Remember Pleasure Island, from Pinocchio? On Pleasure Island a boy can smoke, drink, eat all the candy and ice cream and break all the windows he wants to. After that, he is turned into a pack mule. Moral: Act like an animal and you may become one. Okay, it's not a very subtle moral, but it's a moral for six-year-old boys, and when I was a six-year-old boy, my idea of subtle was an armpit fart.
The adult version of Pleasure Island, at least in the United States, has always been Cuba. Cuba in the late 1940's and for most of the 1950's was called the "whorehouse of the Caribbean"--Pleasure Island, for cigar-chomping American businessmen who left their wives at home. Castro threw us out, eventually, but we kept Guantanamo, which is Cortizo Indian for "C'mon, you know you always wanted to."
Okay, I made that last thing up. There's no such thing as a Cortizo Indian.
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Still, what would you do, turned loose on an island beyond the law, and encouraged to do exactly as you liked, without fear of punishment? Among those millions of Americans--not necessarily you at all, gentle reader--who support a multibillion dollar porn industry that includes a great deal about handcuffs, whips, chains, and leather masks, I would guess there is a spectrum of honest response. At the extremes would be those who were horrified at the prospect, and at the other extreme those who were delighted, their souls in arms and eager for the fray. PFC Lynndie England, who at Abu Ghraib forced grown men to crawl naked on the floor leashed like dogs, would buy the first cruise ticket. She would have plenty of company.
Of course it is objected that PFC England represented a rogue element, a few bad apples who did these things merely for kicks. Okay, taking that as true, does it mean that other kinds of torturers and other kinds of torture are better? Is there such a thing as torture performed by the pure of heart? Torture--as Mr. Cheney so avidly repeats (and repeats and repeats) that has redeeming social importance?
I dispute the proposition. Certainly there is no danger, at least just then, from the victim. The idea seems to be that the victim is part of something larger and much more menacing, something that the pure-hearted torturer may discover and disable. But if this is the intent of the good torturers,the pure-of-heart torturers, then why torture on Pleasure Island? Why not torture right here at home? We could simply make the torture as public as, say, imprisonment. Exit 15B; Conway; U.S. Enhanced Interrogation Facility. The screams, like the yells and curses in the vicinity of any prison, would be part of the landscape. We could do that, easily enough.
But we don't do that.
We keep torture out of sight, far away, on Pleasure Island. We say it is for safety, but that is given the lie by our government's own actions--by our own government's insistence in court that American law could not reach our own behavior at Guantanamo. We admitted in public that it was not the terrorists we feared, but ourselves, our own laws. We said we were doing things that were right, that we could do at home, but that we preferred to do elsewhere.
That was damning, damning beyond all response. If your actions are just and your motives pure and good, why take it to a lawless island? There is only one possible remaining explanation for it: Because one is not pure of heart at all. One is ashamed. One recruits from the Lynndie England end of the spectrum. Torture--the binding, the tilting back of the head, the water, the struggles, the anonymity, the forcing people to crawl naked on a leash, the breaking of a person so he will do and say whatever you like, anything anything--contains some primary and inescapable element of sadistic sexual pleasure. Not to put too fine a point on it--consciously or not, this was done in large part for kicks.
And deep down, everyone knows it. Lynndie England certainly knows it. Her cohorts know it. That's what Pleasure Island is for. And it has its name for a reason, and for that reason, it's on an island.
Only the trouble with Pleasure Island is, it turns you into a pack mule.
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Disney does the transformation scene using shadows on the cavern wall. The shadow boy-mule kicks and screams, and the shadow kicking turns into shadow bucking and the screaming turns into terrified, locked-in whinnies. (Why anybody would take a six-year-old to such a movie, I don't know.) Pinocchio escapes deformed, with donkey's ears and a tail, and he is redeemed to boyhood only by rescuing his father. It is a very nice wholesome message, puritanical in its way, and therefore American. And the movie really is us, too, or at least Jiminy Cricket is. (He sounds just like Harry Truman.)
The torture issue is a great brass fanfare of a call to serious redemption, if only someone would answer it. Sooner or later, someone will. I hope it is right-wing religious Republicans. They are best equipped by education and training for the task. We may have the logic, but they have the mythos. Jiminy Cricket has the initials to prove it. They had better hurry up, though, because the shadows on our wall have lately gotten pretty disturbing. They, too, belong to us.