lord as his warrant, has presided over the transformation of US foreign policy into a God-destroying juggernaut of absurdity. “If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations,” wrote Thomas Merton in 1961, “study hell.” Merton was a Trappist monk, but he knew the world. In its relentless, chaotic sponsorship of torture, the Bush Administration has created many little chambers of hell, many places where reason is overthrown and sanctity denied. In such places — in Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or Camp Cropper, or Bagram Air Base — human rights evaporate: there are no rights, no principles or precedents. There is only the despotism of the present tense, whose sole limit is the fact that you might die before it has exhausted its capacity for torment. It doesn’t get more absurd than that.

Edward Lear didn’t invent the limerick, but he might as well have. The form had existed for centuries before this shy Victorian landscape painter — tormented privately by epilepsy, which he called “my terrible demon” — made his name by turning it into a vehicle for violent irrationality:

There was a Young Person of Smyrna
Whose grandmother threatened to burn her;
But she seized on the cat, and said, “Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!”

Lear was a post-Romantic who disliked getting carried away: he described his own mind as “concrete and abstemious,” and he knew that the key to successful nonsense (as he called his verse) lay in a crooked balancing of order and chaos. Without the punctilious containment of the limerick — its mirrored first and last lines creating a sense of psychotic circularity (literally, of loopiness) — his strange animalistic jokes would have had no punch line.

There was an old man who screamed out
Whenever they knocked him about;
So they took off his boots, and fed him with fruits,
And continued to knock him about.

Insisting that his nonsense was simple entertainment, written for the nursery, Lear was in fact one of the fathers of absurdity, of Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco, unwilling herald of a universe “freed” — in the words of Martin Esslin, scholar of absurd theater — “from the shackles of logic,” where “wish-fulfillment will not be inhibited by considerations of human kindness.” The old man is fed with fruits to stop him screaming: once he’s quiet, the abuse can resume.

The Bush-era analogue to this situation would be the one in which the doctor stands by during the torture session, ensuring that the prisoner doesn’t die. During the course of one interrogation at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, for example, as reported by Time magazine, prisoner 063 — Mohamed al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker of 9/11 — grew dangerously dehydrated. Medical corpsmen intervened, and al-Qahtani was pumped with three bags of saline. For the duration of the procedure, however, he remained strapped to his chair, and loud music (possibly Christina Aguilera, which had been used before) was played to keep him awake.

Nonsense is its own insurance. In the unhappy event that a prisoner expires before realizing his full potential as a source of intelligence, his corpse can be kept safely in the realm of meaninglessness — pickled, as it were, in absurdity. Steven H. Miles, in his 2005 book Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House) describes the case of the detainee at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, who was killed by a blow to the head. Two weeks later his body, complete with pre-prepared death certificate, was dropped at a local hospital. Cause of death: “sudden brainstem compression.” That unfortunate young man of Camp Cropper . . .