Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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needs to go put that guy out.”
The star of The New Yorker piece, the one who took more pictures than anyone else, was a twenty-six-year-old specialist named Sabrina Harman, who served as an MP at Abu Ghraib. She took her pictures, she says, because she couldn’t believe the horrific assaults by MPs against the prisoners. Like her buddies, Sabrina liked to have a good time, and the camera made the torture and degradation fun. Or, at least she tried to make it so. The encounter with Gilligan turns out to be a mock electrocution—the wires carried no electricity. Gilligan knew a bit of English and so perhaps he understood they had nothing but fun and games in mind—“besides, the whole mock-electrocution business had not lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes—just long enough for a photo session.” Harman explains, “He was laughing at us towards the end of the night, maybe because he knew we couldn’t break him.” To borrow a bit of the lighthearted spirit from King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”
This should not surprise us, that the most iconic picture from the Iraq War is a staged one. One hears the same thing about the group of GIs raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in the Second World War. The camera begs for staging and props; the photograph leaves us with a version of the truth: We must read the images with care and skepticism. Gourevitch and Morris end their essay with a cogent analysis of the immediacy of that photograph of Gilligan:
The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.
We react to this photograph, Morris wants to say, in part because of the disappearance of the human form. The photograph allows us to imagine and ponder the inhumanity of human being to human being. Harman and her buddies staged it just that way because that is the situation they wanted—that’s the one they hoped for in their imagination and in their mind’s eye. In a sense, it is pornographic, as much a fantasy as a prostitute in a maid’s dress or a nurse’s uniform. In a serious distortion of reality, the photograph of Gilligan gives us a more perverse look at Guantánamo than if the photograph shot the truth. Harman and her buddies did more than torture the prisoners. They tortured the truth. In their staged presentation, they offer a candid view of themselves.
How it came to this: a staged photograph, “an image of carnival weirdness.” Harman and her MP cohort saw torture as entertainment, Abu Ghraib as an amusement park, except that some poor unfortunate souls wound up losing their minds, destroyed for all time as functioning human beings. Of course, others got horribly mutilated and even died. The single iconic piece of evidence for an investigation of Abu Ghraib turns out to be a result of that instrument from the nineteenth century, a series of photographs taken with detective cameras. Entertainment, disappearance, and torture all meet at that place where human rights received a wholesale suspension, Abu Ghraib. It is the end of the road in a journey toward disappearance that begins in the nineteenth century.
ONE | What Is Life?
WITH THE ARRIVAL of the new century, in 1800, the world, like a Humpty Dumpty egg, cracked wide open. Every belief and construct that held reality together simply loosened its grip. Even that most basic of entities, the human being, gave up its old, enduring definitions and fell in line as just another construct in need of serious rethinking. The century owes that radical shift, in part, not to a scholar, but to a little known pediatrician, Charles White, who published a treatise in 1799 that took on monumental importance, titled An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter. In his Account, White predicted that the longest lasting and most static of philosophical ideas, the Great Chain of Being, would soon give way to something much more dynamic. Though he did not yet call it by name, we know it as the theory of evolution by natural selection.
The Chain had provided a schematic on which the Church hung the entirety of God’s created universe. Everything had its assigned place on that imagined Chain, starting with God and followed by nine levels of angels, then human beings, birds, animals, and finally rocks and stones. Under the new schema, human beings would no longer occupy their elevated position. To the contrary, God did not make man in His image, as we read in Genesis, but rather man evolved through accidental and competitive forces. We shared that same kind of birth with all the other animals. In this scheme, humans might thus wind up having no higher claim in the kingdom of created things than the apes and the chimps. “The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!” Darwin wrote in his notebooks in 1885. The cosmic egg had decidedly shattered, and human essence slowly disappeared.
But that was just the beginning—or, in some significant ways, the end. In hindsight, one can sense the enormity of other basic changes in the air—the railroad would move people farther and faster than they had ever gone before and, along with the cinema, would utterly destroy the way the average person experienced time and space. The human voice, disembodied from the person, would soon move long distances over a system of telephone lines. The incandescent bulb would push daylight deep into the night. The list of advances and innovations that would occur in the nineteenth century seemed endless: the telegraph (1837), the steam locomotive (1840), inexpensive photographic equipment (1840s), the transoceanic cablegram (1844), anesthesia (1846), the phonograph (1878), radio (1896), and new and cheaper methods of industrial production. The list seemed to go on and on.
If all that were not bewildering enough for ordinary people, they would confront a further revolution in technology that would change forever the way they performed the most ordinary tasks. Typewriters arrived on the market in the 1870s. Bell invented the telephone in 1876; a year later Edison invented the phonograph. Cheap eyeglasses, made of steel, first appeared in 1843, but took another three or four decades to be affordable to the masses. The 1870s and 1880s saw the discovery of radio waves, the electric motor, the National Baseball League, and dynamite. By the end of the 1880s, everyday people could buy their first Kodak cameras. Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor, received his first patent in 1896, for sending radio messages. With the invention of the internal combustion engine, scores of people would soon become auto-mobile. At the same time, the time clock would gradually fix every person to a tighter schedule. Modernity, like a mighty wind, swept across England, much of Europe, and the United States, blowing aside virtually every received idea. How to cope with the overwhelming enormity of so much change at such a fundamental level?
And then the absolutely unthinkable: God would die, or at least the idea of God would cease to define common, agreed-upon experience. The Chain and its maker both disappeared. When Nietzsche wrote his obituary for God in Also Sprach Zarathustra (1887), he meant a lot of things. But one thing in particular stands out. For almost two thousand years, the Church provided the definition of the human being. All of creation lay in God’s hands, including human beings, and every stitch of nature stayed radiantly alive through God’s constant, creative support, remaking all of existence second by second. Before the nineteenth century opened, God was not just alive in nature. He filled the world with His imminent presence. By the 1880s, such thinking, at least for intellectuals, no longer had vibrancy. God had opened his hands. And men and women and children—all his creatures, really—fell out of the comfort of his grip to fend for themselves. Without God’s constant attention, the contingent, imminent life, which had burned like a small flame, went out. Science took over the task of defining human existence. It could not hold a candle—or a Bunsen burner—to the Church.
Everything—all