Tag Archives: Cruelty

Triggers

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Justice, Politics

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The first time I recall reading a trigger warning it was in the off-topic sub-forum on a gaming discussion board. If I remember correctly, it was in the title for a thread about sexual abuse. That usage struck me then, as it does now, as a perfectly appropriate warning to some that the ensuing discussion was going to cover issues which some might find intensely stressful. I also understood the likely reason for this to be that some people might have had direct personal experience with the realities of such abuse. It has ever since struck me as a reasonable and positive thing to provide that warning in advance. It also serves as a good reminder to the rest of us that something we may regard as grist for the mill could have serious personal significance for others. I know that reminder has helped me to appreciate the weight of some issues. I can’t say that I’m always happy with my performance in dealing with these things, but I do think I handle these issues with more care now than I did in earlier days, and I credit that first encounter with a trigger warning with producing the difference.

Within a couple years on that same discussion the trigger warnings in the off-topic forum had multiplied beyond my wildest imagination. Countless variations of trigger warnings could be found in the title of one thread after another. I found it increasingly difficult to take them seriously, not because I couldn’t imagine someone getting upset at this or that topic, but because there comes a point where the likelihood that someone will become upset ceases to be a function of the topic and becomes an abstract possibility that is simply always there. People get upset, but it isn’t always because the discussion at hand is intrinsically dangerous subject matter. As I read the increasingly common little warning symbols, placed conveniently in square brackets, I couldn’t help but think the point was far more likely to be a statement about the values of the person employing the hashtag. Right wingers like to call this ‘virtue signaling’, and I don’t necessarily dispute the appropriateness of the label, though I do suspect the convenience of that buzz-term is a vice of its own. Whatever the purpose of the growing trigger-warning craze, I couldn’t help thinking then, as I do now, that the concept is subject to inflationary pressures.

As in, increased usage leads to decreased significance.

Where do you draw the line? I don’t know, but somewhere between a trigger warning fr sexual abuse and the many seemingly trivial uses I have seen over the years, the significance of these warnings does seem to change. Moreover, the expectation that someone ought to use trigger warnings, or that they must use them introduces a level of coercive authority into the equation. It wasn’t that long ago that a Dean at the University of Chicago denounced trigger warnings. In so doing, he clearly took them to be a mechanism for silencing those with whom one disagrees. But what about those who choose to use such warnings, some argued. Is that not permitted? And thus the renunciation of authority came  itself to be viewed as an assertion of authority, one itself worthy of denial. Who is oppressing whom and how is, it turns out, a bit more complicated than some would have it.

I guess I’m enough of an old fashioned liberal to want to have my free speech and use it too. I don’t like seeing efforts to silence speakers at public universities in the name of safe spaces, and that isn’t because I’m a fan of people like Milo Yiannopoulos. What I really don’t like is watching the careers people like that flourish as a direct result of the explosive outrage they specialize in …triggering. People like that have nothing to say, and they need the spectacle of outrage to provide the illusion of substance. I’d rather answer them. I would rather make the case against them, at least when that case can be made without fear and intimidation coming from the other side. I have seen right wingers drown out their critics, and I wouldn’t tolerate it. Lately though, a number of right wing sources have come to relish moments in which the left appears to be doing the same thing.

…is doing the same thing.

That too should not be tolerated, not the least of reasons being that it’s exactly what some of these hacks want from us.

This brings me back to the whole inflationary pressures thing. If the left wing over-uses trigger warnings, I think the same can be said of the right.

…well the ‘trigger’ part anyway, not so much the ‘warning’ part.

Time and again, I see folks respond to an argument for social justice by claiming its proponent has been triggered. Hell, I’ve gotten the response myself a time or ten, sometimes when I am more amused than agry. It’s fascinating to me, to see this cry of victory. As often as not, the signs of stress just aren’t there, or if they are, they are present to exactly the degree that one might expect from anyone else upon expressing disagreement. Yet, those proclaiming their opponents have been ‘triggered’ seem to hope those opponents are wallowing in distress, or at least they seem to enjoy pretending that is the case.

