We went to see Across the Universe

on Saturday night, and it made me think interesting thoughts about the War in Vietnam and my generation. I went with my 11-year-old daughter, who is the same age as I was when the story of the movie is supposed to have happened. If you haven't seen the movie, it traces the lives of young people in the years 1967-1969, roughly, mostly by staging Beatles' songs. It's a tour de force of stagecraft and visual imagination by the inimitable Julie Taymor, the only person on the face of the earth who could make a watchable movie out of Titus Andronicus. (That movie was called Titus, and the title character was played by Anthony Hopkins.)

As you would imagine, a character is sent to Vietnam, and there is a sequence that features what are now the standard signifiers of that war--jungle, helicopters, carpet bombing. Those are the buttons that are there to be pushed, as reliably hard-wired into our collective memory as the Zapruder film or MLK's I Have a Dream speech (which we get in this movie). These things are in my head. Periodically I use a news photo of John John Kennedy saluting his father's coffin in an undergraduate class I teach, and it predictably chokes me up a little bit, as I'm sure it would for anyone of my generation.

Now I DO have the Vietnam iconography in my head, especially the helicopters, the napalm, the carpet bombing, and the jungle. The same is not true for the Iraq War, either for my daughter, or for myself and, I think, my contemporaries. There are no really iconic symbols of the Iraq War. There are the car bombs, but these don't quite have the same symbolic and emotional resonance. They're pictures, as far away as earlier pictures of other car bombs in the middle east.

Why don't we have the same repertoire of representation for this war? Well, why DO we have a repertoire for Vietnam? Partly because of movies that came well after the War itself. The helicopters were really hammered home by the Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now--after I saw the Deer Hunter, I froze every time I heard a helicopter. Same with the jungle. But I already had the images in my head before that.

The reasons, I think, were the news and the draft. The news kept putting the War on the television, which still followed the logic of "newsworthiness" rather than finely measured viewer interest. The big three networks had footage of the war on on a nightly basis. This is hardly true now. Even though there are still dozens of embeds, they never really gave us the kind of candid war footage that we expected. There has been plenty of war porn on the web, but the gatekeepers have been working very hard to keep this off our radar screens, and to a large extent they've succeeded. Probably because, compared with Vietnam, the US body count is microscopic.

The draft is the other big reason. I had those images in my brain because I had nightmares about being drafted and sent over there. As it happened, I am part of the microgeneration that has never been required to register for the draft. I am very grateful for that.

It's common for antiwar folk to wonder why there aren't bodies in the streets, massive marches in DC and elsewhere. Well, you do see more than a little of that, though without the high drama of the Vietnam era, and without the attention as well. 2008 will not be 1968. But there still are marches and demonstrations. The missing iconography, the missing mental images of the war, makes a bigger impression on me. Critics will blame the mediascape for the diminished demonstrations; more appropriately, we should investigate the mediascape for our missing collective memory.

McCain was never tortured

if you buy the Bush administration's definition of torture. According to the memo drafted by assistant AG Jay Bybee in 2002, for an interrogation technique to amount to torture, it must inflict pain as severe as that brought on by "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Findlaw has this and other documents.

The Bush administration has held to this definition of torture, and won't even let us see how it's tortured it to make it countenance the simultaneous use of three or more interrogation techniques, any of which I would consider torture if it were used on me. (The Pres-o-dent doesn't believe in that kind of application of the golden rule. Any dog owner does, though. You wouldn't put a pinch collar on your dog without trying it out--not on your neck, of course, but on your thigh, say. It's only fair to ask the Pres-o-dent to undergo waterboarding, on the presumption that human beings are as entitled to humane treatment as dogs, or that human beings are entitled to at least canine treatment. Perhaps we can have Michael Vick handle the waterboarding of the Pres-o-dent.)

So here's McCain, walking around without "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." y'know whut, how come he keeps saying he was tortured? Well, he's a politician. He plays fast and loose with words.

But look at this: There's a technology that can inflict unbearable pain without causing any physical damage. Oh, if only it was just a thought experiment! Then we could speculate about it and not have to worry whether it would actually be used as an "interrogation technique." But it's there, and I'm willing to bet that there's still some flunky left over from the Gonzalez era in the Justice Dept who's willing to say that that wouldn't be torture.

Except that we'd never hear about that, would we? Any such advice would be kept secret. Not from the terrorists; the secret torture memos would only confirm what they already believe. These things have to be kept secret from us, the people. Why? It's as if they expect us to actually object when this stuff is done in our names.