May 6, 2004
More on Abu Ghraib
The most distressing of the scandal photos is, to me, the one of an American woman, a GI, who is laughing, holding a cigarette and aiming her fingers as if comically shooting or aiming at a group of prisoners, presumably Iraqi. They are naked and hooded. She looks coarse, cruel, perhaps drunk. And as I looked at her I thought Oh, no. This is not equality but mutual degradation. Can anyone imagine a WAC of 1945, or a WAVE of 1965, acting in this manner? I can't. Because WACs and WAVEs were not only members of the American armed forces, which responsibility brought its own demands in terms of dignity and bearing; they were women. They apparently did not think they had to prove they were men, or men at their worst. I've never seen evidence to suggest the old-time WACs and WAVEs had to delve down into some coarse and vulgar part of their nature to fit in, to show they were one of the guys, as tough as the guys, as ugly at their ugliest.But the young woman soldier in the scandal photo--she looked, shall we say, confused about these issues. It was chilling. Perhaps we should be worrying about that, too.
Peggy Noonan, welcome to today's Brave New World. Where nothing is scarier or tougher than a city girl, or a girl fight, or an enraged feminist. Ask any school administrator, or soccer referee, or university administrator. Or Iraqi prisoner.
Noonan's recollection of decency in the American public, including its women, is both touching and heartbreakingly dated. A coarsening culture can, yes, lower its women as much as its men. Masculinity found its revival in the implosion of the World Trade Center on strong, altruistic firemen chugging up stairs to rescue the weak.
What pivotal moment will bring back femininity? What will bring back the matriarch and her the moral authority, the woman neither coarse nor timid, who instead of posing like a goofball by naked Muslim men, says this is perverse and wrong, and needs to stop?
As I noted yesterday (see below), the big water-cooler (and talk radio) buzz is over the Iraqi prison photo showing West Va. Spc. Lynndie England. We would all like to learn more about Lynndie England. There is a story here, a big one that is resonating.
Donna M. Hughes, writing on National Review Online, indirectly echoes my point yesterday about the sexual tension and domination and politics underlying the activities at the Iraq prison, as well as Peggy Noonan's observation of our coarse culture:
Why are we shocked by these images from Abu Ghraib, but when the victims are women (or gay men) the images are called pornography or "adult entertainment"? Why can we easily see the violations of human beings in one set of images, but miss it in others? What if the Iraqi men had been forced to smile, could we be convinced that there was a newly formed "publishing and film production" company in Baghdad instead of sexual abuse and humiliation being perpetrated?President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have condemned the acts and the abuse of the Iraqis. They said that these acts do not represent American values. I want to believe that is true. Yet, I see the common themes and methods used by other types of perpetrators on different victims. These similar images are what the young American soldiers from the Internet generation have grown up with and learned to call "adult entertainment." Did they become desensitized to the harm of doing such things to people by seeing multiple images of similar abuse to women? Did they learn how to violate someone by being a voyeur to abuse, and in Abu Ghraib they had the chance to become perpetrators — and pornographers? Did they fully comprehend the harm they were doing?
