McCain to Cheney: "You're wrong, asshole."

In response to the simple-minded attempt of Richard B. "Dick" Cheney to defend himself by claiming that torture is good for America, the former Republican presidential candidate and former P.O.W., Senator John McCain replies that Cheney's torture programs made the United States less safe and also that the programs were and are criminal.

I like the fact that John McCain and other Republicans -- perhaps a majority of them veterans -- speak out against Cheney's bullshit. The fact is that torture is so patently immoral that it really needs to be seen as the kind of thing, as Slavoj Zizek has stated, that nobody should ever have to point out, much less debate on its merits.

But the fact that McCain is willing to demur publicly and categorically is good for reasons pertaining to what maybe could be called public discourse. Let me explain: The present reader and I agree that, of course, legally sanctioned torture is beyond the pale. That the notion of legally sanctioned torture has so much as appeared in the public conversation (and it has) is itself a nauseating and Orwellian phenomenon.
So: When such a specter is unleashed upon 'civilization', how can it be made obvious to all of our ovine fellow citizens that it is, of course, beyond the pale and self-undermining for our ostensibly free, democratic society to engage in legally-sanctioned torture?

It isn't a matter of convincing people, because anybody who's able to think it through is of course going to oppose it. The problem is those people who don't think but feel. Or, more specifically, who feel in the place of thinking. These are the people for whom Dick Cheney's propaganda proved so effective in mobilizing the bovine United States population into supporting his Hundred Years Oil War.

How do you influence them if you can't convince them? Counter-propaganda? No. That merely serves to further radicalize the terms of the 'debate'. No, you make sure that the discourse is framed in such a way as to oppose clear-thinking, historically minded and morality-based against Cheney's wing-nut fringe.

If the emerging framework -- the one that casts Cheney as the wing-nut/liar that he is -- is to prove durable, we need the John McCains to continue speaking out. The long-term effect of this, I hope, is that during the next Presidential election, we will no longer have candidates of either major party issuing pledges to emulate Jack Bauer in their national security policies.

A dialogue and two aphorisms:Cable 'news' = MTV for senior citizens.

I. *
John Cage: Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.

Thrasymachus: But it's against company policy to dream.

JC: [momentary silence]... Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.

T: But my employer would have me fired were I to engage in this activity. And yet, you say that human beings need to dream always.

JC: As to the statement about your employer, I can only take your word for it. As to the matter of human beings dreaming, yes. Human beings need to dream always.

T: Would you have me fired from my job?

JC: I would no more have you fired from your job than I would have you receive a promotion and a raise in pay. I would no more have you receive a promotion and raise in pay than I would have you drink your coffee with two lumps of sugar, rather than your usual one lump, during your morning coffee break: the coffee break that you take in the large foyer outside your office, in which you sit facing the same direction as the Rauschenberg painting that hangs in the foyer of the adjoining house .


II.
There's no sense in despair. This isn't to say that there's no sense in your having been led to despair. Quite the opposite! It remains, however, that there's no sense in despair.


III.
Cable news -- all of it: CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Whatever Else -- is not news. But don't hate it for what it's not. Hate it instead for what it is: MTV for Senior Citizens.



* These do not represent the words or ideas -- real or imagined -- of the late John Cage. They are instead wholly the creation of our blogger. Same = true as regards the portrayal of Thrasymachus.