This is of course the hope of a troll, and it isn’t much worthy of anyone who claims to be advancing a serious point of view on any subject. But I suppose it does help to confound the issues, to ensure that no-one ever does take a trigger warning seriously. Still, I can’t help thinking for some it appears to be an end in itself, the prospect of making someone else feel bad.

If the notion of a trigger has lost some of its value in overuse by those on the left, it’s losing even more value as playground conservatives transform the term into a trophy of sorts. If they have their way, the public will be incapable of distinguishing between the psychological traumas experienced by some when dealing with sensitive issues and the irritation others feel upon realizing someone is wrong on the internet. This isn’t really conservatism, of course. There is nothing conservative about mocking women over their looks, disabled persons, victims of crime, or even minorities for pleading their own case in the public eye. Conservative politics may be resistant to a number of efforts at correcting social harms, but the growing orgy of right wing schadenfreude is an altogether different animal. Some people really do hope to inflict suffering on others.

To them a trigger warning is a symbol of hope.

It’s a hope I would see them denied.

An Uncommon Security Guard: Dave Eshelman, AKA ‘John Wayne’

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Narrative VIolence, Uncommonday

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IMGYou’ve probably encountered the Stanford Prison Experiment in your psychology textbook, or perhaps heard about it in some other conversation. Ostensibly a study of the influence of power and authority on human behavior, the experiment (so the story goes) had to be closed down because it was all too successful. Dr. Philip Zimbardo set up a faux-prison in the psychology building at Stanford University and began recruiting test subjects. Having divided his subjects randomly into a pool of guards and another pool of prisoners, Zimbardo soon found the conflict between the guards and the prisoners had escalated beyond control. Zimbardo has spent his career describing the study as proof that good people will become monsters under the right circumstances.

Such circumstances would appear to include a badge and a uniform. …or perhaps a tenure-track professorship.

What fascinates me most about this story is the role that one guard, Dave Eshelman, played in setting the tone for the experiment. If the experiment was designed to illustrate the dehumanizing characteristics of power, Eshelman’s behavior took that message to 11. Aside from the possibility that his decisions may have thrown the whole study off, Eshelman’s personal experiments in cruelty are themselves worthy of serious scrutiny. Eshelman explained his approach to the project as follows:

I arrived independently at the conclusion that this experiment must have been put together to prove a point about prisons being a cruel and inhumane place. And therefore, I would do my part, you know, to, to help those results come about. I was a confrontational and arrogant, uh, 18-year old at the time, and uh, you know, I said, somebody ought to stir things up here.

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I made the decision that I would be as intimidating, as cold, as cruel as possible. …I had just watched a movie called Cool-Hand Luke, and uh, the mean intimidating uh, you know southern prison ward character in that film, really was my inspiration for the role that I had created for myself.

Fittingly, Eshelman adopted a southern accent for the experiment and engaged in a deliberate campaign of cruelty against the prisoners. It might be ironic that Eshelman’s emulation of Strother Martin earned him the nickname of John Wayne, or perhaps it’s just damned appropriate, but anyway, …that’s two movie references for the price of one villainous act.

Eshelman’s approach to the experiment is fascinating on many levels. He knows he is participating in an experiment, and he takes this as license (even incentive) to perform experiments on his own initiative. His personal experiment is theatrical in nature; Eshelman is enacting sadistic themes borrowed from a Hollywood film with the end result being a drama fit for a textbook.

But of course someone had to live through that drama, and I’m not talking about Eshelman.

