HE day was April 2, 2003, the town was Najaf, the mood
was giddy, and, yes, the citizens did greet the American liberators from
the 101st Airborne Division with cheers. One Iraqi was asked what he hoped
the Americans would bring, and Jim Dwyer reported the answer on the front
page of The New York Times: " `Democracy,' the man said, his voice rising
to lift each word to greater prominence. `Whiskey. And sexy!' "
Well, two out of three ain't bad.
This joyous memory came rushing back after the grim revelation of yet
another kink in the torture regime at Abu Ghraib. As if sexual humiliation
and violent abuse weren't punishment enough, the guards also made
prisoners violate Islamic practice by force-feeding them booze.
How do we square the tales of American cruelty with the promise of
democracy we thought we were bringing to Iraq? One obvious way might be to
acknowledge with some humility that our often proud history has always had
a fault line, running from slavery to Wounded Knee to My Lai. (Read
accounts of Andersonville, the Confederate-run Civil War prison at which
some 13,000 died, for literal echoes of some of Abu Ghraib's inhumanity.)
But there's an easier way out in 2004: blame Janet Jackson for what's gone
wrong in Iraq, or if not her, then Jenna Jameson.
It sounds laughable, but it's not a joke. Some of our self-appointed
moral leaders are defending the morally indefensible by annexing Abu
Ghraib as another front in America's election-year culture war. Charles
Colson, the Watergate felon turned celebrity preacher, told a group of
pastors convened by the Family Research Council that the prison guards had
been corrupted by "a steady diet of MTV and pornography." The Concerned
Women for America site posted a screed by Robert Knight, of the Culture
and Family Institute, calling the Abu Ghraib scandal the " `Perfect Storm'
of American cultural depravity," in which porn, especially gay porn, gave
soldiers "the idea to engage in sadomasochistic activity and to videotape
it in voyeuristic fashion." (His chosen prophylactics to avert future Abu
Ghraibs include abolishing sex education, outlawing same-sex marriage and
banishing Howard Stern.) The vice president of the Heritage Foundation,
Rebecca Hagelin, found a link between the prison scandal and how "our
country permits Hollywood to put almost anything in a movie and still call
it PG-13."
Some of these same characters also felt that the media shouldn't show
the Abu Ghraib pictures too much or at all — as if the pictures were the
problem rather than what they reveal. They are of an ideological piece
with Jerry Falwell, who, a mere two days after 9/11, tried to shift the
blame for al Qaeda's attack to the "pagans" and abortionists and gays and
lesbians who have "tried to secularize America."
This time the point of these scolds' political strategy — and it is a
political strategy, despite some of its adherents' quasireligiosity — is
clear enough. It is not merely to demonize gays and the usual rogue's
gallery of secularist bogeymen for any American ill but to clear the Bush
administration of any culpability for Abu Ghraib, the disaster that may
have destroyed its mission in Iraq. If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be
said to have induced a "few bad apples" in one prison to misbehave, then
everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down,
is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual
war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at
the Paris Hilton video, or "Mean Girls," or maybe "Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy."
The hypocrisy of those pushing this line knows few bounds. They choose
to ignore the reality that the most popular images of sadomasochism in
American pop culture this year have been those in "The Passion of the
Christ," an R-rated "religious" movie that many Americans took their
children to see, at times with clerical blessings. FDrank RichThe other hypocrisy of the
blame-the-culture crowd is that "normal Americans" — a phrase favored by
Mr. Knight — don't partake of the "secular" entertainment that is doing
all this damage. In other words, the porn that led to prison abuse is all
ghettoized in the blue states. The facts say otherwise. Phil Harvey, the
president of the North Carolina-based Adam & Eve, one of the country's
largest suppliers of mail-order adult products, said in an interview last
week that his business has "for years" been roughly the same per capita
throughout the continental United States, with those Deep South bastions
of the Bible Belt, Alabama and Mississippi, buying only 10 percent fewer
sex toys and porn videos than everyone else. Even residents of the
Cincinnati metropolitan area — home to Citizens for Community Values and
famous for antismut battles over Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe —
turned out to be slightly larger-than-average users of porn Web sites,
according to a 2001 Nielsen Internet survey.
