If you’re a guy of a certain age you have vivid memories of Robin Hood, be it from film, the TV series, even the Classics Illustrated comic book. Whichever the source, the common denominator villain was always the Sheriff of Nottingham. He may have had his cronies in devising plots to capture Robin and his band of merry followers, but there could be no doubt in any young reader’s mind that the sole foil to Robin’s philanthropy was invariably the greedy Sheriff of Nottingham. (Cue: hissing and booing.)
Interspersed with Robin’s adventures of stealing from the rich to feed and clothe the poor, there were often scenes where the Sheriff applied some form of torture to a captured wretch in the hope of gaining ground on his nemesis. In the Sheriff’s twisted psyche, inducing fear, pain and panic—but especially pain— in his prisoners equated with collecting valuable information towards his goal of exterminating Robin Hood. To say nothing of the streak of sadism that seemed to ooze from the administration of torture. You likely were too young to know anything about sadism back then but you knew it was pure evil at its core. (Cue: more hissing and booing.)
Even at a very young age, you understood viscerally that the torture equation was falsely predicated on a faulty understanding of human psychology, even of human nature. That under extreme pain conditions anyone could be coerced into stating any gibberish fed to them simply to have the pain stop. Even worse, that someone chose to die from such torture, honor-bound to a code that would not permit him/her to breach a solemn oath they had made to friends, to a cause. There were no CliffsNotes to debate the moral/ethical conundrum for your young brain to process the Sheriff’s actions but you just knew and detested his means and methods.
Fast forward into the early aughts when President Bush Jr. signed a still-classified directive giving the CIA the power to secretly imprison and interrogate detainees. Without any of the traditional oversight the CIA ordinarily had to curb its excesses, this Bush directive amounted to carte blanche for torture, well-documented over the last fifteen years. (See US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report 12-9-2014). After the Justice Department completed what are now known as the Torture Memos, Condoleezza Rice told the CIA in July 2002 that the “enhanced interrogation” techniques were approved. It was no coincidence that throughout Bush Jr.’s administration, my Sheriff of Nottingham gag reflex was constantly being triggered.
In 2010, Dick Cheney said on ABC’s This Week, “I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.” Was there ever any doubt that Cheney was/is one incarnation of the Sheriff of Nottingham?
Time and again, various opportunities to prosecute those who perpetrated those horrors were stifled, both nationally and internationally for obvious reasons. The consequences of any one country acting on behalf of The International Court to bring to justice high-ranking officials in the Bush administration would be courting a diplomatic nightmare. Good old Canada towed the line, shutting down a Bush investigation initiated by the Center for Constitutional Rights just in time for a Bush visit to Canada. It’s the same motivation that informed the Obama Administration from going forward on this matter. Fear of retribution, even on contrived facts, is a strong, if toxic, detriment. Without any prosecutions the possibility remains that a future U.S. presidential administration could claim torture is legal again, merely a question of policy choice, and revive its practice. Sound familiar?
Which brings me to Steve Bannon.
From the minute this man was introduced to us on the Trump campaign, my ire was ignited. What he said, what he suggested, what he intimated, all had the aura of a Sheriff of Nottingham in the house. My concerns over Bannon’s influence on Trump and his Cabinet did not diminish when I learned of Bannon’s admiration for, and supposed devotion to, something called the Strauss-Howe generational theory. It was like adding fuel to my ire’s fire. The theory is too complicated (convoluted?) to take up here in this short blog. Suffice to say, that in Bannon’s worldview we are in a generational period of Crisis. Think End Times but for political junkies!
If the man advising the supposedly most powerful man on the planet believes in a theory that should produce a Crisis in our times, doesn’t it stand to reason that this advisor will do all he can to accommodate his theory. If Bannon, in order to feel good about himself, needs his theory to work, what is there preventing him from orchestrating a Crisis out of nowhere? What best way to do so than to create an atmosphere of havoc and unsureness, where U.S. citizens begin to doubt facts and truths. Welcome to the real Trump empire. Forget hotels and casinos; imagine instability and chaos and all the profiteering opportunities to come.
The difference between perception and reality can be quite infinitesimal. In the wrong eyes, it can also prove catastrophic. In the end, if we, as an aggrieved society, should have learned anything over the previous Bush/Cheney era, it is to be vocal and engaged. All together now: Loud hissing and booing!
bymax7 