tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post4597352626130574962..comments2024-03-06T06:34:42.881-05:00Comments on EconoSpeak: Torture and TVUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-12393352097072452742014-12-16T13:27:01.016-05:002014-12-16T13:27:01.016-05:00You make the excellent point that the most politic...You make the excellent point that the most politically potent arguments are often dramatic, fictional portrayals of circumstances and character.<br /><br />There's a deep root for the fictional portrayal, though, in everyday experience of coercion and expedience. Both the 9/11 policies and fiction are exploiting the emotional relief that accompanies the resolution of conflicting priorities and moral ambiguities. Ordinary life and work confronts a never-ending stream of impedimenta, constraint, compromise and falling short. Frustration and impotence are common experiences, which can be erased in heroic fiction.<br /><br />It is interesting to me that the country is now confronting the moral lessons from what might be considered the other side of dramatic crises, in a seemingly endless parade of instances of deadly police error. And, the conclusion, each time, from the deliberations of grand juries and police review boards, is that the police are never responsible, never accountable, when they make a mistake, and someone dies. Just as no one who tortures is ever held responsible and accountable for the crime.<br /><br />The policeman, responding to an ersatz emergency and caught up in the adrenalin-pumping drama, who kills an innocent person, is held to be innocent. The essential responsibility -- the obligation to discriminate between the ordinary grey world where we must use deliberate reason and act proportionately and the bright colors of the fictional world where the hero acts decisively with sure intention -- this essential responsibility is ignored.<br /><br />Most people are followers, not executives or leaders -- they do not design the systems within which they work and live. And, much of the elite do not live and work within the constraints of the systems they design for others.<br /><br />Fictional portrayal in so-called police procedurals, like <i>Law and Order</i> has been eroding support for civil liberties for many years, by portraying judicial exclusion of evidence tainted by faulty procedure as turning on mere technicalities. It is a symptom of system decay.<br /><br />The use of torture raises similar issues of elite incompetence in outlining systems that are effective in accomplishing their objectives. Frustration with system corruption and decay makes expedience attractive.<br />Bruce Wilderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09631065564839959376noreply@blogger.com