Americans, regardless of location or political affiliation, have always
consumed a culture of sex and violence. David Milch's explicit HBO
recollection of the cruelty and carnality that accompanied our "winning"
of the west, "Deadwood," is hardly fiction. As Luc Sante and Susan Sontag
have pointed out, the photographs from Abu Ghraib themselves have a nearly
exact historical antecedent in those touristy snapshots of shameless
Americans posing underneath the victims of lynchings for decades after the
Civil War. The horrific photos were sent around as postcards in the same
insouciant spirit that moved Abu Ghraib guards to e-mail their torture
pictures or turn them into screensavers — even though the reigning
mass-culture pin-ups of the time were Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple
rather than Janet Jackson or Britney Spears.
To blame every American transgression on the culture, whether the
transgression is as grievous as Abu Ghraib or the shootings at Columbine
or as trivial as lubricious teenage fashions, is to absolve Americans of
any responsibility for anything. It used to be that liberals pinned all
American sins on the military-industrial complex; now it's conservatives
who pin them all on the Viacom-Time Warner complex. It used to be liberals
that found criminals victims of "root causes"; now it's conservatives who
find criminals victims of X-rated causes. Since it's conservatives who are
now in power, we've reached the absurd state where we have an attorney
general who arrived in Washington placing a higher priority on stamping
out porn than terrorism; we have a Federal Communications Commission that
is ready to sacrifice a bedrock American value (the First Amendment) to
the cause of spanking Bono for using a four-letter word on TV. As Congress
threatens to police cable TV as well, we face the prospect that the
history in "Deadwood" may yet be airbrushed by the government until it
resembles "Little Women."
All of this is at odds with one of President Bush's most persistent campaign themes.
He has repeatedly vowed to introduce "a culture of responsibility in
America" in which "each of us understands we are responsible for the
decisions we make in life." Up to a point. Now he talks about how the Abu
Ghraib pictures are not "the America I know." (Maybe he should get out
more.) If he really practiced "a culture of responsibility" he would take
responsibility for his own government's actions rather than plead
ignorance and express dismay. He might, for instance, explain how his own
White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, came to write a January 2002 memo
that labeled the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete" for dealing
with prisoners in the war on terrorism (of which Iraq, we're told, is a
part). The dissemination of that memo's legal wisdom through the Defense
Department and the military command over the past 26 months may tell us
more about what led to Abu Ghraib than anything else we've heard so far
from the administration, let alone any Heritage Foundation press release
that finds the genesis of torture in the sexual innuendos of prime-time
television.
In his speech last Monday night, the president, reeling in the polls
and seeking a life raft, seemed to be well on his way to adopting the
cultural defense being pushed by his political allies. He called Abu
Ghraib a symbol of "death and torture" under Saddam Hussein and then said
that the same prison also "became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few
American troops." The idea, it seemed, was to concede American
fallibility, if not exactly error. But by reducing the charge to
"disgraceful conduct," he was performing a verbal sleight-of-hand that
acquitted those troops of torture and found them guilty instead of the
lesser crime of pornographic horseplay. (He was also trying to confine
culpability to a "few" troops.) Perhaps he hopes that we will believe that
what happened at Abu Ghraib is the work of just a handful of porn-addled
freaks, and that by razing the prison we can shut the whole incident down
the way Rudy Giuliani banished the sex emporiums of Times Square.
But it's hard to imagine that any of this will fool that man in Najaf
who had hoped we'd replace the terror of Saddam with that elixir he
rightly called democracy. Whatever else America may represent — whiskey
and sexy included — it stands most of all for the rule of law. We won't
bring democracy to Iraq until those of high rank and low alike submit to
an all-American prosecution for crimes that clearly extend well beyond the
perimeters of pornographic pictures that, in the end, are merely the
evidence.