bad metaphor

This weekend, Eli’s parents went out of town, so we housesat and took care of their dogs. Ever since they got these dogs, it seems as though things in the house have gradually become more…canine. For instance, Eli said when he was over there once, he reached into the fridge and grabbed some yogurt to eat. His parents laughed at him, and when he asked why, they said, “you are eating the dog yogurt!” Dog yogurt! I don’t think it was yogurt specifically made for dogs, so much as a separate tub from the yogurt the humans of the household eat.

Setting: Eli’s parents house, about 2 a.m. on Saturday. We had just gotten back from a friend’s birthday party, and Eli still had to go deliver a promotional movie he’d made for this organization. He wanted to test the movie before he dropped it off, so he put it in the DVD player. I actually heard him gasp while I was in the kitchen:

“Oh god. Oh man. I had no idea what sick, depraved stuff my parents were into…”

“Uhh…should we be looking at this?” I said, as he gestured me over to look at the DVD.

The title read: “BARKLINGTON: A Movie for Dogs.” Underneath the title, distributed evenly across the surface of the DVD, were elaborately detailed cartoon dogs of various breeds and poses, some with sunglasses, some with outfits, all in various states of frolicking, across a pastel green lawn and a crudely painted movie theater. In short, it was the most demented art I’ve seen in some time.

We put it in, and immediately one of the dogs trotted up to the TV and stared, transfixed by the selection menu, which featured cartoon bones stamped onto the screen to the sound of a doorbell ringing repeatedly. A black and white terrier casually perched atop a horse, sauntering across a hyper-green lawn. We had an errand to run, so we decided that was the appropriate time to flee the house and let the dogs watch their movie.

When we returned, the dogs were busy chewing on what appeared to be an elk femur, instead of watching their movie. Well, whatever. We each took a dog outside for a quick pee in the yard. It was cold, and I was shivering standing there, waiting for my dog to relieve itself, chatting with Eli about something when Eli looked up. He had seen some fleeting shadow out of the corner of his eye, but dismissed it initially as an artifact of poor vision. Then the shadow became more definite.

“Whoa, there’s another dog over there,” he said. I looked over. Now we had both a beagle / harrier mix, a dog who happens to have a very keen sense of smell (she had actually found a $20 bill earlier when I took her out for a walk!), and a little shih-tzu mix, who looks like an infant Ewok. Both are the opposite of intimidating, and neither dog saw the interloper at first: a big beast of a dog, probably a Doberman pinscher from the looks of him. The most unsettling thing, apart from his size, was how silent the dog was – it was as if he had materialized from the shadows of the house. He raised his ears and started gamboling towards us.

“Ahh!” I said, and one of my unfortunate instincts when confronted with something I fear is to shut my eyes, cover my head and HIDE. This is probably just about the worst reaction anyone can have, in any threatening situation, ever. Like, what is a rapist murder psycho going to do, go “RAAAR, RAAAR, hey wait a minute. Where’d that girl go? Oh well, off to the next victim.” Anyway, I need to work on honing my defense insticts. My dog finally noticed the interloper and, as he was a little shih-tzu with more balls than brains, started baring his teeth and barking at the hulking shape (the second worst reaction in this particular scenario). Luckily Eli had his wits about him, grabbed both leashes and dragged the non-demon dogs away from the hell beast, who’d decided he’d had enough of teasing the mortals – for now – and slinked off into the night.

Later, as we were pondering the appearance of hell beast, I wondered: “Did Barklington summon him?”

Yesterday I opened up the New York Times to see the headline: Khmer Rouge Defendant Apologizes for Atrocities. This, an apology from an aged war criminal, is considered a milestone. A response to unresolved questions buried in vast fields of sunken skulls and bones. It’s a paltry and unsatisfying answer, and infuriating that even this small gesture has met resistance from the current Cambodian government, half of which were in the Khmer Rouge – but better still than denial, of course.

