Ice in the Heart

My sister wrote me the other day to wish me an early ‘Happy Birthday,’ and inquired, in passing, ‘What do you guys do up there in the winter?’ Good question. She lives in southern California so she doesn’t have recent first-hand experience of what anyone would do anywhere in the winter, I guess. Seventy degrees there, today; stories of record-setting high temperatures for this time of year.

Up here, in rural Washington/B.C.: afraid not. Well, some records set, but in the opposite direction of course. People often ask me what we do up here in the off-seasons. I guess that is because, if you are a city-dweller, and most of the outside people I know are, it’s not entirely clear how anyone would live a daily life that would appear to have so few extracurricular options, as city people know them. Even discounting Vancouver’s nearby presence, there are some options. When I lived in Yap in the mid-70’s, that was a life without options. An island in the South Pacific without beaches and virtually no food of interest. There was the option of taking a shower in the outdoor shower with the water--warmed by the air--coming down from the water drum on the roof or taking a shower in the outdoor shower when it was raining hard, which it did every day. That’s a limited option.

By contrast, winter life here has lots of options. You can’t garden, really; that’s an option for the other seasons. Also, you might have a job. But if you don't, you can go out for walks; you can go visit friends; you can read; you can quilt; you can while away endless time at the computer; you can bake bread and cookies and make jam and soup; you can watch DVD’s and listen to music; you can build and make things. And you can play a musical instrument if you know how to. And I do all of these things—except for the musical instrument--but mostly I read and quilt.

Right now, I’m reading about torture. A few years ago, I decided I would spend a year or so reading about the Middle East on the grounds that if I was paying taxes to kill people, the least I could do is learn something about them. That was a worthwhile year of reading, although not always cheerful or encouraging. I really resent those tax dollars going to that goal. Now, I’ve moved on to reading about torture, pretty much for the same reasons. If we’re going to be a country that does it, you ought to know exactly what it is that you are helping to pay for. Otherwise, you just end up being like people in countries (which ones we shall not here name) who said, ‘I had no idea what was going on.’

I need to know what it is I’m helping to pay for. I started down this road after watching a DVD called ‘Taxi to the Dark Side.’ Then I moved on to Lawrence Weschler’s book, ‘A Universe, A Miracle,’ which is about the torture regimes in Brazil (1965-75) and in Uruguay (1975-85), and how people tried to find a way to a public accounting. Now I am at Jane Mayer’s ‘The Dark Side’ about our own adventures in this activity over the past seven years. Needless to say, it’s not a pretty picture. And of course that’s not the end of the reading list, either, because that’s not the end of the histories of those who have tried to figure out how to do it or to get over having done it. (South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are surely another source of information.)

However, this reading is definitely winter-time work. The bleakness of the outer world, as well as the starkness and even elemental quality that winter can bring fit the subject. In the summer, it would be hard to believe that what I am reading is true. In winter, when the snow sits for weeks because it barely gets above freezing day after day and the sky stays gray and the sun seems barely to rise on the horizon, not so hard.

On Tuesday, my granddaughter wrote to me that it had been the happiest day of her entire life. It took me a few minutes to realize that she meant because of the Obama inauguration. She is filled with the hope of the young about what will come next. When I look at these years of torture and loss of habeas and permanent prisoners and vast killing of Iraquis and Afghanis whose lives were more like mine than they weren’t, I think of them against the backdrop of eight hard public decades; she doesn’t even have two. Of course, she would--indeed should--be hopeful. As with the torture books, it is important to remember the spring and summer, the times of possibility, and the seasons of good and compassionate work done by and in the name of the U.S. It is not all winter.

But what are we to do about the ice in our hearts that arises from the knowledge of this torture regime? Acts carried out by our agents, with the urging and knowledge of the highest people in the government, acting in our name and on our behalf? What are we to do about that? Too late just to refuse to know. And ending it, as Obama may have done today, doesn't end the knowing about what has been done.

Pandemic Problem?

Once in awhile, the outer world breaks into our peninsula kingdom without a king and one is forced either to respond or just to be amazed (or distraught). Today brings some kind of response/amazement/distress, I guess, to the news from ABC that the senior advisers to the President of the Excited States of America met in the White House in order to discuss exactly how to torture suspects in the poorly named ‘global war on terror’ (acronym GWOT: is this pronounced “gee what”?). It is hard enough to think that they would even be discussing torture, but in detail? Which techniques? How many times? I mean, are any of these people experts on this topic? Is that not what we have science and learned professions for? Ms. Rice is not the person I would first think of as being a useful advisor on the topic of torture, e.g. The experience of Dick Cheney certainly feels like torture, but I am not such a fool to think that it is the same as torture.

All this caused me to think back to 1972 and to the famous Nixon opening to China. Back in those days (and indeed still in these days) there is endless talk about the way in which China (or any other nation that the U.S. designates as retrograde and that we want something out of) will succumb to us once they see us in action, once they see our way of life. Interestingly, the metaphor that is almost invariably used when discussing this issue is that of disease. E.g., if China is opened up they will be exposed to democracy; they will catch freedom from our own love of freedom. It is not so much that they will want to imitate us or even that they will learn from our example as that they will inevitably be stricken with the same condition that we have been struck with.

Now, what occurs to me in the light of the aforementioned news is that perhaps this disease exposure is a two-way street. Of course, as a disease, it would inevitably be. Perhaps, over the past 30 plus years, it is not so much that the Chinese have caught democracy and freedom (which they apparently have not), but that Americans (or at least some Americans, and although they may be very bad apples, they are not the ones at the bottom of the barrel) have caught from China the acceptability of torture and the denial of human rights, while their ardent U.S. supporters have also caught the bug, at least as long as it is planned and approved by those in very high places.

If this is true, then I think we need to be more concerned about the two-way disease street we are facing everywhere. Particularly, as members of a border community, those of us in the peninsula kingdom without a king need to know what the Canadians are exposing us to? It certainly doesn’t seem to be universal health care.