| WHITE HOUSE PERFORMANCE ART
by Jason Loewith on 2/02/2007 02:21:00 PM
A recent New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece by Nicholas Lemann on the Lewis (Scooter) Libby trial struck a nerve with me recently:
The drama of incriminating evidence – the smoking gun, the damning memo, the DNA match, the latent fingerprint, the surprise confession – pervades American culture these days. It’s the lifeblood of popular television shows, books, movies, and websites. The Bush version is particularly potent, though, both in its emotional content and in its effects. It begins with a certainty that a situation is intolerable and a frustration that most people don’t see it that way. The next move is to bend the rules – to play rough, in the manner of a cop show – so that the truth comes out.
I was reminded of our Saturday Salon last season about the politics of torture surrounding our God of Hell production with Doug Cassel of NPR, who forcefully argued that torture – both as moral imperative and practical technique – is unjustifiable, because the intelligence gathered (if any) is unreliable… so say most experts.
And yet, American culture tells an entirely different story. My favorite television show is Fox’s 24, a high-stakes anti-terrorist fantasy in which the lead character, Jack Bauer, frequently resorts to torture (the stabbing of a thigh, the gouging of an eye, the shooting of a knee) to find out the exact piece of information we need to stop a terrorist attack. He’s got a heavy heart when he does it, but he knows its for the good of the Country, and (in my viewing experience of five seasons) he has yet to receive anything but perfect information.
It’s a satisfying fantasy in troubled times – that’s why I and so many millions love Jack. Bauer is a familiar American archetype: the cowboy who breaks the rules for the greater good when our Way Of Life is threatened. He’s Horatio Alger and John Wayne rolled into one, and that’s as American as you can get. What’s troubling is that the distinction between fantasy and fact seems lost by many in our government. Even Kiefer Sutherland (the actor who plays Jack Bauer) said to Charlie Rose:
It is widely known that… you can torture someone and they’ll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether it’s true or not, if you put someone in enough pain. Torture is not a way of procuring information. The way of procuring information is actually -- is in fact quite the opposite, and, unfortunately, that takes a lot of time. Within the context of our show, which is a fantastical show to begin with, the torture is a dramatic device to show you how desperate a situation is… and [how] desperate these characters are to solve this one specific thing, and time is running out. And so it is a dramatic device. It is not to be confused with what we think is right or wrong. And it’s a television show.
Yet many officials seem to believe that torture will bring about the information we need, and that the enemy needs only be pushed a bit farther to reveal The Truth. (The Vice President, incidentally, is said to be a huge fan of 24.) Lemann continues:
Back in the fall of 2002, the UN ordered Iraq to produce a report on its weapons programs. When it did, the Administration immediately rejected the report’s claims: the fact that Saddam claimed not to have WMDs when we knew that he did, was itself an insupportable offence. (Hence the grim police-precinct refrain among Bush and his Cabinet members: "We gave him a final chance to come clean.")
What struck me so forcefully about Lemann’s article was the sense that the White House was performing or narrating a version of events in regards to terrorism that seems fed by, or is constructed in concert with, contemporary cultural myths like 24. Satisfying, fantastical, and fictional cultural myths. That we’ll never know exactly what the government is learning at Guantanamo and elsewhere – are they really learning information that’s stopping terrorist attacks? – allows the government to apply yet another layer of mythology from 24: secrecy is key in the fight against terrorism, and we can’t know the truth for our own protection.
Of course, the arts have for thousands of years portrayed rulers as performers. I'm currently teaching a class on Shakespeare's Henry V, and the play itself is a fantastically biased narrative about a king who himself "performed" kingship: staging his rejection of Falstaff in public, staging his decision to go to war before his council, staging his uncovering of the terrorist Scroop before his intimates, staging his reply to Mountjoy before his soldiers about being ransomed. Public office - as Shakespeare and the Greeks before him knew well - is the most powerful stage of them all. Watching our current government assume the mantle of a television hero is just the most recent instance.
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