Dick Durbin speaks his mind

The news this morning has flabbergasted me. On my ride in, NPR played this quote from Dick Durbin (concerning treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) on the senate floor yesterday...

"If I read this to you and did not tell you it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would almost certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case, this was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

Personally, I've thought this for months. With the revelation of abuse at Abu Ghirab, I could not see how comparisons of the sort were inevitable. The reaction to Durbin's statements, both from the press and from other "leaders" in my country, has been positively rabid. They've taken arms to correct the situation, by humiliating and attacking Durbin.

The Boston globe put up the quote above and then added:

Durbin said of Guantanamo "abuses" like ratcheting up the air conditioning in detainees' cells. -"Sarcastic quotes" courtesy of the Boston Globe Editorial Staff.

The White House Perss Secretary, Scott McClellan, (who seems to be filling in nicely for the disingenuous Ari Fleischer,) said:

"It's a real disservice to our men and women in uniform who adhere to high standards and uphold our values and our laws," McClellan said. "To compare the way our military treats detainees with the Soviet gulags, the Nazi concentration camps, and Pol Pot's (Cambodian) regime is simply reprehensible."

What everyone is missing is the actual story. Durbin is saying that he could read you the report he has in his hand from an American FBI agent and you would not be able to tell the difference between it and atrocities committed in the Gulag or at Aushwitz. It is the actions that are reprehensible, not his (admittedly) bad taste in evoking Godwin's Law. (Ie: "Bringing Nazis into an argument instantly invalidates any points you were trying to make.") In fact, Durbin prefaced his "gaff" with the following segments from the report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water.

"Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.

"On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold ... On another occasion, the (air conditioner) had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night."

"On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor." (Sounds like my old apartment.)

Of course, no-one is talking about that particular elephant in the room. Those terrorists are just a bunch of pussies. We must not forget, that these are evil men, far too evil to charge with a crime, because then we'd have to determine whether they were really evil men, and if they weren't then we'd have to release them, and hell, that'd just look bad, because we've held on to these guys for, say.... three years. It's just easier to let Allah sort them out.

Durbin, pressured to apologise, refused, and backpedaled revised his remarks:

"If this indeed occurred, it does not represent American values. It does not represent what our country stands for, it is not the sort of conduct we would ever condone ... and that is the point I was making. Now, sadly, we have a situation here where some in the right-wing media have said that I have been insulting men and women in uniform. Nothing could be further from truth," Durbin said, following up under questioning by Sen. John Warner, R-Va that "he does not know if the interrogators cited in the FBI report were Americans or not."

So, who the frick do we have torturing people down in GitMo under contract then? Russians? Cambodians? Germans?

Look folks. Wake up. Some seriously bad crap is going down. The future is not going to look kindly upon us, regardless of our excuses, and these things that the government does, are done in your name! And unless you say something to the contrary, then they are done with your CONSENT. We are taking people who may (or may not be) bad bad men, and doing bad bad things to them. The fact that they may be bad men should not mean as much to us as the fact that they may NOT be bad men. We simply need to prove our case. If we act in any other way, then we are not acting in a way consistent with our American ideals. We won't keep these men on American soil, not because we fear that they are dangerous, but so that we can avoid obeying our own laws regarding treatment of our enemies. And THAT is reprehensible.

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BONUS: As I finish typing, my co-workers are having a heated discussion about autographed baseball bats that one can buy on eBay, and how to protect them to increase their value. Brilliant. Someone nuke us all, please.

(no subject)

The entry below used to be called "Dick Durbin calls a spade a spade." But in a fit of self-censorship, I retitled it "Dick Durbin Speaks His Mind." Why?

Well, I wanted to be politically correct. I only have a small audience, but I like to think that they represent a fair segment of the population, and I wouldn't mind if people of all types read what I write, so I feel that I've a duty to you, dear reader, to avoid publishing my ignorance and unconscious prejudices.

I thought about it, and began to think that calling a "Spade a spade" could be construed as (just slightly) racist. Perhaps a reference to blacks "passing" as white, or having some "negro in the woodpile."

Now, I happened to already be aware that the phrase "to call a spade a spade" predates the American Southern experience by quite a few years, having first been cited in Aristophanes: "to call a fig a fig, a trough a trough." (It was a pun relating to marriage.) Later, "trough" was mistranslated from Plutarch by Erasmus. Erasmus used "skapheion" (digging tool, ie: spade) when he should have used "skaphe" (trough.) Honest mistake, I know I mix up those two all the time.¹

But I also know that the term "Black as the ace of spades" is an improper and racist term, and the basis of the pejorative use of "spade" to refer to black people. So people who were mean, callous, and ignorant of Aristophanes, used the term "To call a spade a spade" pejoratively to refer to black folks, for oh, about 80 years. On one level, some part of my brain says "c'mon, the word has an innocent origin! Might as well stop using the word "grotto" because it is an ancient Roman slur against Spaniards!" (Which is true.) On the other, I think, "I'm not ancient Roman, and people today use this phrase and others, with an ugly intent."

And after thinking about it, I began to think that unconscious use of these phrases, far from being innocent, is harmful, because it lets us imagine that nothing is wrong with keeping these phrases in our verbal lexicon. In short, it helps us ignore racism, and more personally, our responsibility not to succumb to what I think of as our "societal programming." It is not enough to avoid verbal use of the "n-word" and call it a day, to be considered "prejudice free."

Which brings me to this last thought. Often black people will use the "n word" amongst themselves, which has led many people that aren't black that I've known to ask "Why can't I use that word? Black people use that word, look at this rap song, it's ni**az this, ni**az that! Black people can't expect people to respect them on one hand, and then use that word on the other!"

To these folks I always want to ask:

"Just how do you, as a white person, intend to use THAT word? Polite conversation?" Our old neighbors, who were all as white as the underside of a frog, used to scream up at each other in the middle of the night, "You, ni**a! Open tha DOOR!" And I couldn't help but shudder to myself. These twenty-something little creeps have no idea.

You just can't subtract a word from its subtext. Not with slavery, lynching, reconstruction, sharecropping, segregation, and the like hanging off of it like so many engorged ticks. Which is why Dick Durbin speaks his mind, rather than calls a spade a spade.