by William Norman Grigg
Shall I tell you what true evil is? It is to submit to you. It is when we surrender our freedom, our dignity, instead of defying you.
~ Captain Jean-Luc Picard confronts Armus, Dick Cheney's sci-fi soul mate.
En route to the Enterprise-D, a shuttlecraft carrying Counselor Deanna Troi malfunctioned and crash-landed on desolate Vagra II. The accident left Troi seriously wounded, and nearly killed the nondescript shuttle pilot (who was fortunate to survive, given that he was clad in the often-fatal red uniform). Her misfortune was complicated by the presence of a malevolent entity known as Armus – the congealed essence of sadistic evil.
Abandoned on Vagra II by a long-extinct race, Armus could re-arrange itself into a vaguely humanoid form. It could generate potent force fields and direct lethal energy discharges at anyone who provoked its displeasure. In appearance and substance, Armus somewhat resembled the Venom symbiote that afflicted Spider-Man (I write those words knowing that I am revealing myself to be an incurable sci-fi nerd).
Following its abandonment countless millennia ago, Armus degenerated into a being of pure rage and hatred. Troi and her Enterprise colleagues were the first to interrupt Armus's prolonged exile, and he greeted his unexpected visitors in predictable fashion – by torturing them.
It's tempting to think that Armus was a sci-fi analogue to Dick Cheney – a being formed from congealed malevolence whose only pleasure is taken from confining and tormenting other beings. Cheney's background in the petroleum industry offers another point of metaphorical contact, given that Armus in repose looked like an oil slick.
Nevertheless, the parallel doesn't quite work. Armus describes himself as a "skin of evil left here by a race of Titans who believed if they rid themselves of me, they would free the bonds of destructiveness."
That race somehow devised a way "of bringing to the surface all that was evil and negative within, erupting, spreading, connecting. In time, it formed a second skin, dank and vile."
At the risk of conferring undue legitimacy on Freud's dogma, it may be best to describe Cheney as the Id of modern conservatism.
He isn't the wretched residue cast off by the Red State Fascist sub-population; he is its depraved living essence, and his malignant influence pulsates through the executive branch even though a new administration is nominally in charge.
The routine criminal violence carried out in the name of "the war on terror" – summary execution of terrorist suspects by way of Langley's death drones, the murder of handcuffed Afghan children by Washington's death squads, as well as the institutionalization of unaccountable, dictatorial presidential war powers, and the creation of spurious legal doctrines denying personhood to prisoners accused of being "enemy combatants" – are fulfillment of Cheney's decree that the U.S. government would take a turn to the "dark side" that would probably last for decades.
Operatives of Russia's "security organs" could be called "Dzerzhinsky's Children" in memory of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the career criminal who founded the Cheka secret police.
In similar fashion it could be said that those now enrolled in Washington's apparatus of surveillance, detention, torture and murder are products of Cheney's vision. They are creatures from the Id of contemporary conservatism, in which nothing is considered more important than preserving and enhancing Leviathan's power to imprison, torture, and kill anyone designated an enemy of the State.
Torture produces little if any reliable intelligence. It is entirely unconstitutional and banned by both domestic law and international agreements. It is, however, a superb method to dehumanize individuals and force them to submit to whatever their captor demands.
More importantly, from the perspective of Cheney's disciples, torture serves something of a sacramental function. The ritualized torment of those deemed to be irreconcilably alien ("they're not citizens or even common criminals – they're terrorists!") is critical to establishing a sense of shared identity, a tangible way of distinguishing "them" from "us."
Cognate public sentiments played a role in establishing the Soviet and Nazi secret police organs, which defined themselves – lest we forget – as enforcement bodies carrying out "counter-terrorism" missions. One measure of what we might call the Cheneyification of public opinion was offered by the GOP-friendly Rasmussen polling firm immediately after the most recent piece of "security theater" – the abortive Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253.
According to Rasmussen's New Year's Eve survey, 58% of the public agreed with the proposition that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka the "Panty-bomber Patsy," should be tortured, because ... well, because he's a Muslim accused of terrorism, that's why, and thus shouldn't be "given the rights" that would protect American criminal defendants.
Interestingly, an April 2009 poll conducted by the same firm claimed that the public, by exactly the same margin, opposed investigation of Bush-era torture practices. This makes me wonder if the firm is tweaking the results going back to the same demographic well.
Just a few years ago, points out Matthew Yglesias, torture was being justified as an exceptional means used to pry critical intelligence out of recalcitrant master terrorists – an emergency measure that played out against the pressure of a ticking time bomb.
By now, however, torture is firmly institutionalized as a routine interrogation-cum-punishment technique. For the post-Cheney GOP, noted Adam Serwer of The American Prospect, "torture is no longer a 'necessary evil.’ It is a rally cry, a 'values’ issue like same-sex marriage or abortion. They don’t "grudgingly" support torture, they applaud it. They celebrate it."
In fact, as I've noted elsewhere, the GOP's "values" commissariat is willing to countenance all kinds of political and theological transgressions on the part of a candidate as long as he or she firmly supports torture. This is what remains of conservatism today: Fetid nihilism shrouded in high-gloss sanctimony.
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