A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  September 28

  Drive through the interior of California and you drive past prisons. In Adelanto the mother and daughter who ran the local Days Inn told me that they already had two in town, one state and one federal, and were scheduled for three more. Higher up Interstate 5 you pass Avenal and Coalinga, with others over the horizon. In San Jose the headlines spoke of further implosion in the e-markets. Hewlett Packard was set to lay off thousands worldwide.

  I chugged up through the wine country and into Humboldt County and in mid-afternoon, 4,000 miles, and ten days after I left Landrum, SC, having needed only one quart of oil and having established an average of 17 mpg, the ’62 Plymouth Belvedere swung into my yard in Petrolia. Five minutes later two F-14s, or maybe F-18s, flew down the tiny valley at 500 feet, amid a deafening roar. “The sound of freedom,” they used to call it. These were pilots being assholes. I watched my horses jump about four feet in the air. A mile down river, Margie Smith’s old horse jumped too, wounded itself on a fence post and bled to death.

  November 9

  Open the November 5 edition of Newsweek and here’s Jonathan Alter, munching coyly on the week’s hot topic, namely the propriety of the FBI torturing obdurate September 11 suspects in the Bureau’s custody here in the United States. Alter says no to cattleprods, but continues the sentence with the observation that something is needed to “jump start” the stalled investigation. The tone is lightly facetious, as in “Couldn’t we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap?” There are respectful references to Alan Dershowitz (who is running around the country promoting the idea of “torture warrants” issued by judges) and to Israel, where, “until 1999 an interrogation technique called ‘shaking’ was legal. It entailed holding a smelly bag over a suspect’s head in a dark room, then applying scary psychological torment … Even now, Israeli law leaves a little room for ‘moderate physical pressure’ in what are called ‘ticking time bomb’ cases.”

  As so often with unappealing labor, Alter arrives at the usual American solution: outsource the job: “we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical.”

  What’s striking about Alter’s commentary and others in the same idiom is the abstraction from reality, as if torture is so indisputably a dirty business that all painful data had best be avoided. One would have thought it hard to be frivolous about the subject of torture, but Alter managed it.

  2002

  February 22

  The hoof prints of Lucifer are everywhere. And since this is America, eternally at war with the darker forces, the foremost Enemy Within is sex, no quarter given. Here are some bulletins from the battlefront, drawn from a smart essay on “Sex and Empire” in the March issue of The Guide, a Boston-based monthly travel magazine, whose features and editorials have “about the best gay sex politics around,” according to Bill Dobbs of Queerwatch, whom I take as my advisor in these matters.

  In February 2000, eighteen-year-old Matthew Limon had oral sex with a fourteen-year-old male schoolmate. A Kansas court sentenced him to seventeen years in prison, a punishment upheld by a federal court in February.

  Last July, Ohio sentenced twenty-two-year-old Brian Dalton to seven years in prison because of sex fantasies he wrote in his diary. A woman teacher in Arizona up on trial last month for a relationship with a seventeen-year-old boy faces 100 years in prison.

  Apropos the triumph of identity politics across the last thirty years, Bill Andriette, the author of “Sex and Empire,” remarks wittily that “In America, your clout as identity group depends how much of an enhanced sentence someone gets for dissing you” and then observes that “The same PR machinery that produces all these feel-good identities naturally segues into manufacturing demonic ones, indeed, creates a demand for them. The ascription of demonic sexual identities onto people helps drive repression, from attacks on Internet freedom to sex-predator laws. Identity politics works gear-in-gear with a fetishization of children, because the young represent one class of persons free of identity, the last stand of unbranded humanity, precious and rare as virgin prairie.”

  This brings us into an Olympian quadruple axis of evil: sexually violent predators (familiarly known as SVPs) preying on minors of the same sex. There’s no quarrelling between prosecutor and judge, jury and governor, Supreme Court and shrinks. Lock ’em up and throw away the key.

  I went to a Bar Mitzvah in Berkeley the other day, and after listening to passages from the Torah transmitting Yahweh’s extremely rigorous prescriptions for his temple, right down to the use of acacia wood and dolphin skins, heard Marita Mayer, an attorney in the public defender’s office in Contra Costa county, describe the truly harrowing business of trying to save her clients—SVPs—from indeterminate confinement in Atascadero, the state’s prime psychiatric bin within its prison system.

  Among Mayer’s clients are men who pleaded guilty to sex crimes in the mid-1980s, mostly rape of an adult woman, getting a fixed term of anywhere from ten to fifteen years. In the good old days, if you worked and behaved yourself, you’d be up for parole after serving half the sentence.

