There are plenty of sensible, mature people who look upon the suicidal protest action of Aaron Bushnell in only the most sensible terms: as an act of madness. It accomplished exactly nothing, save perhaps delegitimizing the cause for which it was meant to advocate. Certainly that’s what CrimethInc, the anarchist collective to whom Bushnell directly appealed for publicity, thought in rejecting his martyrdom. And yet there is no shortage of highly insensible people who see, at best, a regrettable tint of goodness in Bushnell’s intentions. This raises an issue that spreads beyond the cozy boundaries of the ethics of setting yourself on fire. It goes instead to comprehend what level of insanity our fellow citizens have reached and what danger do they collectively or individually pose to us normal mature people with only the highest possible good to the greatest possible expediency in mind.
You, normal so-and-so, are actually in luck! That quandary is readily answered.
Setting aside individual psychological and temporal factors for the moment, two aspects of Bushnell resonated: a hopelessness about the world situation and a tendency to seek the logical extreme. For most of us these traits are safely separate. People hopeless in thought are often hopeless in deed, and no real threat. Logical extremists, on the other hand, can take their extremes in any direction and to heinous degrees. It is only in combination that a kind of magical effect takes hold, and a knightly authority is conferred. People of this type seem to think beyond the meager scope of second-rate do-gooders. Protest should not simply be a theatrical airing of complaint but a kind of philosophy in action: declaring what is unequivocally wrong and doing what is right. That that right action tends to compromise conventional comforts, to themselves and others, is a tradeoff like any other. So Bushnell thought, as did Ted Kaczynski, the Weathermen, to say nothing of the other self-immolators in recent history. To them, so many people for any number of reasons—but not least of all for shame of personal inaction—offer the highest admiration and respect.
The admiration is misplaced. Every hopeless extremist, whatever the scale of their lethality, offers an excuse to everyone else from the socio-hygienic obligation of evaluating the ways in which their political reality takes on accents of evil. Not that it’s an easy or hazard-free process, as my own experience can attest.
Even before it started I sensed that the war in Iraq was a bad idea. On simple logical terms there was no basis for it. Saddam Hussein’s connection to the September 11 attacks and Al-Qaeda seemed tenuous at best; serving, if anything, as a timely convenience for certain politicians and bureaucrats with a longstanding interest in having a deeper imprint in the region. This was not a controversial position, I think. Neither broad rationales nor offers of highly suspect intelligence were altogether persuasive. Most of the “support” for it, at least in my middle-to-upper-class blue state orbit, came in the form of resignation. “Saddam is a menace,” they said. “He gasses his own people, etc., etc.” Apparently none realized, or cared much about, my capacity to recall any number of instances between the fall of the Berlin Wall and that moment where we very notably hesitated on similar premises. Whatever. We invaded; my college made the news because an alumnus was its first American casualty. Things collapsed as many foresaw in short order. Bush’s removal from the White House by democratic means was in that moment of the highest importance.
The trouble with war is that it is contingent. The complacency of simple incompetence did not prepare me for the change of April 2004. Unlike 9/11, I don’t know where I was when the Abu Ghraib story broke, only that once it did it was impossible to escape. The internet, even at that stage, offered an impressive array of real-life violence. I recall distinctly an unhinged high school history teacher allowing a student to search the classroom computer for video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading. (The search failed; the pedagogical value of seeing it will forever be a mystery.) That, combined with the election-year advantage supposedly to be gained from it, made the many, many images from that prison unprecedentedly profuse in their accessibility.
To say that I was affected solely by the images of the casual cruelty, the flair for sexual and scatological humiliation, and the horrific iconography of the man in the black hood would be melodramatic. In terms of violence—whether public or aesthetic—it was another item to add to an ever-growing pile. Rather it was the logical framework around which the violence was encased. To assure my own freedom, it seemed necessary to concoct a baroque tapestry of strange euphemisms (“learned helplessness”), legal jargon, Sadean hypotheticals, and an approach to information-gathering that resembled a Black Mass offering. I suppose if the exposure had been able to actually remove the people under which these policies were implemented from any positions of responsibility my attitude might have been more modified. Though that would have underscored its apocalyptic nature. And once the veil—or hood, as it were—is lifted, there is no use putting it back on. You respond to it as best as you’re able.
