Frozen Scandal by Mark Danner

[many a good man]

In my opinion this column gets to the root of the biggest problem facing America today. In the past eight years or more, scandal has piled atop scandal and outrage atop more outrage. They blaze into our consciousness but...nothing ever becomes of them. They are simply shrugged off and we move onto the next. No one ever seems to get punished and no one is ever deterred from committing the next outrage. When is it going to stop? What is it going to take to stop this cycle? The Republic cannot endure until we find a way.

1.

I thought, "My God, she's not going to get away with this." But you have got away with it....
—Gethsemane

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.

...

2.

Something's wrong.... Something's deeply wrong. I can't say if your government is the symptom, or if it's the fucking problem. Whichever it is, it's ugly....
—Gethsemane

It is not information, it is politics. If we have learned anything this past decade it is that "the people," that vaunted repository of public good—"the people always find out"—the people are willing and able to live with quite a lot. They read, watch television, grunt a pox on all their houses, and turn back to their dinners. Thanks to the efficiency of our age of scandal we now know as never before what the public is willing to live with. "Now you have shown independence, commendable independence," Barack Obama said to John McCain in the third debate, "on some key issues—torture, for example." Torture has metamorphosed, these past few years, from an execrable war crime to a "key issue." From something forbidden by international treaty and condemned by domestic law to...something to be debated. Something one can stand on either side of. Something we can live with.

The story of how this happened is long and elaborate but one thing is clear: it has not happened for lack of revelation. The Abu Ghraib scandal broke in the spring of 2004. The images of Hooded Man, Leashed Man, Man Menaced by Dog—all quickly became "iconic," the stuff of end-of-the-year news tableaux and faded murals on the walls of minor cities in the Middle East. This first and last occasion when torture became vivid, fertile scandal—when torture emerged, thanks to the photographs, as that most valuable of products: televisual scandal—came and went in the spring and summer of 2004, leaving a harvest of rapidly aging images and leaked documents. Those documents—many hundreds of pages, which told in great and precise detail the story of how United States officials, from the President on down, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks to order Americans to torture—were quickly published by journalists and writers, myself included, who no doubt expected that the investigative committees, the televised hearings, and the prison sentences would quickly follow.<2>

In the event, the investigations did come, a dozen or more of them, and their very proliferation was the means by which the story was converted from shocking crime into perpetual news, then minor story, and then, at last, "key issue."
...

3.

That's why, these days, it's so interesting being a politician. Sorry, but you have to trust us. You have no choice.
—Gethsemane

What notes on scandal could be complete without mention of the presiding master-scandal of our age, The War. One uses capitals to denote not a set of discrete events—a set of particular people being cut down or blown apart by particular violent actions at particular times—but a state of mind. Threat becomes not only a political shield but what is in the end much more dangerous: a source of bottomless self-justification. What is dangerous is not only that our leaders have endlessly maintained that they are right but that they believe they are. George Bush, as he declared to the world in a proudly emphatic phrase, had been reborn as a "war president."

...

In our own less happy day, we can pore over the ever so explicit Downing Street Memo and scores of similar documents leaked fast and furiously from within the bureaucracy but find them, according to the rules of the scandal game, all too large and obvious to be taken to mean what to any normal person they precisely do mean, which is that those in power—wanting war, not diplomacy, and working hard to "wrong-foot Saddam" into war, as the Downing Street memoranda make explicitly clear—lied us into war. And now they have got us a war that has managed to be at once unnecessary and unending.

Of course the Law of the Smoking Gun tells us that this case, however evident the truth of it is to all, can never (failing the discovery of a tape record- ing in which the American president or the British prime minister can be heard chortling demonically about the grand charade they are about to perpetrate on their respective publics) be taken as definitively proved. The Law of Frozen Scandal means the case must remain forever open. Forever "alleged." Fodder still for a thousand investigative reports and a thousand revelations that reveal only what is already known. Can you not hear the wheels of scandal spinning? It is the music of our age.

much more at link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22117

[Sinistrous]

1. An eloquent support of the fact that

Prosecution of the bush, inc. war crimes is imperative.