In Which the English Language Takes a Surprise Twist
I could have sworn that I spoke English pretty well. I mean, I’ve always been confident, able to communicate and rarely had extreme misunderstandings with other people who also seemed to think they were speaking English.
Then I read the quote below and I wondered if I have even the slightest grasp whatsoever of the language we all claim to have in common. I mean, do we have it in common at all or do we just make similar-sounding noises whilst all the while each taking completely different meaning from the conversation.
This man is talking about the rack. The medieval torture device called the rack. This. And what he has to say is the following:
“I am not going to give aid to our enemies by disclosing details of our interrogation techniques. But if we do expose detainees to the Rack it is not torture, because we do not torture.”
Well that’s cleared that up then. The quote was from none other than Deranged-Lunatic-in-Chief George Bush and was perhaps the pick of the bunch which I found on this little post here on Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports. It looks like a pretty reputable source – given it’s part of the Law Professor Blogs network one assumes he’d be pulled up pretty sharpish if he was making it up, never mind the implications for his own career.
Reading some of the bald-faced justifications for torture (yes, torture: think witch trials, The Inquisition, The Middle Ages and other such bastions of enlightenment and civilisation) truly is breathtaking. It pretty much puts the current American government slap bang in that Axis of Evil they invented a few years back. ‘The la-and of the freeee, and the home of thuuuh barbaric medieval torturers’ Quite fucking splendid. This makes an interesting read about the equally insane technique of waterboarding.
The comedy of this whole nonsense is that terrorist acts have killed 3000 people in America in the last six years. This works out at an average of about 500 per year, compared to 40 000 deaths per year due to road accidents. 500 per year, versus 40 000 per year. 500 versus 40 000. When, oh when, will they stop hating freedom and start bombing General Motors.
U2 – Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car
Cracklin’ Moth – Car Wreck
David Bowie – Always Crashing in the Same Car
me gusta todo esto
That post was actually a satire, substituting “rack” for “waterboarding” in Mukasey’s and Bush’s actual statements. Er, not that that makes the actual statements any less disgusting.
Was it really? Well I suppose that leads nicely onto the comments of Malcolm Nance in his article.
Also highlights the truly worrying fact that Romney and Giuliani both declared support for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ during debates in campaigning for Republican party nomination. The fact that have not been slaughtered in the press for basically advocating torture is pretty frightening. Rack or waterboarding.
“When, oh when, will they stop hating freedom and start bombing General Motors.”
Amen to that. Currently saving up for a ticket out of the US.
The English language, indeed.
Where o where would we be with out semantics? I for one would be out of a job & certainly wouldn’t be publishing any more books any time soon.
When I was over in Washington recently I happened into a conversation about politics (it’s quite the thing, darling, in them there climes), the Presidential campaigns, Hillary Clinton &, eventually, Mr Hillary Clinton.
The basis of the generally animated debate was the ‘poliicising’ of phrases & words (for an individual’s benefit) as required by whichever particular corner he/she found themselves in during some topic du jour (Iraq, War in General, Healthcare, fucking an intern etc.). I’d give examples but them’s not the point of this.
The point, then: throughout this whole beer-fed frenzy of opinion & pseudo-analysis (of liberties taken, by said Politicians, with easily understandable, common or garden words & phrases, turning them into head-wringing confuse-athons designed to bamboozle the public into questionning their own intelligence & understanding of the most basic of things) the tables we were at (populated by Democrats, Republicans, so-called Independents, Liberals, British & Canadians) only came to unanimous agreement on one thing alone: Bill Clinton’s ingenius grasp & repeated reference to the confusingly not obviously understood phrase “sexual relations” a la Lewinski & his, ahem, daliance.
Now we all know he stuck a cigar up her cooch, frothed manjam on her Sunday best & she blew a tune on his man sax. But, what he most certainly didn’t do was have “sexual relations”. And rightly so, because, even though the whole world thinks he was being naiive/stupid/desperate to refute the “sexual relations” claim, it actually means something entirely less than what we (the general public) think it does: “sexual relations”, i.e. the correct semantic definition of the phrase, means to engage in collaborative sexual organ-based penetrative mischief(ie Mr Pickles say hello to Mrs Toffee Chops, repeatedly, with various degrees of force & angle, until you’re sick).
So, technically, & rather literally so, popping a cuban up her Oval Orifice (sorry, couldn’t resist) & junking on her dry-clean only don’t equate to “sexual relations”. Frustratingly borderline in terms of pedantic, but Mr. C was entirely justified when he was answering that line of question: “Did you have sexual relations with Miss Lewinksi?” “No, I did not have “sexual relations” with that bowl-faced slattern”. etc.
Whoever wrote the original impeachment statement/deposition that included phrase clearly didn’t realise the serious & total fuck up potential of such a tiny misunderstanding of that extraordinarily important phrase. Clearly, someone on Clinton’s staff did. “Bravo that pedanticly jobsworthy son/daughter of a bitch!” the table cheered, & we ordered another round of weak American piss in a child’s glass.
