Reality TV May Impact GIs' Morals

May 7, 2004 -- I would like to propose a new reality TV show: It's called "The Interrogation." Here's the premise: A TV camera follows American GIs whose sole charge is to make Iraqi detainees "talk." Each group will choose from one of three "persuasive" tactics: (1) kindness, reason, and the promise of a brighter future; (2) old-fashioned torture; and (3) degrading sexual poses demeaning to the manhood of the prisoners but entertaining to bored soldiers.

I'm pretty sure all the GIs would pick (3) — and not only because of the mind-boggling pictures coming out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Some say the antics displayed in those images, playing continually on a TV near you, were an aberration. Our troops, it seems, were unversed in the canons of the Geneva Conventions (there being no other catechism to draw moral illustrations from, you see). I offer another explanation, the same reason my game show would be all too predictable: a culture — our culture — that serves up degradation as a form of daily entertainment, and which can only skew the mental grid our 20-something soldiers work from, thereby stunting their moral options.

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Once upon a time, Americans could boast with some legitimacy of a cultural superiority that was rooted in cold hard facts: a high standard of living, religious and political freedom, an entrepreneurial spirit, and ideals that inspired us to strive for a polity where there is "neither male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free" — or, in more secular terms, "liberty and justice for all."

Then came television. When it first appeared, the medium was informed by the givens of "polite society." All kinds of things couldn't be said (like "pregnant") and couldn't be shown (like a married couple in a double bed). But now, in 2004 D.A. ("Digital Age"), a woman on Survivor is given the "challenge" of enduring hours on a small platform affixed to a piling in the ocean. She is allowed to stand down only when she exposes her breasts. This, in our unrepressed times, is called "reality."

We must admit that, in such a culture, the abomination of the Abu Ghraib prison is not an anomaly. The soldiers in charge of the detainees didn't pervert justice because we cannot grant "the other" his humanity, or some other fashionable explanation.