The American island

New York

What’s it like to be back in New York after seven weeks in Greece, Turkey, and India? Disconcerting, verging on stunning.

I have an oversupply of reasons. Start with the soft gauze of prosperity, patchy though it may be – the smooth (and clean!) expressways and neat cottages of Queens, the outdoor cafes of the Upper West Side, the sprightly and unscarved women, the flat colors and odorless streets. Prosperity is supposed to caress you into feeling that you’ve safely returned to a psychic landing zone – but since memory traces of India and Turkey remain fresh in my overworked psyche, the springy New York cheer succeeds in reminding me all at once of how absurd, uplifting, and desperate the outside world remains and what an island America is – and I’m not just talking about Manhattan.

There’s also the enduringly local life, the family and friends, the gossip comical and deplorable – reintroductions to familiar pleasures and pains, tickets back from strangeness abroad.

Then there’s the rediscovery of routine, another layer of gauze. I think every day of the cremations taking place 24 hours a day along the Ganges in Varanasi – the river-soaked corpses borne there on wagons and foot, festooned in ribbons; the sandalwood neutralizing what would otherwise be the scent of burning hair; the crowbar smashing a skull to let the spirit out; and a few meters away, under bamboo shelters from the scorching sun, the card-players at their games and the Indians speaking urgently into mobile phones. I think of the Muslim pilgrims trembling to behold the ostensible hair of the beard and other relics at the tomb of Muhammad’s companion Abu Ayyub al-Ansari in Istanbul.

But I recall all this from my armchair, laptop on lap and in hand.

And then, not least, compounding the sense of displacement, there are the images piercing the gauze: the spectacle of horrors all over the media, from Abu Ghraib prison to the decapitation of Nick Berg, as if there’s no holding back the proof that the Iraq war and occupation are, in reality, an accelerating catastrophe.

On the evidence of the news, America is stunned to find out where it is truly living – in a world-spanning America whose boundaries are infinitely flexible but also infinitely porous. America is staggered, Bush is reeling, so is confidence, and the high moral ground is blowing away in a sandstorm.

It’s true that most of the opinion-making classes still strive to resist that conclusion. They offer instead their own sideshow spectacle of limited debate and collective fumbling. Option one, faced with the almost universal horror about what the Abu Ghraib photos reveal, is to search out the bad commanders and punish them. This is the focus of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings to date.

Option two is to say that the atrocities were exceptional and isolated, caused by overworked and insufficient numbers of interrogators and guards. In other circumstances, conservatives, following the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, scoff at this sort of argument as “defining deviancy down” Professional culture-scolds, normally quick to see civilizational breakdown behind every appalling crime, this time rush to assure an unsettled, disgusted public that you can’t make apple sauce without some bad apples.

Option three is to blame the pictures, or to say, with Rush Limbaugh, that the torturers were “blowing some steam off,” performing “a brilliant maneuver,” and playing at what one of his callers dubbed “a college fraternity prank.” (“Exactly!” chimed Rush.) So far these less than brilliant maneuvers are limited to the far right and will probably stay there, as with an impacted wisdom tooth. Republican Senator James Imhofe of Oklahoma takes the cake (or is it the cakewalk?) for his remarks at the 11 May Armed Services Committee hearing: “I’ m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment ... These prisoners, you know they’ re not there for traffic violations. If they’ re in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’ re murderers, they’ re terrorists, they’ re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we’ re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”

According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, “certain [coalition] military intelligence officers [said] that in their estimate between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” But never mind. The all-suspects-are-guilty caricature is thrashing, its back to the wall. This selfsame Senator Imhofe has previously declared that the notion that human activity causes global warming is “a hoax.” Nevertheless – or therefore – he has been given an award for defending “rational, science-based thinking and policy-making” – from a group funded by Exxon Mobil.

As Imhofe was speaking, according to CNN, a horrified Senator John McCain, no stranger to prisoner torture, got up and left the room. John Kerry has just publicly mentioned McCain as a prospect for his Secretary of Defense.

The pundits and most politicians have so far consigned Imhofe & Co. to their moral black hole and pulled public opinion along with them. According to Gallup, 64 percent of Americans “believe the actions are isolated events rather than common occurrences.” But the popular mind is plainly rattled beyond the reassurances that George W. Bush and his entourage have served up. Gallup goes on to say that Americans “also believe the actions are serious criminal offenses that violate military policy, and people are not inclined to accept the excuse that the soldiers perpetrating the abuse were just following orders. In the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal, war support has fallen – with a majority of Americans, for the first time, saying it was not worth going to war in Iraq.”

In the meantime, Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to his low point, 46 percent.

So, inadvertently, the presidential campaign has grazed right up to the edge of a long-deferred debate on the war’s consequences and where to go from here. In recent months, absent WMD’s and Saddam-terrorist links, the war’s supporters have been thrown back on a single arguable claim: that the war improved life in Iraq, and that the end of the occupation would be worse.

Maybe life is better for many Iraqis, “objectively,” as Marxists and empiricists say. But if the people concerned don’t think so, and Bush is staking a claim to exalted moral values and not the molehills of lesser evildom, what does the claim avail? Who does it make feel good besides the claimants themselves?

“Better than Saddam Hussein” is not a winning slogan – not in the Arab world and (I’m guessing) not in America.