Torture, Mad Max, and the American Right

Andrew Sullivan writes:

If America does not stand against the torture of individuals seized without due process by an unchecked executive power, then American stands for nothing. In fact, if this standard had applied two centuries ago, America would not exist at all. . . . To destroy the constitution, the rule of law, and habeas corpus and to legalize torture in the false hope of saving lives is the action of those who do not understand freedom and who do not understand America. It is the action of cowards and slaves.

What part of "Live Free Or Die" do these people not understand?

Amen.

But.

It's not that these people—BushCo, the Right--"don't understand." It's that they operate in a different paradigm. They've left behind the WWII paradigm. That was then. Now it's not about the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It’s about boythink, how one type of post-industrial male, brought up on TV and movies, defines American masculinity.

From the Twin Towers to torture, the symbolic reference for the Right has always been psycho-sexual. Unless the its response is understood in that context, it seems wildly contradictory. How can a “patriot” espouse warrantless wiretapping, unaccountable detention, a unitary presidency, and torture?

Try this. As I've said for years, 9-11 was a bogglingly huge symbolic genital excision. It wasn't just that America's great towering (global corporatist) phallus was excised. It was also that it was brought down by a bunch of what the Brits used so nicely to call "wogs." Both go to the heart of white male America's greatest and most sacred myths: the myth of the self-made man, the invincible cowboy/frontiersman, the ever-successful Indian fighter/slave holder/ conquistador native tamer. Only a female bin Ladin would have been worse.

So, lacking a wholer and more richly nuanced definition of masculinity, a Rightwing America grown or growing of age in a post-industrial economy and starved for a viable new myth of the American Male latched on to the only role model it can comprehend. No, not John Wayne.

For all his faults, Wayne was hero to an older and better generation. Wayne was the WWII role model. Once we let him go and step from the 20th to the 21st Century, the veil suddenly lifts.

The model for today's Rightwing man is Blackwater. For Iraq, for Bush, for Cheney, for the corporatist/fascist power structure now presuming to speak for us, it’s Max Rockatansky with a paw on his chest.

For this Rightwing generation, the model American male is Mad Max, not coincidentally the character for which homophobe antisemite Mel Gibson is best known, who does his thing in a post-nuclear war dystopia brought about by the global oil shortage. And ironically, he's not even American. He's the pseudo-nationalist for the pseudo-patriot.

The Rightwing vision – playing out now in Iraq and embodied by men like Alberto Gonzales, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Erik Prince--canonizes vengeful, brutal, unrestrained and unaccountable men. Men like Max, only in this case, men who actually don't remember a time when principle was an intrinsic part of the authentic male ideal, men who areincapable of the U-turn that (too late) allowed movie Max to reclaim his soul, men who, for the most part, have had other priorities than putting themselves under fire, men for whom money is the measure of self-worth.

As we see every day, such men view laws as helpful in their place but not applicable to them. They also see the Constitution as just a piece of paper. For them, principles and restraint are for "pussies." The Rightwing vocabulary and the supporting role of faithful, super-orthodox women and minority characters (Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Lynne Cheney, Mary Matalin, Ann Coulter) pretty much say all we need to know about how today’s Rightwing American Man sees himself in relation to the rest of the world.

So it follows as night follows day that men like Bush, Gonzales, Limbaugh, Cheney and the rest view the capacity to dish out torture as the mark of manhood. Not surprisingly, it's the inverse of an older principle that saw the capacity to withstand torture and never deign to sink to its level as the core of the authentic adult male.