David Bromwich, in “Strip Search Nation,” at Huffpo, points out that the Obama administration sided with “the authoritarians on the Supreme Court” in the Court’s 5-4 decision upholding the right of prison officials to command a strip search. And Bromwich relates it to foreign policy:
This decision makes a large example, and the most significant thus far, of the way an expansionist foreign policy based on coercion and violence has returned on us and come to haunt Americans. We have a right-wing practice of foreign policy that is reliably backed by the party of wars and prisons, and a left-wing theory of universal treatment that is backed by the party of speech codes and cultural sensitivity. Conquer them in order to improve them, says the first party. Be sure to treat everyone the same, replies the second — for surely we are no better than the countries we occupy. The safety we secure by arms abroad we must likewise enforce on ourselves at home.
Foreign policy has come home in the form of pepper spray, Tasers, and strip searches. But there is a practice closer to the Florence case. A mass experiment in the reduction of political self-respect occurs and is reinforced every day, in every airport in the country, in the body scans and pat-downs performed by the TSA. Some of the latter work is necessary, of course, while a strip search of a man with a parking ticket is not necessary. Still, the common experience and the exceptional one are clearly related. The government wore people down and achieved acceptance of the first practice, and that prepared the way for official endorsement of the second. Once again, a political and moral aberration has been redescribed and turned into an approved policy….
Let us not overlook the echo here of that concern for “safety” which was articulated often by the Bush-Cheney administration. Barack Obama signaled his solidarity with the Bush-Cheney view, against the demand of constitutional rights, in his curious public comment on the Bradley Manning case. Recall that before being charged with a crime, Manning, whom the government suspects of having illegally supplied documents to WikiLeaks, spent almost a year in solitary confinement at Quantico. Scant physical exercise and frequent interruptions of sleep were his daily and nightly regimen, along with other reductions below the minimal level of decent treatment of a prisoner. This came to be well known in early 2011. Yet, in a press conference of May 11, 2011, when asked about PFC Bradley Manning, President Obama said that he had inquired about the case with authorities at the Pentagon, and “they assure me” that “the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement… are meeting our basic standards. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.”
This comment may be counted among the precursors of the Obama justice department’s approval of the strip search for everyone. “Some of this,” said the president, was for “Private Manning’s safety as well.”
Thanks. Which’ll get us first? Global warming or right-wing, pro-war-pro-dominance political governance?
Remember how some people used to blame the European Jews for “going like sheep into Hitler’s camps”? Well, “we like sheep” are going down the tubes in a variety of ways, and politicians with their 2-year and 4-year horizons are no way to save us.
For fun, I think I’ll vote “GREEN” next time.
Even if it is all too late.
Perhaps the notion of dignity is relative. Many forms of greetings center on showing either the right palm of both palms to show that we carry neither a sword nor a dagger. Clearly, various ways of concealing weapons make those greeting disfunctional in the sense that they do not prove that we lack offensive capabilities.
A new, more reassuring type of greeting is needed. Perhaps bowing with our back to the greeted person while spreading the “cheeks” for inspection?
Here in the UK during the Provisional Irish Republican Armies bombing campaign on the mainland, people in general did not overreact nor did the Government [ maybe our stiff upper lip]. I suspect, in the present climate that a couple of outrages like those perpetrated by the PIRA in London and done by a small group in the US could have the US Government calling for martial law, such is the fear in the US [ much of it manufactured] I suspect a majority of US citizens would probably support that call, your democracy stands on brittle glass.
paraphrasing paul virilio’s ‘the administration of fear’, fear was once a discrete phenomenon, a phenomenon related to a fixed, identifiable event, limited in time. the ‘war on terror’ (with no clear definition of victory) is a psychological event which requires the state to implement greater and greater protective measures, measures that are not necessarily designed in response to a specific act, but apparently in response to the continuous building of anxiety, when the state finally steps in and ‘does something’ to protect them. creepy stuff.
Thanks for the post, Phil.
We live in a post-constitutional country.
The situation is deadly serious.