Transparency vs. Ghosts
“I feel a lot of pressure from this thing that has no shape or form,'’ she said. The New York Times, April 23, 2003
In American folklore, ghosts are said to haunt houses, forests, cemeteries and, on occasion, entire cities. Yet there are few stories of ghosts who, whether friend or foe, inhabit the very flesh of the living.
By contrast, in the tradition of Roman Catholicism, as in other Christian sects, there are, officially, no ghosts whatsoever. In their place operate an invisible army of demons whose only purpose, I gather, is to probe the souls of mortals for the smallest crevice in which to creep.
As a child, I could make no such distinctions. Nor did I care to because I already knew what to fear: darkness.
Like the ocean or a blinding fog, darkness confounds our sense of space to becomes, in itself, a place: the dark. Walking into a darkened room it is the darkness we enter first and, then, gradually, the room. As adults, we sidestep this abyss by gripping the lifeline of our memory. Thrust into the unknowable darkness, our experience serves as our guide.
But as children, our experiences are naturally limited. What we don’t know can very much hurt us precisely because the circumference of what we know is no wider than our arm’s reach.
Upon arriving to the United States, I was placed in an english-only classroom at the Incarnation Catholic school. At the time, I could speak no more than a half-dozen words in English whereas my classmates were predominantly native english-speakers. Shortly after I arrived, a boy named Ty picked a fight with me.
“Ty.” I thought. As in “ty your shoelaces?”
We never did fight. But my parents took this and other incidents to mean that I would need more than english skills to survive my entry into adulthood in this country. Within a few weeks, I was enrolled in self-defense classes at a nearby Tae Kwon Do school.
I went on to study Tae Kwon Do for another seven years, much in the same way that other children studied the rules of baseball, ballet or the major and minor scales of a piano. Yet these are hardly interchangeable skills and experiences.
Whereas other parents might desire that their children master the basic grammar of classical music or perform with pleasure under the managerial rules of baseball, my parents — and my father, in particular — wanted that I be able to defend myself, physically.
Eventually I became a teen-ager and, honoring the time-honored tradition of selectively refuting my parent’s authority, I stopped going to Tae Kwon Do classes. To this day I sometimes dream, ecstatically, that I am reunited with my second instructor, Myung Kyung Park, a beautiful man whose heavily-accented voice was as bittersweet as that of my own immigrant parents.
Nevertheless, in the five years I was his student Mr. Park did manage to teach me a great deal about self-defense, lessons have manifested themselves in my desire to lead a peaceful life. Perhaps this caution is due to the central paradox of most martial arts: the assumption that you may use only your own body, the very thing you wish to protect, in order to fend off an attack.
For me, a cautious approach to dealing with physical danger has meant rejecting the claim that actions speak louder than words.
As linguistic creatures, our ability to reason is the product of a shared language. Because language is a set of common meanings, we are fundamentally political beings. As “political animals” we leave the realm of brute force, of prey and predator, when we enter into mutual promises — compromises, sensu stricto. Action without language is meaningless. The use of force without meaning is violence. Lying, however expedient, is a suicidal gesture. When an action is described as “unilateral” but said to have a legitimate “political” objective — first “disarmament” and, then, “democracy” — language recedes into darkness and nonsense. From this perspective, the disingenuous claim that the U.S. is enacting a policy of “unilateral disarmament” by invading Iraq poses a serious threat to our political and financial stability. First, a truly “unilateral” action in a multilateral world order is inherently a non-political, if not anti-political gesture. Second, true disarmament can only take place in the clearest light of day. I will not put down my weapon unless I can see you put down your weapon — and you will not put down your weapon unless you can see me do the same. True disarmament is inherently bilateral if not universal.
Likewise, democracy is only possible in a transparent society. I am not convinced that the current administation appreciates the fundamental importance of transparency, i.e., truthfulness and accountability. Why, then, would I assume that it wishes to create a transparent society in Iraq?
Rather than the weak justifications offered above, I believe the televised subjugation of Iraq, er “the liberation of Iraq,” was meant to communicate that the U.S. is entirely self-sufficient. Not only will we refuse compromise and, thus, participation in votes and treaties that would circumscribe the interests of the current administration (even if this intransigence comes at the expense of the American people), but, we also have the military power to be able to circumvent such treaties by using force to achieve our goals. The government of the U.S., it would appear, has become possessed by the very same mendacity and hypocrisy that attacked the Twin Towers. New York, a city that is said to never sleep, a city of lights, its entrance guarded not by ravenous lions as was the case in Babylon but by a woman holding aloft a torch, should hasten to rebuild those towers draped in light. Where some saw icons of capitalism and its inadequacies in places where local governments are unable — or unwilling — to obtain the best possible deals and conditions for their resources and citizens, I now see monuments to the vast wealth and stability that can only be created under conditions of transparency and the rule of law.
[6/12/2003]
Let us not forget that the Twin Towers were not one man’s palace, not one family’s dynastic chair. They were fluid structures built out of liquidity, not monopoly. At least, so we could assert until the revelations of insider trading, stock price manipulation and wholesale accounting fraud reminded us that the so-called “free” market must, also and especially, be forever guarded against mendacity and hypocrisy. “The typical American corporation is a shareholders’ republic in the same way that China is a people’s republic.” James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, 6/9/2003
Related links
The current debacle over SARS in China has little to do with public health and a great deal to say about the perils of an “opaque” society. After decades of lying to their citizens about everything from the weather to wars, the Chinese government has been caught — by its own citizens — with its pants on fire.
Let’s talk about ghosts, shall we? www.turnofthescrew.com.
Postscript
On Iraq and the lessons learned.
It was hard not to notice the meteoric rise of American interest in Al Jazeera. Nor will I ever forget a surreal exchange between ABC’s Peter Jennings and an Iraqi professor of political science living in Baghdad in the days after the U.S. military began bombing that city. Jennings was amazed to have this voice on the other end of the line and kept saying as much while the caller, angry and sad, rebuked the necessity of an air assault.
I kept asking myself: Why the fuck didn’t they interview this guy two weeks ago?
Which led to…
What if wars were fought with overwhelming applications of transparency: with cameras and courts? Instead of one reporter embedded with a squadron of soldiers we might dispatch a squadron of reporters embedded with one well-armed soldier. Instead of cluster bombs and thousands of innocent civilians murdered as a result of bilateral criminal negligence, we might have thousands of videophones, interviews and continuous coverage of thousands of civilians, peacefully engaged by their newfound voice.
How does one deal with dangerous liars? By telling the truth. How does one disarm a violent murderer? With as much force as is necessary to facilitate a trial.
If it means the creation of an international tribunal, what of it? The U.S. has the best lawyers in the world and even they are a great deal cheaper than so-called smart bombs. Bring on the rule of law. The only alternative is the law of the jungle.
footnote
In an earlier draft of this entry, I began by addressing the ghost of torture as it impacted my own life. The person tortured was my father and he had this unpleasantness visited upon him as a result of his opposition to Castro’s government in Cuba. It is interesting to note that while Rumsfeld was serving his nation as a Representative to the U.S. Congress my father was serving a ten year sentence as a political prisoner. Earlier this year, Mr. Rumsfeld clearly favored the current war whereas my father quietly — ambivalently — opposed it.