Of all the fictional characters in the literary universe, the malicious Iago, who betrays his commander and friend, Othello, leading to the doom of sweet Desdemona, may be the villain who most deserves the liquid fires of limitless punishment. Shakespeare’s play leaves no doubt as to what awaits that “demi-devil”: torture unto death. And the command is to make it slow: “If there be any cunning cruelty / that can torment him much and hold him long, / it shall be his.”
The spectators watching The Moor of Venice when it was first performed in1604 were more than aware of what those torments entailed, having regularly attended executions conceived as public displays of brutality.
Just one notorious case, out of many, that would have been etched in the memory and eyes of London theatre-goers, was the martyrdom of Robert Southwell, a Jesuit priest and superb poet, whose verses (“My mind to me an empire is”) were well known to Shakespeare. In February of 1595, Southwell, accused of treason, was strung up at Tyburn. Sentenced to be disemboweled while still alive, his corpse ended up quartered and his head cut off, exhibited to a large, ogling crowd. Before dying, Southwell wrote about his experience during three previous years of incarceration and dismay. Some of the prisoners, he says, “are hanged by the handes eight or nine houres, yea twelve houres together, till not only their wits, but even their senses fayle them.” Additional horrors he describes are genital disfigurement and sleep deprivation; racks that roll the body into a ball and crush different parts until blood spurts out; and inmates so starved in dark dungeons that they lick “the very moisture off the walls”.
What sets Othello’s nemesis apart from Southwell and countless suspects in England and across Europe who were pressed to death with slabs, burned during interrogations and at the stake, and subjected to waterboarding was that Iago did not claim to be innocent, took pride in his perfidy. Nor did he have any willing accomplices in his conspiracy, so no actionable “intelligence” could be rooted out of his throat.
Why, then, afflict him in such a savage manner?
In our own presumably civilized century, where torture is held to be illegal, a crime against humanity, and yet practiced systematically all over the globe, including, until just a few years ago, by the United States in black sites abroad, the reasons for someone like Iago to be savagely tormented has enormous relevance and implications.
For starters, Iago’s body must be mercilessly mutilated because the audience would have demanded that kind of retribution, cheering at the thought of that traitor on the rack, a minor redress of justice in a tragedy where few other comforts are on offer.
Another reason was to make an example of him and anyone else who might dare to attack the foundations of the State and the order of the universe. Indeed, the spectacular nature of that performance of pain was supposed, according to Queen Elizabeth the First herself, to be “for the terror of others.”
The final reason is one Shakespeare may have found the most intriguing.
In Cinthio’s novella, the source from which he had lifted the outlines of the story, multiple motives animate this dreadful Machiavellian schemer. Shakespeare went out of his way to jettison most of them. Shakespeare’s Iago has not been demoted by Othello. Nor does he deem that Othello has seduced his wife or tarnished his reputation. Iago is an enigma, refusing to explain the whys and wherefores of his hatred, declaring in the last scene of the play that nobody will drag any clarity from him: “Demand me nothing. What you know you know. / From this time forth I will never speak word.” And despite the ominous threat of one of his captors (“Torments will ope your lips”), we will not hear one more syllable from this “hellish villain.”
Shakespeare tempts his audience, then and now, makes them yearn to crack open Iago’s soul, watch it be cracked open so he can pour forth his secrets. Shakespeare shared, I submit, the sick curiosity humans have when confronted by the boundaries of something infinitely perverse. If we could only fathom the psyche that commanded such malignancy, we whisper to ourselves, then perhaps—it is a delusion, yet we persist in demanding and desiring it—we might recognize the next avatar of evil, stop him before he again sows chaos and wickedness in his wake.
Of course, most torture, back in Shakespeare’s time and in ours, is perpetrated for less metaphysical purposes: primarily, as a way of wresting information from the suspect, to get him to confess his guilt, betray his network, reveal and prevent future atrocities.
Despite the Universal Declaration of Human Right having been adopted in 1948 (its article five stipulates that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”), despite ensuing treaties and conventions that outlaw such tribulations, despite the UN General Assembly unanimously proclaiming two decades ago that June 26th should be known as the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, these violations of body and mind continue to be exculpated and justified by the idea that they save lives.
It does not seem to matter that there is incontrovertible evidence that torture does not work. Donald Trump vowed, during his campaign, to bring back waterboarding “and a hell of a lot worse,” a position he suggested he might reconsider when James N. Mattis, soon to be his Defense Secretary, explained that such methods are useless and counterproductive. Still, all it would take is a major terrorist assault to revive such maltreatment. A recent survey indicated that almost half of Americans approved of the use of torture if it led to information being extracted.
I do not want to look down upon those multitudes of misguided, apprehensive fellow citizens. I understand the collective panic from which that blindness to the pain of the enemy stems, I commiserate with their thirst for a total, and sadly unobtainable, security.
Before we judge those millions of people, let us pause to reflect on our own reactions, our own imperfect humanity. When I am entangled in the emotions of Othello, distraught at innocence smothered and nobility murdered, I also wish to see Iago suffer without surcease for his sins. I suspect every other member of the contemporary audience feels, as I do, as the spectators in Shakespeare’s theatre did, an indecent sense of satisfaction at imagining someone so serially and deviously evil being tormented without remission.
