Demagogue

Bob Herbert describes a disturbing case:

Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."[...]

The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.[...]

Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose brother was a suspected terrorist.[...]

Syrian officials reported back to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is now back in Canada.[...]

She sounded shaken by the memory. "He's not a big guy," she said. "He had lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken. He looked like someone who was kind of dead inside."

Herbert asks the appropriate question:

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?

The only answer to this question that makes any sense to me at all is from George Lakoff's theory that conservative and progressive viewpoints on all issues can be explained by examining each group's basic understanding of the family. In the conservative "strict father model" of the family (as opposed to the "nurturing parents model" of progressives), it is the father's duty, as the moral authority, to discipline his children, preferably with physical force, because children are born inherently bad and must be made good. Lakoff also contends that in the conservative mindset, there is a subconscious (if not conscious) connection between prosperity and morality (with discipline being the tie that binds the two together).

I draw two conclusions from this as it relates to torture: The first is that the physical nature of torture is not as alarming because of the physical element that fits in a worldview where the moral authority father figure (the United States due to its immense prosperity) has a moral duty to teach the children ("less developed" nations and cultures whatever that means) right from wrong so that they too can be prosperous and thus moral. That is not to say, of course, that conservative believe torture is moral or that children should be tortured -- only phsycial discipline.

The second conclusion is that the details of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are not as important in the conservative model because the United States's prosperity is a larger indication of its morality than are these "small gnats in the big picture" (as a conservative friend of mine has called torture).