The "blame the culture" crowd
New York Times Columnist Frank Rich has really been on a roll. In today’s column he takes on people like Charles Colson and Robert Knight, who are trying to blame recent abuses in Abu Ghraib on our “steady diet of MTV and pornography.” That’s right, it’s all Janet Jackson’s and Jenna Jameson’s fault.
Rich rips the “blame the culture” crowd a new one.
He points out that “Mel Gibson's relentlessly violent, distinctly American take on Jesus' martyrdom is a more exact fit for what's been acted out in Abu Ghraib than the flouncings of any cheesy porn-video dominatrix.”
And he goes on to point out the historical precedents of these photographs from Abu Ghraib, which “themselves have a nearly exact historical antecedent in those touristy snapshots of shameless Americans posing underneath the victims of lynchings for decades after the Civil War. The horrific photos were sent around as postcards in the same insouciant spirit that moved Abu Ghraib guards to e-mail their torture pictures or turn them into screensavers — even though the reigning mass-culture pin-ups of the time were Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple rather than Janet Jackson or Britney Spears”.
Yes, Bush’s sneering contempt for International Law is the problem, not anything Britney Spears has done. As Rich puts it, maybe these “blame the culture” critics should explain, how “White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, came to write a January 2002 memo that labeled the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete" for dealing with prisoners in the war on terrorism (of which Iraq, we're told, is a part).”
“ The dissemination of that memo's legal wisdom through the Defense Department and the military command over the past 26 months may tell us more about what led to Abu Ghraib than anything else we've heard so far from the administration, let alone any Heritage Foundation press release that finds the genesis of torture in the sexual innuendos of prime-time television.”
While MTV can be blamed for a lot of things, what happened at Abu Ghraib is not one of them. And it shows just how desparate conservatives are in trying to keep the blame away from this administration where it properly belongs.
Rich rips the “blame the culture” crowd a new one.
He points out that “Mel Gibson's relentlessly violent, distinctly American take on Jesus' martyrdom is a more exact fit for what's been acted out in Abu Ghraib than the flouncings of any cheesy porn-video dominatrix.”
And he goes on to point out the historical precedents of these photographs from Abu Ghraib, which “themselves have a nearly exact historical antecedent in those touristy snapshots of shameless Americans posing underneath the victims of lynchings for decades after the Civil War. The horrific photos were sent around as postcards in the same insouciant spirit that moved Abu Ghraib guards to e-mail their torture pictures or turn them into screensavers — even though the reigning mass-culture pin-ups of the time were Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple rather than Janet Jackson or Britney Spears”.
Yes, Bush’s sneering contempt for International Law is the problem, not anything Britney Spears has done. As Rich puts it, maybe these “blame the culture” critics should explain, how “White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, came to write a January 2002 memo that labeled the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete" for dealing with prisoners in the war on terrorism (of which Iraq, we're told, is a part).”
“ The dissemination of that memo's legal wisdom through the Defense Department and the military command over the past 26 months may tell us more about what led to Abu Ghraib than anything else we've heard so far from the administration, let alone any Heritage Foundation press release that finds the genesis of torture in the sexual innuendos of prime-time television.”
While MTV can be blamed for a lot of things, what happened at Abu Ghraib is not one of them. And it shows just how desparate conservatives are in trying to keep the blame away from this administration where it properly belongs.
posted by Zack at 7:47 AM
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