Heather Mallick
April 2009

“Some things in life, you wanna just keep walkin’. Some things in life need to be  mysterious.”

Yes, it sounds like an early ‘60s pop song. Kind of tarty, kind of philosophical. Ain’t it the truth, sistah. There are lots of things I just don’t wanna see neither.

There’s what that guy did in the Domino’s Pizza video that has made millions of Americans unable to eat circular cheese food this summer. Most people naked. Tony Blair preaching (Link). A skinned seal. A pedophile’s hands (Link) Simon Cowell before he had his teeth replaced. Conrad Black’s mugshot in his National Post column unless it has little prison bars over his face.

But the woman who offered up that quote, in a weirdly soft breathy voice on American TV this week, she was the most distressing sight I could ever imagine. She’s a nice-looking older lady named Peggy Noonan and she’s one of the Bush Old Guard. The thing she thinks should have the rest of us just walkin’ on by—yes, she drops her g’s just the way George W. Bush liked to—is the Bush torture memos (Link), just released by the Obama Administration.

She would prefer that Americans not know the truth about their government’s  torture of suspected terrorists, because it’s a dirty job that has to get done and sometimes it’s best not to know.

Now even if Noonan has joined a rat pack here, indeed a rat king, as Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh et al agree with her, that’s her right.

Here’s my problem. I could imagine her saying the same thing, not about the fun stuff I just listed, but the stuff of history.

1. People show up by train, hand over their luggage, and there’s nonstop smoke coming out of the chimneys. And there’s this weird barbecue smell.
    
2. It looks like the entire city of Phnom Penh is being evacuated by men in checkered neck scarves calling themselves the Khmer Rouge. It looks like everyone’s headed out for a day in the country.
    
3. This guy in Vancouver Airport, he’s stressed out of his mind, he can’t speak English. And the Mounties showed up. God, he’s screaming, he’s writhing. He’s not moving.
    
4. Some woman’s being stabbed in alley. I gotta go to work in the morning. I don’t want to get involved.

Just keep walking.

In each case, the men in charge believed what they were doing was right and just and deserved. In each case, anyone asking awkward questions might be causing trouble in a way that did damage to the authorities.
Just keep walking.

1. was the concentration camp deaths organized by the Nazis in World War II. Millions just walked on by. The Nazis did manage to keep their killing of Jews and other “undesirables” mysterious; the truth of it eludes some people to this day.
    
2. was the Khmer Rouge’s genocide of the Cambodian people in the 1970s. The U.S. didn’t just walk on by, it actually supported the Khmer Rouge, with a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” justification. Mysteriously, they got away with it.
    
3. was the mysterious death of Robert Dziekanski after he was repeatedly Tasered by the Mounties in Vancouver Airport on Oct. 14, 2007. Were it not for the video, Dziekanski would just be a creepy anecdote now.
    
4. was the March 13, 1964 death of Kitty Genovese. Her New York neighbours didn’t even get out of bed to keep walking, they just listened to the sounds of a woman being slaughtered. “Don’t want to get involved” became a catchphrase of shame for decades, no mystery there.

Sen. Russ Feingold of Minnesota says he has “never heard anything quite as disturbing” as Noonan’s remark. He’s right. And he’s in tune with most Americans, including Paul Krugman, (Link)   who are revolted by the notion that the U.S. is as depraved as the totalitarian nations it claims to despise. Claw for that moral high ground, fight for every inch!

Most of the discredited American hard right are actively defending torture. But you can at least meet them head-on and ask if they think the Japanese waterboarding Allied soldiers in World War II was equally fine.

But Noonan is different. She’s not saying it’s good to torture. She’s saying that any decent person would just ignore the screams.

We know that “just following orders” is not a defence—although President Obama appears to think it is. But Noonan is saying, “Just follow orders you haven’t even been explicitly given.”

Keep on walking.
I didn’t set out to write a column on Noonan’s aggressive cowardice. I had planned to write about how an active contempt for reading lays waste to any hope of moral conduct.

It didn’t work out that way. So here’s a basic starter reading list for anyone who thinks Noonan’s view is defensible. U.S. torturer planners read none of them, nor did they read a crucial CIA document on torture, known as SERE (Link).

• Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. As you read in the torture memos, the CIA were okayed to place prisoners in a tiny box with whatever they most feared. Abu Zubaydah was said to fear insects. Any literate person would instantly recognize where the CIA got the idea. It’s the climax of Orwell’s novel. Winston Smith fears rats more than anything. So a cage is placed around his face. It contains a rat. Does Smith give them information? No, he called out the name of the beautiful young woman he loves. “Do it to Julia!” he begged his torturers. “Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”
   
• -The Cap, or The Price of a Life, by Roman Frister. It’s a memoir by a man who survived Auschwitz and argues that morality is site-specific and a bit Do it to Julia. He’s a hustler, a real son of a bitch, and his book is extraordinary.
   
• The Railway Man, by Eric Lomax. This British POW survived a World War II Japanese prison camp where he was waterboarded. Decades later, his life frozen by what was done to him, he meets one of his Japanese torturers whose life was haunted by guilt.
   
• The Fog of War. This is Errol Morris’s 2004 documentary consisting of Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara telling the camera about his war crimes—the bombing of dozens of Japanese cities in World War II, the orchestrating of the Vietnam War, the bombing of Cambodia, etc. They’re not war crimes when they’re committed by the winning side, he says wryly. He doesn’t expand on his sins--so many war crimes, so little time!—but he’s more open than Albert Speer ever was. I like McNamara, but then I’m a sap for candour.
   
• The Good Listener, by Neil Belton. It’s a biography of Helen Bamber, a Jewish psychotherapist who was one of the founders of Amnesty International. She first learned about torture when she helped the survivors of Belsen. Now she’s flatly against all torture, ever.

If you haven’t read any of them, do so before you excoriate me and defend the lovely Peggy Noonan. Non-readers, walk on by.