  In California, as in many other states, SVP laws took effect in the mid-1990s, on the crest of the repressive wave of hysteria over child sex abuse and crime generally: mandatory minimum sentences, reduction or elimination of statutes of limitation, erosion of the right to confront witnesses, community notification of released sex offenders, surgical and chemical castration, prohibition of mere possession of certain printed materials, this last an indignity previously only accorded atomic energy secrets.

  So California passes its SVP law in January of 1996, decreeing that those falling into the category of SVP have a sickness that requires treatment and cannot be freed, until a jury agrees unanimously that they are no longer a danger to the community. The adjudicators vary from state to state. Sometimes it’s a jury, or merely a majority of jurors, sometimes a judge, sometimes a panel, sometimes an (unlicensed) “multidisciplinary team.”

  Mayer’s clients, serving out their years in Pelican Bay or Vacaville or San Quentin, counting the months down to parole date, suddenly find themselves back to jail in Contra Costa county, told they’ve got a mental disorder and can’t be released till a jury decides they’re no danger to the community. Off to Atascadero they go for a two-year term, at the end of which they get a hearing, and almost always another two-year term.

  “Many of them refuse treatment,” Mayer says. “They refuse to sign a piece of paper saying they have a mental disease.” Of course they do. Why sign a document saying that for all practical purposes you may well be beyond reform or redemption, that you are Evil by nature, not just a guy who did something bad and paid the penalty?

  It’s the AA model of boozing as sin, having to say you are an alcoholic and will always be in that condition, one lurch away from perdition. Soon everything begins to hinge on someone’s assessment of your state of mind, your future intentions. As with the damnable liberal obsession with hate-crime laws, it’s a nosedive into the category of “thought crimes.”

  There the SVPs sit in Atascadero surrounded by psych techs eager to test all sorts of statistical and behavioral models, phallometric devices designed to assist in the persuasion of judge and jury that yes, the prisoner has a more than 50 percent likelihood of exercising his criminal sexual impulses, should he be released.

  Thus, by the circuitous route of “civil commitment” (confining persons deemed to be a danger to themselves or others) we have ended up with a situation that, from the constitutional point of view, is indeed absolutely Evil: that of being held in preventive detention or locked up twice for the same crime.

  “It’s using psychiatry, like religion, to put people away,” Mayer concludes. “Why not hire an astrologer or a goat-entrail reader to predict what the person might do? Why not the same for robbers as for rapists? What’s happening is double jeopardy. If we don’t watch it, it will com
e back to haunt us. People don’t care about child rapists, but the Constitution is about protections. I think it’s shredding the Constitution. I get into trouble because they say I’m into jury nullification and that’s not allowed. Most of my clients tell me it’s worse in Atascadero than in the regular prisons. How do I feel about these guys? When I talk to my clients I don’t presume to think what they’ll do in future. I believe in redemption. I don’t look at them as sexually violent predators, I see them as sad sacks, they have to register. They could be hounded from county to county. Even for a tiny crime they’ll be put away. Their lives are in ruin. I pity them.”

  But not goat entrails, surely. The animal rights crowd would never stand for it.

  February 28

  Chalk up another milestone for sex ed. The University of California at Berkeley has put a “male sexuality” class on ice after the campus newspaper, the Daily Californian, published allegations that as part of their course students were taken to a strip club where they watched their instructor have sex, and also participated in an “orgy” at an party. A female sexuality course is also under review.

  As news of the Berkeley ban came in I happened to be leafing through the analysis of a man code-named “Beta,” the foot fetishist in Sexual Aberrations, written by Freud’s sometime pal Wilhelm Stekel. “I must mention,” Stekel writes with perhaps excessive enthusiasm, “Beta wasn’t in the least animated by women’s ankles, legs or lovely shoes.” No, the dirty beast “wanted to see the shoe fit tightly” and “is promptly enlivened by the sight of corns and envies every chiropodist he sees. He likes only male feet: red, swollen, dirty, sweaty and inflamed feet.”

  Beta craved to view and smell only the feet of the poor, not out of class solidarity but because their economic condition meant they had badly fitting shoes in which they worked hard all day: “On warm days, he goes to the Danube where poor working men may be found in droves, bathing their sweaty, swollen feet. It is the sight of these large, red feet that then gives him a thrill. He rushes home to masturbate.”

  March 2

  Life is returning to normalcy in Kandahar after the grim supervision of the Taliban clerics. Joyful sons of Sodom are to be seen driving along the boulevards of the ancient city, their catamites demurely installed in the passenger seat. Kandahar has long been fabled as the San Francisco of South Asia.

  It seems that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors behind Mullah Omar’s mobilizing of the Taliban. There was a famous fracas in 1994 when two warlords faced off in a dispute over which of them would have the right to rape an attractive young fellow who had fallen into their clutches. There was gunplay in which civilians were killed. Eventually the lad was freed by Mullah Omar’s group and the one-eyed zealot was promptly inundated with requests to help in other such disputes.