We all agreed that whoever that was deserved a dictionary, pen & board game from Countdown & a lifelong membership of the Call My Bluff club (some Amrican’s do know these TV shows, which led us onto another discussion with far more violent results).
Tra for now.
DC
Ok, he mighthave looked like a dick repeating that over & over & over
wot, didn’t you know that if gw says it’s so, then it is so? reality, truth, morality, sense–none of these concepts exist in the bush lexicon except when he decides to fuck with them.
i’m almost beyond being disgusted and certainly never surprised when this kind of shit comes out of his mouth. what’s bothering me more now is the lack of action/reaction from our democratic-led congress. two high-ranking members of the judicial committee said they’ll vote to let bush’s attorney general nominee go to the floor for a confirmation vote. i simply can’t believe it. that they have the power to stop it and are letting it go forward is really despicable.
Are you really disgusted by the inaction of congress and the senate? Really? The entire foundation of the political system in the United States is based on the central precept that ideology defines the morality of the action, not visa versa. Unless you are slightly dark of face of course. This is why you can butcher darkies at will in the desert (or My Lai if you are a bit older) and it’s morally acceptable. One in 25 Irais have died in the last 5 years to preserve freedom. 5000 Americans died in the name of fundamentalism. Think I’m being facetious? If you question the president on the issue of torture you cripple the campaign of every presidential hopeful from your party who failed to act on it. The checks and balances makes us all complicit. So no one can question crimes that have already taken place as they were part of the process which led to them. So of course they can’t act. Get in!
You have somebody in custody. You believe that they know something about a terrorist attack. You’re getting quite good at torture and feel that it’s necessary to enable you to save many innocent lives.
That’s how the question goes, isn’t it, when the more liberal (used advisedly) apologists come out to play. A more honest set up is ‘You have someone in custody. You’ve no idea if they’re involved in anything illegal. If you torture them they will tell you exactly what you want to hear, becuase that’s what people do under torture. You won’t save any lives. However, you will give justification to those who hate you and who believe in terror and you will make future terrorist attacks more likely. What do you do?
I think the other thing that needs to be said about this dispicable and incomprehensible justification for torture, (and the horror of it for the tortured needs to be remembered behind this) is the question of what we are turning our soldiers into. It’s easy to say ‘we might in extremis need to use extreme interrogation methods’ but remember what that means. You’re going to give orders to John Doe from Iowa or Lancashire orders to pull somebody’s fingernails off. You’re going to force somebody trying to do the right thing by their family and their country to strip somebody naked, shove them into a dark room and set a pack of dogs on them. I know this kind of pales into insignificence when you think ‘how can we do this to prisoners’ but how can we even do this to our soliders?
It’s beyond belief that we get away with this. Any of it.
DC – The interesting thing about Clinton, apart from that particular bit of linguistic bullet-dodging, is the fact that he continued to deny everything. At the time I was really irritated by this, and just thought that the continued squirming and evading was going to alienate people for his refusal to come clean and show some respect to the people he was supposed to be leading.
It was then pointed out to me that actually, that would have been foolish. Most people knew what he’d done anyway, and would either condemn him for it or shrug, whether he came clean or not. But there was still a sizeable proportion in a combination of denial and doubt and admitting anything he didn’t absolutely have to would have risked too much of that support. Interesting, I thought, when put that way.
Marcy/Ben – the fact is that Clinton began dismantling many of the systems for governmental accountability, Bush has taken this and run with it, and it is in no party’s interest to dismantle it. This way the only issue is whether or not they can beat the other party, no chance of the actual populace having any sort of democratic influence on who or what they choose to slaughter/torture/bug/whatever because that would just be inconvenient.
Crash – I know ‘framing’ is the word of the moment, but it is such a classic case of framing. When asked: ‘There is a bomb set to go off in a kindergarten in a busy city centre. You have one of the bombers in custody. Would you really be against slapping him about a bit to save those poor wickle children?’ it is much harder to say no than when given the more honest question: ‘Should we, as a civillised nation, use torture methods when interrogating prisoners?’
And you make a fine point about the effect on the soldiers themselves. This is why children make such brutal torturers: once their moral restraints are snapped, they just don’t tend to grow back – that’s it. So we now have a generation of young men desperate to demonise Muslims and Iraqis and terrorists and just about anyone as it is the only way they can even begin to justify the horrific things they have done. What a cheerful thought.
I need a drink.
A quick drink never hurt anyone, as Donald Rumsfeld almost said.
A bit early for me.
But the really frustrating part of this is the total lack of awareness on the part of the perpetrators of the disconnect between the view they have of themselves as virtuous and their actual actions. To get back to the music – the Lonesome Brothers song “The Bush Doctrine” goes:
My shit don’t stink
At least I don’t think it does
Yours does because
Your shit ain’t mine
There was another interesting article about the way the US vigorously prosecuted, as war criminals, other nations who had used water boarding on US POWs. If the West is doing it, it’s For Freedom. If it’s the other lot then it’s barbarism. Splendid.