Later on in the evening, the image of Duch’s fault-lined face floating anchorless in the back of my mind, Eli suggested going to see the film Waltz with Bashir. All he knew about it was that it was an animated film, nominated for an Oscar, and that it was about some war. Somewhere. (Actually he thought it was Armenia before I looked it up and corrected him). I knew even less about it, so I had no expectations going into the film.

The film is about an Israeli Defense Force soldier’s attempt to recover his memories of participating in the devastating 1982 Israeli campaign in Lebanon, twenty years after the fact. He embarks on a quest to interview other IDF soldiers who were there at the time, to pin down where he was on the day of the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre. The film dances with the elusiveness of memories and the mind’s defense mechanisms to horror – the brain blots out atrocity, blurs it into something more palatable. One soldier’s adaptation technique during the war was to pretend as though he was viewing everything through a camera lens – “wow, look at all those explosions over there. What fun.” This technique abruptly stops working when, after his outfit has just shot and razed a section on the outskirts of Beirut, he looks down to see maimed and dying horses on the ground. The destroyed buildings and butchered bystanders could be rationalized, sectioned off in the brain as being part of an action film or a video game. Not the horses.

Afterwards I went home and read the Wikipedia entry, and apparently the film has been criticized for putting a soft focus on the IDF’s role in the massacre (this reviewer even calls it IDF propaganda.) That review is definitely over the top, but I did note while watching that the movie was careful to emphasize that it was definitely those Phalangists over there doing the killing and torturing, not the IDF soldiers. But there are plenty of scenes before that which show the soldiers in a pretty negative light, dispatching civilians without a second thought if they happen to be in the way. One scene showed soldiers in a tank, slowly and carelessly rolling over cars and smashing into buildings – for no reason other than that they could. The soldiers are listless, bored by death and destruction; they keep their heads down and follow orders no matter how brutal. Even if it were true that the movie producers downplayed the murky and controversial role that the Israeli army might have had in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, I doubt the IDF is going to be using this film in their promotional materials any time soon.

The actions that were depicted in the movie were bad enough. The soldiers sit outside a wholesale slaughter, with nobody doing more than making a half-hearted phone call to stop it. The Israeli army officials in charge of the operation are stationed high atop a tall building overlooking the area, and can plainly see for themselves what is taking place. The whole reason the massacre is able to happen is because they are there to back up the Phalangists, light the flares in the sky so that the killers can see better, camp just outside the lines of sight and look the other way – skirting just outside the edge of legal culpability in, say, an international criminal tribunal.

In a Phnom Penh courtroom, Duch’s lawyers argue that he should not bear the brunt of guilt, as he was just following orders. And it’s true, in the increasingly paranoid and frenzied inner climate of the Khmer Rouge at that time, if Duch had resisted he and his family would have been the next on the list to be tortured and killed. In fact, that very fate befell the supervisor who trained him. If Duch hadn’t done it, he would have been killed and someone else taken his place.

But this is a familiar refrain. When reading these first-hand accounts of genocide – everyone says that, from the civilians who consciously ignore the fact that their neighbors are disappearing, to the lowly grunts actually physically carrying out the orders, to the officers and officials frantically trying to placate an increasingly demented leader. Which doesn’t invalidate that defense. In essence, the aggregate of hands carrying out orders, to the circulation system that links them, to the heads that contemplate evil, forms a solid and deadly machine.

But the question still remains: how could this machine function, without you?

This weekend, instead of leaving my frigid, unheated house to go party somewhere warm, E and I decided to stay in and watch Errol Morris’ documentary, Standard Operating Procedure. Cheery, right? Now when the photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib surfaced, I tried to avoid looking at them as much as possible, because I am a sheltered weenie. I also didn’t think I needed to see the photos – I wasn’t the one who needed convincing, see, since I was against the war from the very outset.

