Deceit on Capitol Hill

The transit of the year is coming to a head. As the Aquarius conjunction gears up for its peak (May 27th through the 31st) on the US Moon, Americans find themselves contemplating an ethical controversy of the classic American type. Illogic mixed with outraged bluster is creating a tempest of feigned righteousness. Is Pelosi lying, or is the CIA lying?

Propelled into the headlines just as the planet of deceit (Neptune) meets up with the planet of morality and law (Jupiter), at issue is the infliction of hideous harm (Chiron) upon incarcerees. Right on schedule, the transit has ushered into mass consciousness a national debate about inhumanity and lies.

Slugging it out on center stage are Nancy Pelosi and her GOP antagonists. This woman is fierce, and fiercely resented (aren’t Aries females always keenly resented by a certain type of man?). With the media spotlight upon her, she is meeting head-on the old frauds who have had it in for her since day one.

As ever in these sorts of media spectacles, the attacks and counter-attacks we are hearing are at once bombastic and ridiculously inconsistent. But for observers of cultural symbolism they are very telling, offering up several layers to parse.

At first blush, the dust-up would seem to be about the fact that heinous crimes were committed; crimes which tainted the reputation of a people who had believed themselves to be made of better fiber. On a second level, the argument seems to center around whether the repugnant actions in question were and are technically legal. But where we are hearing the loudest brouhaha is on a third level: that of partisan one-up-manship; with the Speaker of the House being made the focus of a how-much-did-she-know-and-when-did-she-know-it firestorm.

Leave it to the American media to take an issue as starkly odious as torture and obscure it with round-the-clock coverage of banal political backbiting. As presented by the corporate news, the focus of interest here is not torture itself, but the supposed irresponsibility of a scrappy political player who doubtless knew exactly what her enemies in the reining party were doing.

What will history remember about this episode of deceit on Capitol Hill? My guess is that it will not concern itself with whether Nancy Pelosi lied about her awareness of the torture Bush condoned.

I imagine future students of this American era will marvel at the deafening absence of outrage from the public: outrage towards those Congressmen whose party held power at the time the atrocities were committed; outrage towards the now safely-retired villains who signed off on them from the Oval Office; and outrage towards the perps themselves, who would doubtless explain themselves as having been “just following orders” when they strapped their victims to the waterboards.

It seems to surprise no one that the CIA and the Pentagon, the agencies that orchestrated the torture, are not being subpoenaed to offer up names. I think one reason for this is that the postmillennial CIA, somehow credited with “keeping America safe from terrorists” when in fact the opposite is the case, has been recast as a patriotic institution, off-limits to scrutiny and blame.

Another is the confusion that exists in the popular imagination between the glamorous spy-as-cultural-icon and the real thing.

Both supporters and detractors of these agencies understand that unspeakably inhumane activities are part of the spook’s job description. Far from expecting CIA agents to be held accountable as individuals, the public clearly feels that part of the gig’s cachet is that we don’t know their names. In this context it was utterly consistent that Americans seemed to take more umbrage at Cheney’s outing of Valerie Plame than at any of his other despicable ethical breaches.

Wow. You know, I remember when the CIA was considered evil. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Hollywood would’ve no more made their hero a CIA agent than they would’ve made him a Nazi.

James Bond was big in those days, but he was British. For American audiences, that put him at enough of a remove to make it safe to get off on his violence and sexism as one would get off on an over-the-top cartoon. Like the Indian-killing cowboy in that earlier cinematic genre that overlooked its own genocidal subtext, Bond was heroic in the sense that gadget-enhanced homicide set the standard for cinematic coolness.

James Bond movies featured expensive European suits and ejector car seats, seeming to set them in a different universe from the real spooks, who, as were just finding out in the 1970s, conducted dirty wars in Latin America. It didn’t strike Americans as contradictory to thrill to a movie spy’s cosmopolitan antics while simultaneously condemning the US spy agency that assassinated Salvador Allende.

Meanwhile, the CIA has been rebranded. Its operatives are now considered sympathetic enough to play the lead in action movies. Unlike James Bond, these sleek new murderer-heroes are written as serious characters; one is supposed to root for them. Like Mafiosi, CIA agents have been dubbed by the makers of popular fiction as suitable role models for the young males in the audience and as heart throbs for the gals. Fresh-faced young actors like Matt Damon are cast to play them.

While it is true that Bush’s preëmptive strike against Saddam Hussein made some Americans a little uncomfortable, killing sovereign heads of state and orchestrating coups is now considered to be basically okay; at least in the movies. So long as it isn’t our head of state; and so long as the coups are in impoverished Third World nations.

One keeps hearing what a nice man Leon Panetta is, the new head of the CIA. The fact that he is loath to offend either Democrats or Republicans is portrayed as the most important thing about him. In the he-said-she-said melodrama taking place under these Neptunian skies, scant mention is made of the fact that the CIA lies as part of its job.