It is at moments like these, when we are trapped by the desire for reckoning and revenge, that we must remember the terrifying truth about Iago: he is human, all too human and enjoys, by the mere circumstance of having been born, certain inalienable rights. This monster who planned the ruin of Othello and the wondrous Desdemona with the deliberate cold passion of a suicide-bomber—with the same detached rationality and indifference of a general who drops mega-bombs on faraway women and children—happens, alas, to be a member of our species, an extreme litmus test for that species.
Only when we have the moral courage to declare that someone like Iago, especially someone foul like Iago, should not be put on the rack or have his genitals slashed or forced to open his lips and scream and scream, only then, only when we understand that hurting his howling and malignant body in this way degrades us all, will we have really advanced towards abolishing the plague of cunning cruelty from the earth.
I fear that day will be a long time coming.
11.
MISSION AKKOMPLISHED:
FROM COMRADE BUSH TO TOVARISCH TRUMP
A decade ago, when George W. Bush was the Presidential enigma that needed to be unraveled (yes, remember when we used to ask ourselves how could somebody so bungling and clueless and belligerent have been elected to the most powerful office in the world? Oh those were the days!), I found myself one morning trolling the Internet, looking for reasons why the United States does not celebrate its workers the same day as the rest of the world, even if the origins of that date happen to be profoundly American: May 1st, 1886, when demands for an eight hour workday by Chicago trade unions (mostly made up of European immigrants) were met by violent police repression.
When my search engine turned up an unknown website, www.secrethistorygeorgewbu
sh.com, I almost decided not to explore its contents. Of all Americans, after all, the one least likely to be linked to Mayday was the younger President Bush, notoriously uninterested in history or, for that matter, the working class. The website, however, managed to make a connection, albeit an astounding one:
It has now been confirmed. May 1st 1973: that was the date George W. Bush was recruited as an agent by the KGB rather than sometime in 1972 as had been previously reported on this website. “As this is the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, the Chairman of the governing Republican party,” the security officer in charge of the operation wrote to Secretary General Yuri Andropov in a coded message which has now been deciphered, “we will see where this leads. Take it as a gift to the glorious Soviet people on this International Workers’ Day.” Another source inside the Kremlin indicates that, upon receiving the news, the usually solemn Andropov smiled as he reviewed the troops marching through Red Square and murmured to his fellow members of the Politburo: “We have a secret weapon and it is not here in Moscow.”
I blinked at the screen that day in 2006—or maybe it was 2007?
The next paragraph was even more absurd:
Jump forward thirty years, to May 1st 2003. There was George W. Bush, now the President, landing on the deck of the air craft carrier Abraham Lincoln and proclaiming, under a gigantic MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, that ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq had ceased. At first glance the event appeared as a fantastic Top Gun photo op on a vessel named after the greatest Republican President of all time, and that had just returned from the Second Gulf War without suffering a single casualty. The ship’s home-coming had been delayed, idling thirty miles off the coast of California until the soft morning light was ready for the Commander-in-Chief to fly in on an S-3B Viking jet, strut around in full battle gear and send a message to a world celebrating workers: the U.S. does not need you or your countries to rule this planet.
Or that was what Bush’s American handlers thought was transpiring. This website, www.secrethistorygeorgewbush.com, can now confirm that the real message was intended for W’s Russian handler, that the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner was a mischievous wink and nod to the President’s very own KGB agent in charge of his activities: I did it, tovarisch. We’re on our way. Watch what is about to happen in Iraq and elsewhere and enjoy the decline of the American empire. My jubilation knows no bounds. Happy Thirtieth Anniversary! Long live International Workers’ Day!”
And suddenly, before I could click over to another website which might provide less ludicrous material about May 1st and America, my computer shut down, the words and very website vanishing from my eyes. Irritated by this freak mishap, I rebooted my Toshiba, brought Google up, and typed in the Internet address.
Unable to open http://www.secrethistorygeorgewbush.com/. Cannot locate Internet Server or proxy server.
I tried again.
Same outcome.
The following hour of clumsy surfing yielded no trace of that incongruous blog or anything approximating it. I asked my eldest son, Rodrigo, a webmaster himself, if he could find out whether secrethistorygeorgewbush.com was owned by anyone. A few minutes later he informed me that nobody had bought it or, as far as he could tell, ever used it. Did I want to secure that domain? And what was I up to anyway?
Not a bad question.
What was I up to?
I told my son that there was nothing amiss, I was just curious, forget the whole thing. But I could not, in fact, forget it at all. Was somebody playing a trick on me? Had I been hallucinating? Or had that abruptly cancelled website even existed? Brought up on Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes as a child, spy novels as an adolescent, and the victim of real conspiracies as an adult, I could easily conjure up the anonymous author of such wild accusations seated in some smoke-filled interrogation room, even as the web police (whoever they might be) erased all remnants of those outlandish theories from the vast plateaus of virtual reality.
