The unflappable one

Dick Cheney's old friend Alan Simpson recently commented on how the scandals that have brought low the VP's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, will likely leave the boss untouched. The reason, Simpson suggests, is the marvelous strength of Cheney's character: "He's a survivor of all time. . . . I never saw him bow his head or go into a cocoon or suck his thumb or anything like that. He's an unflappable man."

In reading Simpson's characterization of Mr. Cheney, I was reminded of another unflappable character, this one from the realm of poetry. Allow me to quote a few stirring lines from this fine fellow: "What though the field be lost? / All is not lost -- the unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield." The poet is John Milton, the poem is Paradise Lost, and the speaker is, of course, the Prince of Darkness -- flat on his back on the floor of hell (having recently been delivered there by that most Special of Prosecutors), trying nonetheless to buck up his own crestfallen chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Beelzebub.

Also an unflappable man, Milton's Satan, so much so that generations of romantic readers have mistaken him for the hero of the piece -- an egregious misreading that surely would have left Milton disgusted. The poet was, after all, in God's camp.

As for Simpson's reading of Cheney, it is also a misreading. For "unflappable" we should substitute "unscrupulous," "shameless," or better yet just plain "evil." It was Cheney, after all, who at the start of the so-called War on Terror asserted that our country might be compelled to employ "the dark arts" to win that war -- his reference being to torture. And that prediction has been borne out. No longer content simply to train other governments in the dark arts (vide WHINSEC, formerly the School of the Americas), the United States has itself become a torture regime, hanging out its shingle at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan -- at God knows how many "black sites" flung across this ever-suffering globe.

And it is Cheney who, in response to torture victim John McCain's recent attempt to excise this cancer from the body politic by demanding that all future interrogations done in our name be conducted in accordance with the Army Field Manual and the Uniform Code of Military Justice -- it is, as I say, the Unflappable One who has pressured Senator McCain and others to exempt CIA interrogators from the torture prohibition. Cheney wants those operatives to continue to be permitted to defend freedom ("Honor bound!") by inserting needles under fingernails, holding heads under water, administering electric shocks to genitals, and so on. He wants this in spite of the fact that every expert observer has concluded that very little in the way of actionable intelligence has been uncovered via such techniques.

Torture, it turns out, just doesn't work. And there is this troubling tendency for what begins as "coercive interrogation" to degenerate quickly into mere sadism. Thus those winning snapshots of our own Lynndie England demonstrating state-of-the-art canine training techniques. Just a bad apple, you say? Make no mistake, gentle reader: it was the Unflappable One who made her do it. And once she did it, we could kiss the possibility of success in Iraq -- what slim chance there was for that to begin with -- a fond farewell.

So "hearts and minds" be damned! In the manly vision of Richard Cheney, Lady Liberty lifts her lamp beside, not the Golden Door -- that fabled gateway to a Shining City upon a Hill -- but rather beside a rather grim chamber door, above which are inscribed the words "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," and upon which hangs a little cardboard sign that reads "Torture in Progress: Do Not Disturb."