The comments sections of blogs are like parties. Some are like college keg parties (atrios, LGF). They can get pretty rowdy and rude and some downright unpleasant things can be said. There are even rougher parties. I don’t go there.
Some are like pizza and beer with friends (Electric Venom). Pleasant banter. An off-color comment now and again. A nice place to drop in and visit.
Some of the very best are like cocktail parties with a rather bright and well-informed crowd (Winds of Change, Tacitus, Obsidian Wings). A spectrum of opinions are expressed intelligently and, by and large, treated with respect.
One comments section I visit frequently is the one on Roger L. Simon’s blog. It’s somewhere in between “pizza and beer with friends” and “intellectual cocktail party”. It’s one of the better comments sections. And you never know who you’ll run into there.
Last night I saw the following comment in Roger’s comments section from regular commenter Catherine:
Temple (Grandin) talks about this a lot, too. She calls it: the bad becomes normal.
I responded:
You’re familiar with Temple Grandin? Speech pathologist? Special ed?
For those not familiar with Temple Grandin her Thinking in Pictures is without a question the finest first hand description of autism. An extraordinary book and an extraordinary individual. Highly recommended.
She came back:
Maximum special ed, unfortunately. Two of my kids are autistic.
I’m also Temple’s coauthor on her new book (which is why I KNOW FOR A FACT editors do not sleep at your house when you’re furiously trying to meet a deadline you’ve already missed).
The New York Review of Books ran an extremely early review, if you’re interested:
It’s been amazing how much relevance Temple’s work with animals has to 9/11 & its aftermath.
We talked a lot about 9/11; I wish I could have included what she had to say in the book. She flies all the time, and her description of what she was planning to do if anyone tried to hijack a plane she was on is incredible.
Ms. Grandin believes that autism is an intermediary state between animals and human beings. I often wonder if it’s not precisely the reverse—that it’s the next stage in human evolution and that we’re selectively breeding for it. Think of it this way: one man’s intensity is another man’s autism. Quite a few very successful people have the ability to fix their attention for long periods of time on single objectives. Think of a great violinist who’s able to practice for ten hours a day. Or a scientist who focuses so strongly on his work that he loses all track of time.
Catherine says “It’s been amazing how much relevance Temple’s work with animals has to 9/11 & its aftermath”.
does she expound on this? Thanks, Ann J
Follow up: the quote from grandin according to “Beef Mag” website where it appeared is “I’ve been amazed at some of the places I’ve visited, wondering how they could do something the way they are doing it,” Grandin says. “But, bad becomes normal when you have nothing to compare it to.”
This is in reference to the environment for the cows being bad, not behavior in Iraqui prisons being bad.
The only connection I can make here is that the abusers at Abu Ghraib had nothing to compare their behavior to. This to me is a plausible explanation for how bad these soldiers were. If they were given the choice of how to carry out their orders (which hasn’t yet been reported, to my knowledge)they chose astonishingly cruel (and outside the Geneva Convention) methodologies.
Referring back to T. Grandin’s quote, “Bad becomes normal when you have nothing to compare it to” this would seem to say the emotional/intellectual/psychological landscapes of these soldiers was incredibly bereft.
Unless they were instructed by someone else. Even so, they were having way too much fun.
This behavior is incomprehensible to me, as is the commentary of Rush Limbaugh, equating the acts to the off color hijinks of a college hazing event.
Right now I’m feeling like I’d rather be an animal, actually, in my next evolution, if this behavior can be excused or laughed away.
Ann J
Nice comments and I couldn’t agree with you more.
No, Catherine didn’t really elaborate. Several other commenters attempted to draw her out a bit—as did I—but she was a little coy about it. I suspect that she didn’t want to violate any confidences.
I think the malconduct by the U. S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison reflects quite a few things. Second, discipline was pretty obviously lax and morale was low. The general in charge should be held accountable for that. Second, it’s not reasonable to expect the military to inculcate every value into its soldiers. You have to start somewhere. Didn’t these people learn anything at their mothers’ knees?
Third, over the years since my childhood—when dinosaurs ruled the earth—the opportunities for the inculcation of basic values have continued to dwindle. Parents are both employed, sometimes overemployed. The schools don’t do it. Churches are frequently out of the picture entirely as are extended families and other social organizations.
I guess quite a few people are getting their values from TV. Pretty crumby teacher.
I agree with you about TV being a big source of values inculcation—at our house we run an ongoing effort to keep our kids off “trash TV” (prurient, stupid, humiliating, aggressive for it’s own sake, trashy, time wasting).
It’s interesting you mention TV, because I’ve been thinking about the “image” as playing such a big part in the prisoner abuse. As I understand it, soldiers were instructed to take these photos for use in interrogation, where prisoners would be threatened with release of the photo to their family, which would be humiliating, and make them talk.
On first encounter with the photos, it seemed to me that they looked like spontaneous travelogue photos, the kind of thing you would do in the wee hours if you were bored, scared, stupid and wanted to look big back home/or with your colleagues. In fact, the digital images were shared/emailed around the base, if i remember this report. Thumbs up, look ma, here’s me posed in front of a pyramid of prisoners, looking like, look ma, here’s me posed in front of the entrance to Disneyworld. I.e., a putrid souvenir.
Either way, I’d be interested to know if camera imagery has been used in interrogations/torture in the past, or is this a new phenomenon in the digital world. Who owned these cameras? Were they personal cameras? Or owned by the base?
There is enough food for thought here, and ruminations on the image in evolving world culture to make a masters thesis, I believe. I’ve just begun to think about it, signing off, Ann J
Temple is a fascinating person.
We should keep in mind that people in groups sometimes act very differently than they would as individuals. (That’s not meant to excuse any wrongdoing.) A lot of what a good military does is to control and guide violence, and prevent it from becoming mob action. It is just assumed that even the best people can be dangerously unpredictable in war. We guard against this vigilently for combat, but apparently someone overlooked prison guards.
And I’ve heard that the person who blew the whistle at Abu Ghraib wasn’t someone anybody would consider a “good” person!
Just for general info, that Rush Limbaugh comment was an initial wisecrack to his assistant after seeing only two of the pix. I’m not trying to excuse an insensitive comment, but it’s being reported as if it were his considered opinion. His many hours of discussion subsequently have been utterly ignored.
I heard him say that not one single reporter has called him to ask about what he said! It fits their agenda, so apparently they don’t want to be confused with additional facts.