Stop right there. I needed to resist the temptations of political science fiction. What mattered about May 1st in 2006 (or was it 2007 or 2008?), in the United States, was that 120 or so years after those European immigrants had marched through the streets of Chicago, Mayday was being miraculously resurrected by other workers, by other immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of men and women would again fill those Chicago streets and streets all across America. But this time the workers would come primarily from Latin America, most of them illegal and all of them united against the impending legislation threatening to expel them. And they had chosen this date, an American date forgotten by America, to emerge from invisibility.
That was the story that mattered. The workers from the South bringing Mayday, the day known in Mexico as El Dia de los Mártires de Chicago, the day of the martyrs of Chicago, back to El Norte, back to the America which had turned its eyes away from its own past.
And yet, the febrile writer in me couldn’t help wandering off into the arcane realm of Bush and the KGB. In an attempt to rid myself of the obsession, I followed up on some of the clues mentioned in that “disappeared” website, struggling to create a thriller that Hitchcock would never have directed, The Blog Vanishes.
Or was it Three Days of the W?
Either way, a few hours later my cursory search turned out predictably inconclusive.
On May 1st 1973, George W. Bush was supposed to have been in Texas training as a pilot with the National Guard. It is true that there is not one eyewitness that he was in situ during that period. Indeed, not one record places him in Texas or anywhere else during what is known as “George Bush’s lost year.” So lost is it that the future President did not even report for his physical. Of course, it’s more logical to picture him partying, boozing, and smoking marijuana, rather than to conjecture his body being smuggled into some secret Soviet training camp near Uzbekistan or wherever those cloak-and-dagger facilities might have been located, maybe Leningrad. Yes, Leningrad, I thought to myself, now passionately embracing the conspiracy. Leningrad would have been perfect, as that was the one place and time when he might have been offered an early introduction to his counterpart Vladimir Putin, already on his way to his own career in the KGB. It would certainly elucidate one of the most bizarre incidents of all Bush’s Presidency, when, at his first (known) meeting with Putin, on June 16, 2001, George W. astonished the world by stating that he had looked his Russian “friend” in the eye and found him trustworthy, that he now had a sense of Putin’s soul. And if you look at the video of that encounter, there is a peculiar smile on Putin’s lips, perhaps enigmatically reminiscent of Andropov’s smile in Red Square all those years ago. Was the Russian President saying to himself, yes, you have a sense of my soul, but I have a sense of your KGB file, my friend, and that probably matters more. You won’t utter a peep when I bomb Chechnya.
Enough already. These convoluted ramblings of my imagination would get me nowhere. More relevant was to ask whether the theory of George W. Bush as a KGB agent ultimately made sense of his Presidency. And here, I must admit, reluctantly, that yes, in fact, it did illuminate any number of dark issues that had been puzzling me over the years. Because the truth is that, during his amazingly inept administration, there is only one thing at which Bush had been diabolically efficient and that happened to be the systematic destruction of his own country.
It was easy to understand that as a particularly lethal combination of arrogance and stupidity, laziness and greed. Or it could be interpreted as apocalyptic evangelism run amok. Or we might have focused on the corporations that had him in their pockets or the neocons or…there were so many explanations. None of which really satisfied my desire to grasp how Bush managed to sabotage his own country in such a virulent way. Here was a man who willfully ignored all signs of the terrorist attacks about to be launched on American territory. A man who squandered the goodwill of the world by disastrously invading a country that posed no threat to America’s security. Who proved more adept at ravishing foreign lands than rescu
ing compatriots decimated by a hurricane. Who had bankrupted future generations with his inane tax cut. Who had tried to destroy what was left of his land’s social welfare net. Who looked away when people were tortured in the name of America.
It was hard to believe back then that an incompetence so drastic and so persistent was not deliberate. And so, I decided to invent the eccentric website, its mysterious disappearance, the unruly accusations, all of it invented by me as a tongue-in cheek way of using that Mayday landing on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln to explore and write about what George W. Bush has done to America, where his mission had finally landed us. Because—crazy as my ruminations a decade ago may have been—George W. Bush did indeed act as if he had received secret instructions from some foreign enemy to ruin his land and lay low the American empire, make sure that, no matter what happened to the Soviet Union, it would not be the United States that would inherit the earth.
Crazy back then and yet now, in the midst of the turmoil of the Donald Presidency, now that Russian interference in the U.S. electoral process is no longer a fantasy that I have conjured up as a sad joke, now that probable collusion between Putin and Trump’s surrogates is roiling Washington and being investigated by the FBI, now that a Director of that very FBI has been sacked because he would not delay or tone down that investigation, now that international conspiracy and fake websites proliferate, is it not time to ask ourselves if the major question I posed for Bush is not even more relevant for Trump today?
Is he not destroying the very fabric of the American dream, tearing it to pieces shred by shred? Isn’t that the mission he is accomplishing, even as he deludes himself and his followers that he is making America Great Again? Acting in the not so hidden interests of all those waiting for America to continue to make the same mistakes that Comrade Bush enacted, but infinitely worse? Is Putin not smiling, somewhat nervously smiling at what he has helped to bring about? Are we not confronted, over and over again, with oligarchs who decide our fate as if we had nothing to say?
Homeland Security Ate My Speech Page 5