What’s interesting here is the blurring of the lines between real cruelty and its occurrence in a theatrical performance. If Eshelman’s behavior was simply a performance, the scope of his audience isn’t entirely clear. Was it for Zimbardo? The prisoners? The Scientific community? Himself? Perhaps Eshelman’s performance was a kind of singularity, so to speak, an act that simply had to happen (in his view at any rate). Perhaps, his display of cruelty held some kind of meaning independent of any particular audience.

spe_eshelman_3But of course this was an interactive performance, and at least a big part of Eshelman’s audience would have to include the very people he subjected to cruelty in that performance. If Eshelman respected any boundaries, his cruelty certainly violated others (and yes this is one reason why we don’t do experiments like this anymore folks, …at least I hope not). The prisoners actually did feel the impact of Eshelman’s actions, and some (Clay Ramsay, prisoner 416 in particular) clearly described Eshelman’s behavior as genuinely harmful. If Ramsay was part of the audience, and he most certainly was, then he certainly did not experience Eshelman’s cruelty as an artistic or intellectual matter. Ramsay clearly felt harmed by the experiment.

Perhaps the most interesting exchange in first the film clip above above comes at minute 25, when Eshelman and Ramsay (prisoner 416) talk to one another as part a debriefing process. The two of them do not appear to have shaken off their respective roles in that moment. Eshelman is still taking charge of the conversation. He still dominates his former prisoner, and takes it upon himself to set Ramsay straight about the whole project. If Eshelman’s behavior was an act, the act clearly wasn’t over in that debriefing session.

…and thus cruelty escaped it’s narrative.

***

The Stanford Alumni Magazine has an excellent retrospective piece on the subject, including statements from participants 40 years on. Eshelman’s own thoughts are definitely worth looking at. Both of Eshelman’s pictures featured above were taken from this article.

I Suppose Hospitals are Full of Such Stories

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in General

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bosch20

I think a little Bosch is in order here.

“Do you want them or not?”

This was the nurse talking to the patient next to me earlier this morning. Her words struck me as about the most cruel thing I had heard anyone say in a very long time. To be fair, I wasn’t privy to the whole story, and the occasional dose of percoset could not have done much to improve my own perception of events happening on the other side of a curtain. Still, I think I took in enough of what was going on to understand the poor sobbing man who had to answer this question.

My own stay at the hospital was rather uneventful. Three minor procedures and an overnight stay. It was painful, but hardly beyond my own (less than impressive) tolerance levels. I found the staff pleasant and helpful. The story of my brief encounter with the medical world this weekend has thus far been a rather boring story of a plan coming together nicely. The drama last night was unfolded just beyond the curtain beside me.

The patient showed up well into the evening, obviously in great distress. I could hear the man explain that he had walked out of another hospital because they wouldn’t give him enough pain killers. He didn’t seem to be capable of repeating that move again. Shortly after being left to his own devices, the man began to vomit. He seemed to vomit until he had nothing left, and he just kept on going.

…all night.

Granted, there were moments of respite, but they were few and far in between. I could hardly imagine the pain he must have experienced, but listening to him cry just like a child was enough to drive the point home for me. The physical suffering of the patient next to me was but the kicker for the real story. Over the course of the evening, the staff slowly seemed to disengage themselves from the struggle to control his pain, replacing the effort to help him with explanations for their own inability to do so. The response time for his requests grew longer and longer over the course of the evening. At least one time I could hear people joking and laughing just outside the door as his bell rang, and the man struggled to expel whatever it was that wanted out of his belly so badly.

Was I missing something? Perhaps the staff believed him to be a problem patient of sorts, contributing to his own misery in one way or another, or perhaps they simply felt they were unable to help him. Either way, their increasing reluctance to try seemed to grow more obvious over the course of the night. I suppose it would make sense in that perverse way that the human mind actually seems to work that a nurse unable to help a patient in any substantive manner would withdraw from him emotionally, but this seemed to be an exceptionally striking loss of compassion. By morning, it seemed the staff could hardly pretend to care anymore just what happened to this patient.

