Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

A good friend (who lives in a distant place) has recently been grappling with the experience of authority – perhaps arbitrary, perhaps not. It is the experience, either way, that I’m pondering.

How many times have I challenged authority (rarely with success)? Challenging authority is quite different than challenging convention, or orthodoxy, or tradition, which I have done with regularity. Challenging authority is also very different than being its object. As the receiver of the exercise of authority, one wants to immediately defend oneself. “No I didn’t do that,” comes out of ones mouth almost before you realize it. Pre-programmed. But does that work?

Rarely, if ever, I suspect. As the object of authority, you have already been designated responsible for that of which you are accused. Now, you may or may not be responsible for what is at issue, but someone thinks you are. In my testosterone poisoned youth, I one time was so incensed about a speeding violation I was about to receive that I bounced out of the car as soon as I’d come to a stop. Suddenly, I was facing a drawn gun, and these days, I might well have been shot. Dumb. I didn’t stop to consider how I looked in the circumstances: in this case, I looked threatening – exactly the opposite of what I was trying to convey: outraged innocence.

In the ensuing years, I’ve learned the value of contrition, of accepting that I was wrong, and communicating that when true. No more being mistaken as a threat. And, when I’m not responsible, I’ve learned to express my understanding of how they must be looking at the situation, retaining my clarity of what is true, or at least I give it my best shot.

I don’t know how my friend will deal with the situation when he actually sits down with the authorities holding sway over him. What I hope is that he remembers the value in owning up to what he is truly responsible for, and never accepting what is said that is not true. But at the same time, I hope he is able to hold compassion for the accusers in getting it wrong – and expressing that to them. It is an odd, but compelling, expression of the deepest of moral tenets: do to others as you would want them to do to you. And, especially in circumstances of innocence, it is really hard to do.

Can you imagine an innocent victim of our Rendition Program, that grabs people and sends them to be tortured in Egypt or elsewhere, ever turning to his interrogator and expressing understanding about how wrong they have gotten it? And yet, I recall a story of a political dissident in Chile during the Pinochet days who forgave his torturers before each session, expressing his sadness at how they had been forced into these terrible acts they were about to subject him to. It is an act that places one above the fray, with clarity about the truth, and what matters more?

How do you sign up to do torture? Where is that dotted line filled out saying that, “no, I don’t mind seeing another human being scream in agony, agony that I cause in the name of something or in the interest of ‘intelligence’?” The answer, according to Stanford’s Phillip Zimbardo, one of our nation’s experts on the subject, is that people don’t sign up. They absorb the permission from the system they are a part of.

At the recent TED Conference in Monterey, Zimbardo set forth his trim assessment that there are essentially no “bad apples”, which is how the military explained Abu Ghraib. In fact, he asserted, there aren’t even bad barrels. Instead, there are bad barrel makers – the designers of the system – that really hold responsibility. If you need any reinforcement for this argument, just read JoAnne Wypijewski’s extraordinary article in the March/April issue of Mother Jones. It will curl your hair. They have created a system that will not learn from its experience and will not accept responsibility for the wrong that was done. In so doing, they damage us all even more.

In her step by step excavation of the way the military has “held itself accountable”, she outlines in detail what we all know: the grunts on the ground paid a heavy price – many with years in prison. But NONE of their commanding officers has had anything more than a hand slap. It is truly remarkable, and, surprise, surprise, the press is oblivious. No coverage. No outrage. No accountability.

At one point, she recites what we may recall from early press reports – Secretary Rumsfeld received daily briefings on the intelligence gathered. He was focused on Abu Ghraib and had urged the use of the “strong” tactics used to achieve the intelligence as has often been reported. Everyone in the military knew that he and the Vice President believed in harsh tactics. That virtually all the intelligence was garbage seems beside the point. That no one holds any responsibility nor has been held accountable for one of the worst chapters in American history, and, arguably, one of the contributing factors to America’s precipitous decline in international circles.

Somehow, the defender of liberty and freedom and democracy has become the perpetrator of inhumanity, violence, and torture in the name of the emergency of terrorism. How was it that the Nazis explained why Jews needed to be rounded up? What emergency deprived them of their civil liberties?

Military necessity is used to justify the harshest measures of the state – the deprivation of a citizen’s rights. Has it ever been proven worthwhile? Outside of the mind-numbing, fiction of “24” on television, I don’t think so.