Thanks for touching on this EW, what I saw of the show I thought was poignant, but I didn’t quite follow the events at the end of the trial. Your read cleared that up for me.

Maybe another headline would be that a DFB (dirty fukin’ blogger), not The New York Times or The Washington Post*, was offered the lede on this. Because that is seemingly the only place where this topic is in the Acceptable Sphere of Discourse.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/g…..index.html

When I was asked to consider writing about this and interviewing the show’s Executive Producer and lead writer, the former journalist and Emmy Award-winning René Balcer, I was very skeptical that doing so would be worthwhile — for all the obvious reasons. But I then read the script for the episode and was genuinely impressed:

Kudos for the writers of L&O for trying to bring this into the mainstream of discourse.

*Or maybe they were offered the lede…

The minutiae of polling the jury and intervention of the federal courts, while cramming a nuanced case into 43 minutes of dramatic network television aside, bravo Dick Wolf and company for going where literally no one in their business would dare.
Calling out real criminals of Yoo’s magnitude is not the usual fare.

I wondered whether he would. Have not caught wind of this yet. Its a good a question and I will double check.

And Medium took on private insurance death panels this week. No wonder the wingnuts hate Hollywood.

Thanks for the review, much appreciated. An excellent explication of the importance and power of narrative, which itself reminds me of one of my all-time favorite articles.

PETER HERSHOCK: Granted the Buddha’s unequivocal injunction to see ‘is’ and ‘is-not’ as the “twin barbs” on which all humankind is impaled, the pursuit of freedom so defined cannot but institute the root conditions for conflict and a preoccupation with security. The valorization of anonymity and autonomy institutionalizes ignorance and thus at once shadows and ensures the continued possibility of authoritarianism and coercion. Because the world of autonomy is, at bottom, an Hegelian one in which all masters of their circumstances are the antitheses of ‘others’ who are thereby enslaved, the most carefully wrought legal institutions — the products of successful social activism — may effectively soften the modalities of our bondage, but will never entirely dissolve them. Secure borders not only keep threats from coming in, they prohibit free expression or movement outward.

There is no disputing that social activist movements have led to dismantling such degrading and highly partial institutions as slavery, segregated schooling, and sex-specific hiring practices. But because many of the teleological and strategic building blocks — that is, the foundational concepts — of these institutions have been salvaged in the process of legally managing our ‘fair’ and ‘just’ co-existence, our progress has been in the direction of more complex, global, and invisible institutions for our regulated mediation. New powers certainly reign, but it is still a reign of power in which every instance of factual independence is purchased at the cost of increasing dependence on those (largely legal, but also technological and cultural) institutions that generically insure our collective right to be left alone and to dictate the tenor of our circumstances. Degradation has not been abolished. Instead, by virtue of our bias for dealing with conflicts or social malaise through control, degradation has been woven ever more finely and essentially into the fabric of our shared narration. The locus of structurally compromised dignity is, however, not primarily ‘you’ and ‘me’ as individuals, but our relationships as such — the interpersonal body of our conduct. Thus, although each one of us is on average better off and freer than ever before, we — our marriages, our families, our communities — are not.

From a Buddhist perspective, this “unexpected” consequence of social activist success — like the broken promises of technological salvation — pivots on our critical inattention to the karmic nature of the world in which we live. By wrongly assuming that relationships are logically and ontologically posterior to whatever ‘is’ related, and by asserting the “natural” existence of persons as individuals possessing transcendent rights to autonomy in an essentially impersonal and objective world, we have tacitly granted an invisible and highly valorized status to a critical blind spot. Hence the impossibility of mounting a discussion of freedom without invoking determinism and the perennial divergence of what is good for ‘me’ and what is good for ‘us’.[1] At the same time, since placing too weighty an emphasis on either ‘good’ necessarily upsets the ground of our co-existence, and since the control of any situation can never be truly shared, such existential upsets are from the outset guaranteed. Blind to our karmic or dramatically interdependent nature and firmly holding to the either/or logic of the excluded middle, we have developed a notion of freedom that is contradictory and self-defeating. The very ‘freedom’ that legally instituted human rights are intended to secure and preserve is what makes these rights necessary in the first place.[2]

It was insight into precisely this auto-generative pattern of upset or trouble (dukkha) that occasioned the Buddha’s injunction to see all things as empty of any essential self-nature [all holding or carrying is essentially self-emptying] — to relinquish not only our individual habits of self-identification, but also the security of our cultural inheritance of axiomatic “facts” about the way things really are and should be. Attending to the [self-emptying] of all things — ourselves included — promises nothing short of a new “Copernican” revolution by means of which the self-other and freedom-determinism dichotomies are effectively undermined and concrete avenues opened for the practice of a truly social activism aimed at dissolving the dramatic conditions of (especially chronic) suffering. [Emphasis added.] Changing the Way Society Changes: transposing social activism into a dramatic key.

It’s the mythic narrative of dominance by kinetic activity, even in social activism, dammit!

We are not artifacts, mechanisms created by a celestial creator absolutely and eternally apart from our selves; we are growing from within by the power of kenosis, self-emptying, by which mundane miracle, for example, these unspoken words self-empty simply by passing your eyes over them.

Even as I pour my heart out into these words, and like cups of tea, pass them over to you, where, without forcing it, you hear this unspoken voice, just so our shared narrative will deliver us precisely as we load it with our intentions.

I hope this will be the high-water mark for the application of Newtonian mechanics to human social problems. Are we going to continue pretending to be fully-automatic mechanisms, susceptible to malicious hacking like mere voting-machines on two legs? Then torture is only an extreme, no different than threatening whole nations with nuclear-powered annihilation.

Torture is the nuclear option on the personal scale, the ultimate mistaking of another human being for an object susceptible to mechanical manipulation.

But that’s the way we still think the world works, so what’s so surprising that people who believe life is an eternal holy war should turn society into a perpetual motion holy war cash machine? And even we who reject holy war still think the cosmos is some king of mechanism governed by Newton’s laws; and, as we are the masters of those laws, we are also the masters of the universe.

If we never check our most fundamental assumptions, if we build into our solutions the assumptions that created the problems to begin with, we won’t advance our shared narrative one more jot.

We can’t continue to treat organic systems as if they were mechanisms and get anywhere we haven’t already been, we’ll just keep repeating on ever larger scales the horrors of history generated by runaway mechanism.

Just to “bottom line” this for everyone.

Torture is a viral, radioactive toxin that continues to ravage our society.

Obama has re-founded our once-great country as a Torture Nation — through his willful, active refusal to simply abide by and enforce the laws and treaty obligations our Greater Generations fought and died to forge.

Those like Garrison Keillor, who want to wish it away as “bygones,” — or who’d rather selfishly improve our own economic or healthcare situations than meet or moral duty — are simply aiding and abetting torturers and torture after-(and almost certainly before)-the-fact.

No, there is no middle ground. No, you can’t “multitask.” No, you are not helpless to act. No, there is no excuse for not interjecting our torture shame into every other less-important conversation you have.

That’s all rationalization. You’re either on the Torture Team or not.

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