One particularly sad chapter in the drama came when my neighbor asked for pain medication. He was given a pill and some water, all of which stayed down less than a few minutes. As the patient pointed out that his pain medication was now in the bucket, the hospital staff argued that some of it must be making its way into his system. How much was in the bucket and how much was in his system, no-one could tell, and that unanswered question had serious consequences. The man continued to complain of pain all night, and having given him pain medications, the staff explained that they could not risk giving him anything more. Despite any evidence to the contrary, they had to assume the medication they had given him was still in his system. He would simply have to tough it out.

At some point in the evening, I heard somebody take them man into the bathroom where they left him. About ten minutes later I heard a crash. Do, I know that he fell? Not quite. Something else could have gone wrong, but I continue to believe that is what I heard. By this point in the evening, I was getting a slow response to my own requests for help. Perhaps the staff was just that busy, and perhaps my own efforts to get help for the neighbor had earned me too a skeptical ear. Either way, no-one came to help for several minutes as I pressed buttons and talked into speakers. The man begged me to find him some help. Finally, I decided to get up and make for the hallway.

Someone finally entered the room as I grunted and groaned my way out of bed. After asking them to help my neighbor I was told he was just lying on the floor. It was only after I insisted several times that he had fallen, and after I added that I had heard a crash, that anyone turned their attention to him. After sometime they got him back into his bed and listened as he added a very sore shoulder to his list of complaints. Convinced that it had popped out of place, my neighbor asked for help pushing it back into its socket. This request was of course denied, and rightly so, I imagine, but I couldn’t help thinking that to this person it was just one more refusal to help him.

Things were relatively quiet for awhile after that. When asked, the man always said he was in pain. Finally, someone brought him a couple pain pills and a glass of water. The man patiently explained that he would vomit them back up just as they had the first time. His nurse interrupted with terse question; “Do you want them or not?”

After a long silence, I could hear the man taking the pills. It had to be a difficult decision. The previous botched attempt at such medication was the very reason he spent the night in so much pain, and now this was the only option the nurse could (or would) offer him. She left immediately after giving him the pills, and the room fell silent. As it happens, he did keep this batch down, and things were okay for awhile (less than an hour). Who knows, maybe there was a trace of wisdom in her cruelty.

I keep thinking about this, wondering how accurate my sense of the events may be, what details may fill the gaps in my own sense of the story, and just how much I should be angry over the story unfolding beside me. If I’ve gauged the bathroom incident correctly, then I think that argues for an angry-as-hell verdict, but I am on very uncertain ground there. Most of the story takes place in more grey areas, a patient in great pain, and staff well beyond their ability to help him. I wonder if people may have overlooked some options that were available to them all along, but I don’t know what those would be. Perhaps there are lessons here about the way bureaucracies allocate authority for decisions and the way people deal with those policies in real life. Far more likely, I suspect there is a lesson here about the way that people respond to their own limitations, and the short trip from inability to help to utter lack of compassion. These weren’t uncaring people, at least I don’t believe they were, but by the end of the evening you’d have been hard-pressed to see it in their actions toward that patient.

Ah well, I now have a date with some percoset.

…which I am apparently unable to spell.

Also Apropos of Nothing, the Worst Thing I Ever Saw a Teacher do to a Student

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Education

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coreSo, I am sitting down for the final exam in an upper division course. This was the last of 5 courses on the history of philosophy that I took as an undergraduate; its graded assignments consisted of two essay exams and a research project. My project has already been turned in. All I had to do was manage a few decent essays on this particular phase of intellectual history, and then I could go home and sleep.

I remember the scene rather well actually.

We are sitting around a conference table in a room adjoining the professor’s office, about half a dozen of us, furiously scribbling at our blue-books when the instructor walks into his office. He later emerges with a green apple and a single research paper in one of those plastic binders that teachers hate. (Seriously, I didn’t understand this until I started grading myself. Those are nothing but a pain in the ass.) Anyway, the professor frees the essay from its plastic binder with a slight sneer and takes a bite of the apple.

It is the beginning of a long and dramatic performance.

