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The other day someone posted an especially aggravating news article about a man having sex with a dead dog near a day care center.
Terrible, terrible story that ruined my first cup of coffee and the whole day. The OP got a few expected replies before getting locked: "Give me a minute alone with that sicko," "What is the world coming to?" and the usual assortment of disgust with humanity in general. All understandable reactions and they all have one thing in common: helplessness.
Helplessness happens to be the goal of torture as well. In Iraq Tactics Have Long History With U.S. Interrogators, Walter Pincus discusses torture tactics refined by the CIA since 1963, and finds:
Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presents "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation."
The specific coercive methods it describes echo today's news stories about Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, for example, photographs and documents have shown that detainees were hooded, blindfolded, dressed in sloppy garb and forced to go naked.
The KUBARK manual suggests that, for "resistant" prisoners, the "circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring and of being plunged into the strange."
Don't most news stories do the same thing? Don't they distract from the "known and the reassuring" and plunge us "into the strange"? Isn't the threat "far more effective" than any actual immediate danger we could act on? There is little or nothing we can do about most news accounts, be they car accidents, crime reports or any strange danger that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. All we can do is introvert the news and then "the early effect of such an environment is anxiety" and "the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects," some of whom "lose touch with reality focus inwardly."
Maybe after an excruciating story, as the news parades their experts, we experience something similar and the news adopts a more benevolent role. And since the torture would be subtle rather than direct, we can't quite blame and attack the news reporter and might even be thankful. Like a tortured man "resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself" and the source of pain "is not the interrogator but the victim himself."
Let's assume for the sake of argument that something similar occurs while watching the sensational news. What happens?
The payoff of such techniques, the manual said, is that when the interrogator appears, he or she appears as a "reward of lessened anxiety . . . providing relief for growing discomfort," and that sometimes, as a result, "the questioner assumes a benevolent role."
Is it possible the stream of "experts" we see on the news become the benevolent interrogators who offer a "reward of lessened anxiety"? If so, wouldn't we be more likely to be uncritical of their solutions?
Winston Smith suffers torture as the last step to his conformity in 1984:
'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
What is news reporting if not the worst things in the world? Perhaps every newspaper, every news program, somewhere within their pages or minutes opens the door to our Room 101. Yours, mine, everyone's.
Perhaps, just perhaps, when all is said and done after we hear the gruesome news, the expert's solutions are all the hope possible. Perhaps then, "But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
Perhaps.
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