At least by appearances my response wasn’t very unique compared to my classmates. In fact it looked as if I was doing less. I didn’t partake in any protests or volunteer for any campaign. I didn’t go with my friends to watch Michael Moore throw Ramen noodles every which way at Lehigh. Americans, being literal-minded to a fault, deal rather virginally with anything beneath the surface, which is where my response worked itself out. I think of it as making mental notes to keep track of the change in the national ambiance. So while I was watching The Daily Show as everyone else was (believe it or not) I underwent my own process of converting a lot of abstract radical-fringe rhetoric about American “neo-imperialism” into a more acute reality. Abu Ghraib made a black comedy out of the sometimes cooperative, sometimes competing national defense and human rights justifications of the war. In this light it was more an in-yer-face found-footage drama of euphoric national self-confidence. And that euphoria had weight. When it pressed down, patriotic creeds became platitudes; sentimental rhapsodies became a symptom of delusion. The euphoria was a fact of American life.
But when facts reveal themselves you have to live them out. I can’t say that, 20 years later, I’ve lived them out as well as I could or should have. But I try, using the tools at my disposal. One is the intellect.
I was never one for arguing. I was never in a debate club and op-ed writing for the campus paper was torturous. To the extent that I had a sensitivity to rhetoric, it was as a poetic cadence. Bush’s clunky oratory has this effect at least in terms in haunting the memory. Though clearly the most consequential language—both in terms of its raw power and its subservience to power—came out of the bureaus and sub-departments. The administration's memos, whether John Yoo’s cold legalism (“Because the presence of good faith would negate the specific intent element of torture, it is a complete defense of such a charge.”) or Donald Rumsfeld’s compulsive, koan-like pontifications about “unknown knowns,” were a literature unto themselves. Without knowing what Sophism was, the incantatory effects of even a single sentence (whether for my civic benefit or not) had impressed irreversibly upon me. It was like being given a secret, but more substantial lesson in writing. So much so that I made a side project of seeing where I could take that ability. I developed a strong sense for icily portentous prose: the paradoxical thought experiment, the earnest “modest” proposal, the transgressive academic paper, the bad judicial opinion. This effort was marked as much by perverse reverence as by fear; its decadence would have easily exceeded its actual value without my second tool, a moderating moral force.
Disillusion is practically built-in to the college experience. No doubt select Noam Chomsky-parroting professors made an honest effort. They needn’t have bothered. Before I was 20 I was initiated into the Advanced Studies of secret moral education. It consisted mainly of a reorientation process; of bringing my social context and all who shared it up to speed with the apocalypse. I think there’s some variation of it that people like to call “radical honesty.” Though in simpler terms it’s “getting the facts straight.” The facts must be spoken as accurately as possible. America is not evil or even uniquely corrupt. America is goal-oriented. Anyone or anything so oriented is imbued with a particular mode of sight: a sharp knife-slit of clarity in between impenetrably nocturnal slabs, and in those slabs anything goes. I see the Obama administration releasing the report of the things we did in the dark as a pleasant courtesy, and one with a cost. That torture happened at all is not really the issue compared to how quickly it occurred, how easily it was accommodated, how comfortably it was ingrained into our defense apparatus, and how long it took for any proper reaction in accordance with our principles to take place. Admitting the deed gave tacit permission to forget that it happened.
The real difficulty is applying this more practically. My living out the facts does not compel others to follow me. Facts don’t command obedience as laws do; and apocalypse is not a license to be rude. Even an extremist, however hopeless and logical, is not immune to compromise. I agree not to call you or your loved ones “goal-oriented” to your faces; you agree not to bullshit me with your queasy sentimentality or lie to me that all of this working itself out in a just and sensible way. You take full responsibility for any new “goal” that happens to appear; I don’t get a prize for knowing what’s true. The gears of moral complicity grind your bones to dust no more eagerly than they do mine. “America is a word, but I use it.” Heaven is a fact, but it’s very far away.
What alarms us about Bushnell’s case is less the action that sets him apart from us than the thinking that brings him closer. It does not appear that any rationale he applied to his death was rooted in the workings of his own mind. Certain points already in wide circulation had seeped in—points that do little to illuminate, let alone curb, the tangible awfulness of Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza—and somehow resulted in this pyrotechnic outcome. Why? I have no idea. Sometimes things that have the manner and expression of protest have the spiritual desperation of a cope. But good behavior that enables unreality is no less exempt from coping mechanisms; and the language we choose—whether crude or sophisticated, transparent or obscurant—has flammable capacity. If it doesn’t make good content now it can facilitate worse content down the road, that someone, somewhere will spend decades thinking about.