As I and the others were trying to wax brilliant on this and that subject, I think each of us gradually became aware of a couple things about the professor’s activities at the authoritative end of the table. The first thing I noticed was how thoroughly the professor was eating that apple. The man was truly voracious! I want to say that he ate the core, but that may be 20 years of memory rounding the corners of my original experience. What I can definitely say is that he came damned close to it. Drove me nuts, watching that; I wanted to tell him to stop and give the poor thing a break. It had long since done its duty by normal standards and what was left deserved a good Christian burial in the garbage can. He didn’t even look like he was enjoying the apple goodness all that much. It was just there, and that was apparently an unforgivable crime. I don’t think I have ever felt sorry for a piece of fruit before, but that poor apple had my sympathies.

And the paper?

Well let’s just say the professor couldn’t have put more red ink on that paper if he had opened up the pen and poured it out all over the he pages. I honestly think the prof. was putting down as much material as we were. He did this with grand gestures. You could see him drawing broad circles around some offending bit of text before proceeding with a straight line toward the margins where he then proceeded to write essays of his own, all no doubt about the utter stupidity of the poor paper’s author. That sneer got worse and worse. He shook he head as he wounded the pages of that poor term paper, and I could almost make out some of the cursing under his breath. Contempt oozed off of the prof. and slowly filled the room with a strange and rotten feeling as we struggled to produce our own candidates for the red ink of death.

I forced myself to concentrate on my own essay as I took in the drama happening just off to my left, and I wondered what poor Freshman from his intro class would soon be crying in his red cup full of already-watery beer. What the poor victim had done to earn his feedback-beating, I couldn’t imagine, but I told myself I would be fine. Just keep writing!

Finally, the instructor put down the paper, shook his head, stood up and gave a heavy sigh before walking back into his office and then out into the hall. One of my classmates put down his pen, and sat there a moment, obviously stressed. The guy looked around the room a bit. And we all looked back at him.

“Well, I gotta look.”

After learning he had just received a D- on his research paper, the graduating law-school candidate struggled a bit with his blue-book and eventually turned in his unfinished exam.

Jesus and the Devil Get into a Fight, …He Wins!

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Religion

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If I have to be terrified of God, then I don’t see a difference between God and Satan…

– Sonya D. Fowler, Posted on Twitter, July 29th, 2012

South Park

It’s a funny thing, even unbelievers typically assume there is a difference between God and Satan. It seems so obvious. After all we don’t confuse our friend Mike with our friend Chuck, but such friends are there to remind us of the difference between them on a daily basis. Entities such as God and Satan operate under no such constraints. Their traits change from one faith to another, even from one believer to another, or (truth be told) sometimes from morning to noon out of the same mouth.

Satan has certainly made a few significant changes in the years, graduating from a mere servant of the Lord to a principle nemesis for the Lord. For his own part, God has taken on a range of different faces over the course of human history. He still keeps an awful lot of them handy, even within the same tradition. Indeed the Christian world keeps its pretension to monotheism only by ignoring a likely case of multiple personality disorder. He is at the least bipolar.

And of course a trace of projection runs through all of this, right down to the most specific details and sources. You can tell a lot about people from what they say about their gods. And that is precisely why the quote above gives me such pause. To hear some folks talk about God, they might as well be speaking of the Devil.

When I was younger, I used to hear this phrase a lot; “The devil made me do it!” This usually came after someone had just done something they shouldn’t have, something they knew was wrong. Seems like these days people are more likely to lay their sins off on Jesus. Whenever their actions cannot be defended in reasonable terms, it is because Jesus wants it that way.

I’m not just being facetious here, not JUST anyway.