Looking back on it, I do think these photos will stand as the most important images of this decade. The black bags over the faces of limp prisoners, stacked in a human pyramid – this is the visual representation of the loss of the last vestiges of U.S. moral authority. The easy rebuttal to the assertion that this government does not torture.

This administration and its cheerleaders (the nineteen percenters) will say that Abu Ghraib was the result of a few bad apples ruining the good name of the American system, that these actions started and ended with a couple of stupid kids who got carried away disobeyed orders. In fact, as Errol Morris uncovers in his documentary, these were the marching orders. The refrain, repeated again and again during the interviews, is that they were told “Do everything short of killing them,” and that’s what was done. One of the convicted MPs, Javal Davis, passionately argues that what was depicted in the photos was not torture – the real torture was going on behind the scenes, where people died at the hands of interrogators from shadowy “other governmental agencies.”

I definitely disagree with him; what these MPs did would constitute torture and I think most of them did deserve to serve some time for their actions. But as Morris points out, no one above the rank of staff sergeant served any time at all for their complicity in the actions that obliterated what was left of America’s reputation. And the photos that damned the MPs didn’t even show the worst of the torture, committed behind the scenes by their superiors and far away from the view of a camera lens. Why did our collective public anger and interest in hanging those responsible out to dry – why did it end with just these soldiers?

One thing that I found pretty fascinating about the documentary was how prominently military women were involved in the scandal. Lynndie England was probably the most public face attached to Abu Ghraib, and the documentary gives a little bit of a glimpse into the gender pressures of being a woman trying to succeed in a testosterone-driven environment. In some sense, maybe having the female MPs involved legitimized what they were doing. Or maybe the women were easier to scapegoat, like fired Brigadier General Janis Karpinski.

Then there is the brilliant smile of Sabrina Harman. It doesn’t get much time in the documentary, but Morris has a long blog post on the New York Times about Harman and the smile in in particular. One photo features this absolutely bizarre juxtaposition of her vivid smile and thumbs up pose next to the brutalized, decaying corpse of al-Jamadi. Harman explains that she knows it looks bad, but that she simply just doesn’t know what to do with her hands in photos. So she just kind of reflexively does the smile and thumbs up thing in every photo. And indeed, she really does do that pose in every photo.

If it weren’t for the photos, nobody would know anything about this. Perhaps that’s why they took them. Harman claims she was trying to provide evidence to exonerate her later, though her presence in the photos – and that smile – were what led to her conviction and incarceration. But why did Charles Graner insist on taking photographs also, since he was higher up on the chain of command and would almost certainly be damned? Was it purely out of a stupid sense of vanity or invincibility, or what? Morris wasn’t able to interview Graner for this documentary, since he is still incarcerated and the military did not allow Morris access.

Did they know what they were doing was wrong? Harman obviously knew, as she wrote constant letters to her wife complaining of the treatment of the prisoners (another interesting thing, what is it like to be a lesbian in the military?). Javal Davis didn’t seem to think so. It was standard operating procedure, modeled for them by other interrogators who differed in that they were more discreet about their actions. Lynndie England seemed to be more preoccupied with Graner’s romantic betrayal. And Graner himself, according to the testimony of the others, sadistically relished abusing prisoners. But of course, all of them must have known that this was wrong or illegal on some level, because they would change things in anticipation of Red Cross visits. After the audits, it was back to the standard operating procedures.

Abu Ghraib, I think, is the gruesome 21st century version of the Milgram experiment. You are an untrained soldier in charge of a prison, where the prisoners and even some of the fellow guards could be conspiring against you. The prison is constantly being shelled from the outside and you have friends who have been killed in these explosions. Oh yeah, and you’re nineteen, maybe twenty years old?

Now in comes an authority figure, a military guy with a title much higher than yours maybe, or someone from some other agency that you know is above you. You see this authority figure do weird things to the prisoners, things you are not sure are right. But you see this happen regularly, and you start getting orders to do this to your prisoners (who, again, are trying to kill you).

