Abu Ghraib: A Mirror on Our Souls?

Gig Harbor, Wash., Feb. 10 - All Americans celebrate the recent Iraqi election-the images of the long lines at polling sites were truly thrilling--and we hope these newcomers to democracy can solidify our historic reality.

But there is another set of images and another reality--moral--that haunts still: Abu Ghraib. While the administration may hope nothing succeeds like success, and President Bush declared his own reelection an "accountability moment" on Iraq, political victory does not trump moral stain.

The question remains: How could any of our soldiers--defenders and deliverers of the American ideal of human dignity--torture and sexually humiliate prisoners in their custody and laugh about it? (Most of these prisoners, reports the International Red Cross, were innocent.) Equally shameful is the failure to establish command accountability, military or political, for our use of torture not only at Abu Ghraib, but generally.

While we continue to press for the full accountability to be expected of a "moral values" administration, there is something else to consider: our own role. That's because by creating an environment that could produce troops who torture and find it amusing, it's valid also to seek a public accountability. Can we deny that those searing images--of prisoners stripped naked, cowering at dogs, forced to simulate sex--are echoed in the pornographic mix of raunch and violence of much of our own "cultural" fare? Scan the TV, movies, music stations, video games, advertising--and you'll find a brutality in sensibility differing from Abu Ghraib only in degree, not kind.

It's all the same slippery slope, and at Abu Ghraib we slipped-badly. And to those claiming such fare is "only entertainment," so much the worse. That the Sopranos' "whackings" are meant to entertain explains the especially squirm-inducing aspect of the Abu Ghraib photos. As the lead investigator of the courts-martial said, "They didn't think it was that big a deal, they were just joking around."

But it is a "big deal"--as our own outcry drove home when those photos hit our consciousness. Recall that thunderous outcry. Instantly we saw what the "jokers" could not: They'd crossed the line between human and inhuman. In this sorry affair, that outcry was a proud moment for Americans: It confirmed an intact moral compass.

Guided by that compass, we need to connect outcry to responsibility. This entails looking in the mirror, because our cultural environment--from which the Abu Ghraib abusers hail--is created, sustained, and capitalized by us. How? In our market culture, we the consumers are king. Whatever the king wants sets up a chain of demand, and while occasionally we want Mozart, the bank says we want raunch and violence more. To accommodate us, producers push "the edge," creating context in which "human" means not character but kink. Add to this burlesque the imprimatur of critics who praise things "bent" and "twisted"-and no wonder an Abu Ghraib can occur.

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