Voyeur Nation
Billmon says:
And so we come to the central question: Can the cover up artists keep the focus exclusively on Abu Ghraib? Ironically, the flood of S&M porn shots now making their way onto the market tend to reinforce the media's fascination with the perverted antics at the prison, which ultimately works in favor of the coverup, if not Rumsfeld personally. The new gulag archipelago, like the old one, requires anonymity. Right now, the other islands in the chain still have it, and may get to keep it - unless, of course, there are some candid snapshots from Gitmo or Bagram or the CIA's mysterious 'ghost' prisons floating around in unauthorized hands.
Even if such photos were to come to light, I'm not sure the mainstream media, much less the American public, can absorb much more than they already have. It's not easy to admit you live in a country that now owns and operates its own system of gulag camps - instead of contracting the entire job out to friendly despots, sight unseen, as in the good old days.
In other words, the administration has the public's desire not to know on its side. And that, plus Bush's gestures of contrition, may be enough to hold the line at Abu Ghraib - although Donald Rumsfeld's scalp may have to sacrified to seal the bargain.
It's funny he brings this up, because I was just thinking the exact opposite.
I think it is precisely the nature of the evidence that makes the media and the American public interested in the story. They are inured to charges of lies or corruption --- violence and prurience are what moves them. I concluded long ago that the only scandal that really interests the American public is a sex scandal.
It is the S&M image of this one that is moving it, the pictures, the graphic kinkiness of it. That's what shocks and thrills the public, if only in a sickening, voyeuristic, train wreck sort of way.
Bush and his band of faux moralists were in part chosen by the Republican establishment precisely because of their reputations for sexual rectitude. They knew they could get away with almost anything as long as they didn't expose themselves to accusations of sex -- of any kind. (The closest they came to slipping was Bush's Top Gun flight of fancy, but that faded soon enough.) The press and the public are attuned to the tiniest hint of sexual impropriety, both loving it and pretending to be shocked by it, and the GOP knows this because they virtually created the environment of sexual hypocricy our culture slavishly embraces.
The pictures at Abu Ghraib have brought sex back into the White House and they don't have a good way of dealing with it. Look at Rush --- he totally misread the party line (but he knows his public...) The politicians are soiled by their association with this violent kinkiness, but their followers, like Americans everywhere, are drawn to those images like moths to the flame. They can't escape it and they can't change the subject. No matter how pious and faithful, Bush is tainted. It's his war. It's his sex scandal. It's Clinton rules.
I don't pretend to know how this will play out long term. But, sex has been introduced into the equation now and that changes everything. The scandal receptors are turned on and the American people will start to watch. As with most sexually hypocritical cultures, voyeurism is one of America's biggest thrills. If news of further sexual humiliation and worse is confirmed about other prisons and prison camps around the world, the country will be watching with bated breath.