Torturing Reality

Since switching over to Netflix from Blockbuster I've only received one movie through the mail, a movie every American should watch: Taxi to the Dark Side. My first reactions were the feeling of being crushed, angered, and a desire to change change the status quo for politics. Often I get so frustrated with my fellow compatriots and myself for our short memory. With a new president to distract us, all the talk about torture and these secret war prisons have in the least subsided to a whisper.

Torture is disgusting in every form and should be regarded as an enemy of humanity, an unnecessary evil. It transforms our imaginations as US citizens (35% of the population sanctioned torture AFTER seeing pic's from Gitmo).

Politics has become a matter of using and manipulating language to create a reality so that people remain ignorant about reality. As I've mentioned before, I believe the most patriotic act a person can do in this climate of phobia and manipulated reality is to call awareness and repentance to our country's ills and brokenness. Torture is a crime against all of humanity, even the perpetrators.

Something I've been wrestling with since I've began to understand Political theology and Slavoj Zizek is the pressing question, how do you bring about a new political order within the old politic? As the documentary I just watched points to, the Cheney/Bush administration seems to have done this in eight years to an extent. Under this administration the US defied the Geneva Convention and the USA Constitution by (re)defining the terms and at other times propping security and safety over against "the self-evident truth that all men are created equal."

So is this the best way to bring in a new political order? Having a powerful administration that manipulates the people through false records and ambiguous language?

I would hope that this isn't the only answer. It could be the real solution is found in the cross, in the broken body of Christ that recreates humans in the image of a given and estranged God, uniting the isolated and creating a body given to all. The church is a political body by its very existence, thus it must be first faithful to its calling to serve and suffer, while bending reality toward God's love and justice.

The US & Torture

The power of torture is not so much that it gathers info or intel for the CIA. Rather the true power is that it creates a viewpoint within the American nation. Torture is the power of imagining ourselves as so righteous that we must allow our leaders to do the dirty work of torture to uphold our rightness, democracy, and exceptionalism ( or "the last great hope of the world"-Obama). Torture also creates enemies. Of course these aren't your run of the mill bad guys either for torture allows us to imagine that the enemies are so vile they must deserve it, subhuman. This of course leaks down to the power of punishing innocents (which has been widely the practice and mostly the case in the "enhanced interogation methods" used in the War on Terror), so we believe that if they are being tortured or treated so inhumanly, they must be guilty.

Torture is disugsting in every form. The solution?
Absorb it through the Eucharist or in other words allow the sacrifice or torture of Christ to become the once for all declaration that we all sinful, that we are all loved, and in Christ we are all redeemed. Or as William Cavanaugh says,

If the Eucharist is a participation in the sacrifice of Christ, if we become the Body of Christ, then we too are called not just to minister to the victims of this world but to identify with them. The opposition of them and us, friend and enemy, even victim and helper, is overcome. Violence against the enemy is unthinkable, because we are the enemy. Raniero Cantalamessa says “the modern debate on violence and the sacred thus helps us to accept a new dimension of the Eucharist,” thanks to which “God’s absolute ‘no’ to violence, pronounced on the cross, is kept alive through the centuries. The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence!

Check out Cavanaugh's entire article at the Other Journal, the journal of Mars Hill Graduate School.