I just got off an airplane coming from California to Chicago, through the night after a long day of work. Unexpectedly, I stayed awake for every bit of the flight, and Jon Ronson is to blame.
Years ago, I read THEM, Jon Ronson’s very entertaining book of investigations into people who believe in sinister secret societies. I missed the memo when it came, however, to the release of Ronson’s next book, The Men Who Stare At Goats.
I happened upon The Men Who Stare At Goats in an airport bookstore tonight, and I’m very glad that I did. I’ve not been this captivated by a book for a long, long time.
It starts out very funny, with an exploration of silly military programs that aimed to find ways to get soldiers to walk through walls, levitate, see things from far away, and stop the hearts of their enemies, all through the force of their mental concentration. I thought I understood what the book would be: Another wacky Jon Ronson exploration of people believing ridiculous things, and making asses out of themselves.
That’s how it started out, but it’s not at all how the book ended. About half of the way through the book, I realized that the laughs had stopped, and things had gotten worse than deadly serious. They had become tortured. John Ronson’s investigations led him to see how the loopy idea of psychic warfare eventually led to some very nasty psychological warfare, and into the hallways of Abu Ghraib and cages of Guantanamo Bay.
The Men Who Stare At Goats was published in 2004, but with the passage of the Military Commissions Act, the information is all-too-unfortunately as relevant as ever. Consider the following comment about the limits of using non-lethal weapons in interrogation to Ronson by Sid Heal, an advocate for non-lethal technologies: “They might have succeeded, yeah, but any sort of nonlethal weapon that would force compliance in interrogation wouldn’t be appealing to us at all, because the resulting evidence couldn’t be used in court.”
Since the time that The Men Who Stare At Goats was written, the Military Commissions Act has made it legal for information gained through coercion and torture to be given as testimony by the prosecution in a court of law.
If you’re willing to be taken from a light giggle to some very dark places in the space of a few hours, read it.
Welcome to Chicago. We have some sunshine for you today when you wake up.
…in a box in the Art Institute.
(I went to Northwestern. I loved Chicago. In fact, I even got to the point, very early on, of appreciating even a nice cloudy day. But it’s still fun to joke about.)
Hey, it’s not that bad. We’re not a tropical paradise but we do have our moments, one of which we shared with jClifford, just because he’s special.
At least we’re not like Minneapolis with its nine-month winter. They have two seasons: winter and highway construction.
Maryland is pretty lukewarm all year, except for January and July, which are our extremes.