All to often, Jesus is the reason someone must suffer some indignity at the hands of a believer. Every enemy of Christendom, every native forced to endure abuse at the hands of his more forceful missionaries has certainly borne the brunt of this gambit. Yet they are not alone in learning that the Prince of Peace has ugly designs on their health and happiness. Jesus, we are told, is the reason that gay couples cannot marry; he is also the reason those of homosexual orientation must endure any number of indignities from ‘Christian’ circles. Jesus is the reason for compromising women’s health care. He is often the reason you cannot find certain books at the librar. He is the inspiration for a good deal of pseudo-science (some of which is genuinely harmful), for a good deal of pseudo-history, and even for the occasional cold cereal mishap. Jesus may or may not be responsible for some novel forms of corporal punishment and parenting practices, but if sundry Christian organizations are to be believed, he certainly approves of some highly creative approaches to that practice. Time and again, Jesus is the reason someone supplies for actions that are manifestly dishonest or demonstrably harmful to other people.

It really is difficult to tell just how far the Lamb of God is willing to take his lust for violence and cruelty, but it seems that he likes to do the really nasty work himself. To hear some folks talk, he is the reason for one or two great disasters; 9-11, earthquakes and Tsunamis ravaging Thailand or  Japan. I remember when Jesus demanded a ransom to spare the life of Oral Roberts, one of His most trusted servants. But of course, such divine temper tantrums are nothing new; just ask Lot’s wife.

Has it escaped anyone’s notice that the witnesses to Jesus’ greater crimes are the ones who so consistently inflict suffering in his name? Can it be a coincidence that the same people who speak approvingly of god’s greater acts of cruelty would be so quick to commit the mortal equivalent in his name?

Jesus is not just a source of terrible headlines; he is also the source of myriad petty cruelties which will never make it far into the public discussion. I expect most of us have learned in one form or another that Jesus has taken sides in some personal dispute with friends, family, or coworkers. Lord knows, he is certainly the reason given for most of the dick moves made by the moderators on sundry Christian message boards. Indeed, Jesus seems to be implicated in all manner of grievances great and small.

One wants to say to some of these people; “dude, your Jesus is a dick!”

But of course, the real point is that Jesus could never have been anything else but a dick to some of these people; he begins and ends in their least admirable qualities. And if there is anything more to the story of Jesus than a sort of malice to be inflicted upon others, you would never know this from the words and deeds of so many who claim to be doing his will.

There comes a time in all of this, when Jesus can no longer be distinguished from Satan. For some people, He is in effect little other than a name they give to their own vices.

Quanah Parker, Progress, and the Lack Thereof, …Christmas and Torture!

18 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by in Books, History, Native American Themes

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There is always one! One book in the airport bookstore that looks like something I might actually want to read. This time it was “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,” by S.C. Gwynne (Scribner, 2011).

Mind you, the title alone carries at least one red flag. Were the Comanche really the “most powerful Indian tribe in American history?” Reading the book, I began to wonder if there was ever a raid, or a battle, or a tribe that didn’t strike the author as “the most’ or “the greatest” something?  Seriously, this book, has the most superlatives contained in any volume published in this century. (Okay, not really, but it has enough of them that it looked kind of fun. So, I thought I’d try it.) But faced with 16 hours in the hands of the airlines (the most air-time ever… Okay I’ll stop, really, I will), it just looked like the kind of fun-read that might do the trick for all those hours imitating a sardine. So, I bought it and put my larger, more theoretical, volume on the back burner, at least until Quanah could be “tamed,’ as I thought surely the book would put it.

I was not disappointed.

It is certainly an enjoyable yarn, and I learned a few things while reading it, but excessive superlatives aside, there are also a number of factual problems in the book. Gwynne, for example credits Spanish failure to protect the Pueblos with the cause of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This is simple confirmation bias. It ties their story more closely to the one Gwynne is telling. But it’s outright fiction. The Pueblo’s rebelled against the Spanish because what the Spanish were doing to them, not because of what the Spanish were not doing for them. Other critics have raised similar objections to other parts of the book, but I’m not really interested in picking apart the details.