  The inhabitants of Kabul, who had seen their city devastated and thousands killed in the war between muj warlords, similarly yearned for the security, albeit puritanical, offered by the Taliban. Farmers and poor city dwellers who had seen mass rapes of their daughters by the warlords’ armed rabbles also strongly supported the Taliban, reckoning that the compulsory burkas were no bad thing if it meant the safety of women going out in public.

  One of Omar’s first decrees when the Taliban took power in 1994 was the suppression of homosexuality. Accused sodomites endured Trial by Wall Push. In one such trial in February of 1998, “three men sentenced to death for sodomy in Kandahar were taken to the base of a huge mud and brick wall, which was pushed over by tank.” Two of them died, but in an instructive example of how the Taliban tempered its stern ways with an acknowledgement of the capricious workings of Allah, one crawled away to live and love another day.

  But now that pre-Taliban normalcy is returning to Kandahar, just as it is to the rest of Afghanistan, tens of thousands are fleeing to Pakistan to escape banditry and starvation. “One can see the pairs returning,” Tim Reid reports in the London Times. “Usually a heavily bearded man, seated next to, or walking with, a clean-shaven, fresh faced youth.” He adds that “it is usually a terrible fate for the boys concerned” but they get out of poverty. “Once the boy falls into the man’s clutches—nearly always men with a wife and family—he is marked for life, although the Kandaharis accept these relationships as part of their culture.”

  March 12

  Back in April 1989, a Billy Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after he had met with Graham in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.”

  Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war criminal did not excite any commotion when it became public in 1989, twenty years after it was written. I recall finding a small story in the Syracuse Herald-Journal. No one thought to chide Graham or even question him on the matter.

  Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about what Graham refers to as the Jewish “stranglehold” on Hollywood and the media. In this 1972 Oval Office session Nixon raises the topic, saying “we can’t talk about it publicly.” The President cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who was executive producer of the NBC hit Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, as telling him that “eleven of the twelve writers are Jewish.” “That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are “totally dominated by the Jews.” Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite are “front men who may not be of that persuasion,” but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.”

  “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s best-known preacher declares. “You believe that?” Nixon asks. “Yes, sir,” Graham says. “Oh, boy,” replies Nixon. “So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.” “No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,” Graham replies.

  Magnanimously Nixon concedes that this does not mean “that all the Jews are bad” but that most are left-wing radicals who want “peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews.” “That’s right,” agrees Graham, who later concurs with a Nixon assertion that a “powerful bloc” of Jews confronts Nixon in the media. “And they’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham adds.

  Later Graham says that “a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.” After Graham’s departure Nixon says to Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across.” “It’s a shocking point,” Haldeman replies. “Well,” says Nixon, “it’s also, the Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”

  Within days of these exchanges becoming public the eighty-three-year old Graham was hauled from his semi-dotage, and impelled to express public contrition. “Experts” on Graham were duly cited as expressing their “shock” at Graham’s White House table talk.

  Why the shock? Don’t they know that this sort of stuff is consonant with the standard conversational bill of fare at 75 percent of the country clubs in America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree? Nixon thought American Jews were lefty peaceniks who dominated the Democratic Party and were behind the attacks on him. Graham reckoned it was Hollywood Jews who had sunk the nation in porn. Haldeman agreed with both of them. At whatever level of fantasy they were all acknowledging power. But they didn’t say they wanted to kill a millio
n Jews. That’s what Graham said about the Vietnamese and no one raised a bleat.

  April 23

  Late in the evening in back-road America you tend to pick the motels with a few cars parked in front of the rooms. There’s nothing less appealing than an empty courtyard, with maybe Jeffrey Dahmer or Norman Bates waiting to greet you in the Reception office. The all-night clerk at the Lincoln Motel (three cars out front) in Austin, Nevada, who checked me in at around 11.30 p.m. a few nights ago, told me she was eighty-one, and putting in two part-time jobs, the other at the library, to help her pay her heating bills since she couldn’t make it on her Social Security.

  She imparted this info without self-pity as she took my $29.50, saying that business in Austin last fall had been brisk and that the fifty-seven motel beds available in the old mining town had been filled with crews laying fiber-optic cable along the side of the road, which in the case of Austin meant putting it twenty feet under the graveyard that skirts the road just west of town.

  Earlier that day, driving from Utah through the Great Basin along US-50, billed as “the loneliest road,” I’d seen these cables, blue and green and maybe two inches in diameter, sticking out of the ground on the outskirts of Ely, as if despairing at the prospect of the Great Salt Lake desert stretching ahead, through league after league of sagebrush.