I think a lot of people would love to think that they would be a hero in this situation, myself included. You would disobey the orders, even if that meant going to prison or other military retribution. I don’t think that military culture allows for much of that, however. If you’re a good soldier, you’re trained to listen to your superior officer, and if you’re not the type of person who does that, you don’t last very long. Even the whistleblower MP wanted to keep the report within the military, and not expose it to the media or the external civilian world.

In some ways taking photographs was the best form of civil disobedience in this situation. If the MPs had simply walked out, got thrown in jail and blabbed about the goings on at Abu Ghraib to everyone who would listen to them, I’m not sure people would believe them. But you just can’t argue with the photographs.

We need to see these things. Just like we need to see the images of concentration camps, see the piles of skulls in the Killing Fields. Otherwise our sense of outrage is muted by complacency. With a thumbs up and a smile.

I am currently broiling in my office, as the building clings desperately to the notion that it is still mid-winter. It’s so hot that the chocolate kisses in the candy tray on my desk are melting. The thermostats have been placed on the walls for placebo effect; it isn’t working. I’m done with my burst of productive energy for the day, and the heat does not put me in the mood for knitting (haven’t forgotten you, Faye! Expect an octopus or two to make an appearance soon). Instead I’ll type up a review of a movie I’ve seen recently, a Korean flick called ‘Lady Vengeance’, about a hot-tempered woman (ha, how’s that for a segue? My brain, sadly, is quite baked).

Elijah, the guy I’m seeing (again, for those of you just tuning into bad metaphor, no real names are used on this blog), and I were standing around in the video section of a grocery store when this film caught our attention. Apparently it’s part of a three-part series, including another movie Elijah had seen, called ‘Old Boy.’ He liked that movie, and knew of my fascination with vengeance (revenge tragedies especially!), so he picked it up on Netflix a few days after that.

‘Lady Vengeance’ features stunning cinematography. The opening sequence is like a glamour shot for violence: swirls of blood spilled in water curl into stark rosettes. We find out that Geum-ja, the titular Lady Vengeance, has just been released from prison – she had been sentenced for strangling a young boy to death. The crime shocked and titillated the nation because of the beauty of the offender; Geum-ja develops a following of obsessed individuals who are transfixed by the contrast between her innocent appearance and her latent violent tendencies. All this is a familiar story, of course, but the movie gets more interesting plot wise as Geum-ja begins to enact her 13-year plan for revenge.

Yeah, she may be missing a couple of fingers, but she’s got some bitchin’ red eyeshadow.

I expected the film to be like the opening shot, glorifying violence, which I tend not to enjoy so much on the screen (despite my affection for written revenge dramas). Yet the thing that struck me about this movie was how, despite how beautifully shot and gorgeous many of the scenes are, it managed to portray the final revenge as something rather ugly, awkward, and ultimately unsatisfying.

Spoilers in the next paragraph:

The ultimate revenge is decided by committee, ensconced in bureaucracy. Despite the intense anguish the parents of the murdered children experience (or maybe because of it), the parents have many doubts and second guesses about committing violence against the man who tortured and killed their children. The terrible rage they feel upon watching the videos of the last moments of their children, begins to dissipate when each parent stands in front of him, contemplating the murder. One of the women looks at him and says, “But you look so normal.” Afterwards, wherein they celebrate the deed by eating birthday cake, everyone involved seems listless and broken. What they have done hasn’t brought healing, or really much of anything. The discovery of snowfall jolts the people out of solemnity, back into banal, ordinary life, in which one has to worry about traffic and bedtimes. Like the symbolic tofu, the snow washes away sin, or perhaps buries it.

I’d definitely recommend this movie, and I’m curious to see others in the trilogy. There are many layers of complication that I’m not sure I’ve quite parsed through yet, and I saw it last week. That, in my mind, makes the difference between an excellent movie and a merely good one.