What does strike me about this work is its use of a familiar spin. Gwynne is a firm believer in the march of progress, and he does not hesitate to frame the Comanche squarely in this larger story. Channeling Frederick Jackson Turner, Gwynne is telling the tale of the clash between savagery and civilization at the edge of the frontier. And Comanche play a damned familiar role in that story.

It is not really that Gwynne describes the horrors of Comanche raiding in vivid detail, or that he recounts the torture and execution of white captives in numerous chapters. I don’t need sugar-coating in my history books, nor do I need constant reassurance that an author is not a racist. But “progress” is a faith I can do without, and this book would have been much better without it.

Simply put, Gwynne sees Comanche’s as exemplars of a more primitive life-way than Europeans, or even a number of other Indian peoples. His reasons are familiar; they are hunter-gatherers, which sets them apart from and well behind the progress of agricultural societies, from the Pueblos to the Spaniards, …maybe even the Texans. To Gwynn, the cruelties that Comanche’s inflicted on their enemies stem from their lack of progress in comparison to Agricultural tribes such as those found in Mexico.

If the irony of that comparison doesn’t scream in your ears, then perhaps we could take a little time to discuss the history of Central American civilization. …Well some other time, anyway.

On some level, I cannot help but think Gwynne must know better. He certainly does not hesitate to tell us about the atrocities committed by other peoples, including Texans. At times, he seems quite prepared to concede all the facts which should suggest a degree of moral parity. Yet Gwynne sees a difference between the cruelties of commanches and those of other people.

Gwynne has at least the beginnings of an explanation for the difference. He maintains that other peoples consistently show some level of condemnation for the act of torture. Such brutal violence may be carried out by civilizations as modern as our own, but Gwynne seems to suggest, we at least know it is wrong. The Comanche however, revel in it. And that makes all the difference in the world to Gwynne. It is the difference between a “savage,” a “low barbarian,” and someone from a civilization.

So, apparently, cognitive dissonance is a virtue. If you have to torture someone, then you should at least have the decency to feel bad about it.

But I cannot help thinking we can do better than that! We can relegate the job to soldiers serving on some far-flung corner of the world, and if those soldiers should fail to be just as violant as we wish them to be (no more and no less), or should they fail to cover up any actual cruelties they might commit, then perhaps we can just disown them. If nothing else fails, we can at least wring our hands about it, schedule a few talking heads to debate it on the news channels, and sweat a lot over the whole thing. Because knowing at least that torture is wrong sets us apart from those that do not, or so it would seem

In torture, as in Christmas gifts, it is apparently the thought that counts.

It is an interesting question, just how it is that societies allocate boundaries within which cruelty becomes objectionable, and how do they square those boundaries with the interests of military defense, …or outright conquest? Both of these are damned tough problem to sort out, and woe be unto those who end up on the wrong side of the sorting, at least when someone with a camera-phone is around to record it!

The story of Quanah Parker would not be a bad spring board for addressing questions about the cultural construction of violence. It certainly provides enough fodder to get the issue squarely on the table, but of course all this falls by the wayside when the author has recourse to a convenient explanation with a lot of cultural force behind it. The Comanche’s are cruel because they are savage. Others are cruel because their civilization has yet to be perfected.

Problem solved!

This probably is not the best place to try to refute the notion of progress. Suffice to say, that I consider it largely a dead issue, at least as applied to the history of Indian-white relations, and certainly in reference to the comparison between hunter-gathering economies and those of settled agriculturists. Hell, the critique of this notion has been done and redone for a couple of generations of scholarship now. Were I to come across a learned article purporting to refute the notion of progress, I would no doubt feel sympathy for the dead horse that was about to be kicked. And yet, in this book, I find that dead horse alive and grazing in the pastures of every airport in the country.

When the average American reads about Comanche history for the next few months anyway, there is a damned good chance they will read it in this book. They will learn a lot to be sure, much of it reasonably accurate, informative, and interesting. And they will also read in that book yet another chapter in the myth of the progress of civilization.

It is just a little depressing.