A day in Guantanamo

OK not quite. But I have just spent a day in an orange Guantanamo style jump-suit, as part of our student Amnesty Group’s “Orange Wednesday”. This was a bit of harmless and colourful street theatre, designed to draw attention to the injustices of illegal detention all over the world. A few hundred of us, mostly students but some staff, went about our daily business dressed as Guantanamo detainees.

I volunteered for this fancy dress partly because I believe in the cause. But partly because most students seem so un-bothered by issues of  surveillance, civil liberties and human rights that it is important to show some solidarity with those who are.

That said, I’m afraid I’ve lost some of my old knack for political action.

The first problem was: was I going to be able to get into the damn suit? (Not an issue for the poor thin creatures at the real Guantanamo, needless to say.) I had ordered an extra-large, but still had my doubts – particularly when the word went about that they only came in one size.

The good news was that it fitted. The bad news was that once in, it was almost impossible to get out. Going to the loo involved a good five minutes twisting and wriggling, before I could manage to release my shoulders and gradually pull the whole thing down.

No coffee for the day seemed the obvious answer to that one.

But worse was the fact that, even when strutting about the Faculty Library in my bright orange, I still didn’t seem to manage to get the Guantanamo message across.

Maybe classicists really are the absent minded, far away creatures that I’m always claiming they’re not. Or maybe, as one of my colleagues suggested, the handbag I was carrying slightly detracted from the overall impact. But the commonest reaction I got, if anything, was “Gosh, you’re bright today”, “Wow, great colour” etc.

One wag asked me if I’d just been hired by Drainco. (Their guys do look pretty similar, but I thought actually I looked closer to an Easyjet engineer). Another, who at least got the point, asked if I was dressed up to celebrate Fidel’s departure.

I rather envied one of my classicist co-demonstrators who had been giving a lecture today and so at least was able to explain to his captive audience why he was so colourfully dressed (and that he wasn’t actually moonlighting as the drain unblocker).

Was it this difficult in the 70s? I don’t remember it being so. But perhaps in truth it was.

Comments

[MacNara]

I congratulate you on doing this. Somebody has to show the students the point of humanistic education.

In the 80s, I took Japanese students from Nagasaki to Cambridge for a month in the summer on several occasions - homestay and language.

Around the middle of August, there is a Lantern Ceremony on the Cam in commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lanterns with candles in them are floated on the river, representing, in a Japanese way, the souls of the murdered.

Although I carefully told the students about the location and purpose of the event, not one of the students ever showed up, with or without their host family. I was always alone.

When I lived in Nagasaki, the mayor was the victim of an assassination atempt for suggesting that the Japanese Emperor bore some responsibility for WW2 and so for the bombing of Nagasaki.

A couple of years ago, the Mayor of Nagasaki was the victim of a successful assassination - due to a yakuza (mafia) crime gripe about his failure to be sufficiently corrupt in a land deal.

Autres temps, autres moeurs, as they say

[Paul Potts]

And furthermore, Justin, you mention a hostility to all things American. Well, what's wrong with that? Is it a psychological abberation, a criminal offence, an indication that you are a potential or actual terrorist? I should say is that we, or you, have to distinguish between the American fantasy culture, as expressed through its appallingly embarrassing film (= movie) industry, and the reality of its {external} actions, where it seems, the bombing of civilians is the best or only way to resolve their problems. Why has Hollywood never in recent years produced a decent film? What happened to Walt Disney in the fifties? Nothing even interesting since The Sleeping Beauty and Fantasia. I myself used to love Superman and Batman, but are they not just a bit Anti-American too? At least they're funny.

Of course there are good things coming out of America: but they are obscured by the noisy and noisome garbage.

Paulo

[abc]

I knew a chair once and his name was Keith Hopkins. He had a girl escalate fast into one of his post doctoral professorial Christianity seminars. He pulled out a chair and she sat down. Keith would have saved her life, for sure. We emailed about a month before he died, but that is a separate discussion for those who end up brimming like him.

[abc]

Final point - it might (and i am really not sure) be a case of doing a parent swop. "Yes, i know Mary Beard IS my mom but i am nobody...or working where no one really gives a turd who Mary Beard is.". I really don't know - bump them off

[abc]

Parents who are ultimately very ambitious. Some of them don't have the potential. It is a hugely complicated motivation process. Talking about complication, I need to get back to writing and not in Australian, although I do have some UGGS appearing soon. Bye for now and work hard!

[Tony Francis]

Britney S is just one of a series of "train wrecks" left in the wake of the Disney Marketing Machine (Disney: a Dow 30 company, and inter alia, the owners of ABC and various pornography distributors). Others that come to mind are Lindsey Lohan and Hilary Duff:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsey_Lohan
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Duff

Their latest creation is Miley Cyrus:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus
There was an interent scandal that she was prego. Who, in their right mind would put their daughter up for this kind of thing?

[abc]

Actually, that's discriminatory. There are doctors and professors who are bi-polar and on Lithium. Some would be perfectly open and admit to it.

[Tony Francis]

Dear ABC: In the case of Britney S, the bizarre behavior is obvious, at least from what is splashed all over my TV. In the case scenario I mentioned, the state licensing agency will move on an anonymous report of behavior (bizarre, angry, weird, whatever). The agency will suggest a psych eval from the psychiatrist/psychologist of their choosing. The client's lawyer will request the name of the "anonymous complainers" as guaranteed under due process. The agency will inform the lawyer that they are under no requirement to give the identity. If one wants it, it can be obtained at a public hearing in re: the sanity of the client. That is the wedge: no teacher, nurse, doctor, architect, etc can afford to have a public hearing concerning their sanity. Hence, just the threat of psychiatry is used to coerce behavior.

[abc]

Problem with Britney and many anorexics (ballet dancers etc) is that Britney is being made to control to perform and people, be it her parents or the public, expect that performance. If she were left, she would either die in negative self-perception or just go quietly until the expection on her to be her was reduced. Paradoxically, those who serve to stop her or tranquillise her actually see her through. It is exceptionally difficult and for the non-controller it is like an alcoholic who until they check themselves in, or allow themselves to be checked in, systematically destroys everything important to them.

[abc]

That's the initial answer isn't it? The rejection point. Others were right...or perhaps The Worst from Perth is right. Waste of Time decision.

[The Worst of Perth]

I can't see any academics doing that at my university. Even for fun.
The Worst of Perth

[abc]

Surely the bizarre behaviour point is being visibly debated in Britney Spears?

[Paul Potts]

Surely. Justin, the point is that "we" are not responsible for what Castro or Mugabe get up to. We may have set up the situation in which they (have to?} operate, but did not create them, as we did Saddam Hussein or Noriega in Panama (or Idi Amin or .......). We protest against the Guantanamo outrage because it's just possible that our democratically elected politicians might be able to do something about it. In a democracy, no-one is "innocent".

Paulo

[JANE-ANNE SHAW]

Good for you, Mary - and good for Prof PC., much as the mind doth boggle at the vision.
I despair of latter-day students' decreasing political awareness, & figure it might have something to do with increasing student debt? My demo career began with Bertrand R. & the Aldermarston marches, & I was at Grosvenor Sq in '68 ... Where has all the fire gone? Subsumed by an increasingly non-thinking populace & an identikit Tesco-fueled subtopian society of consumerism?
Alas, fear the answer is obvious.
Keep up the good work - we need you!

[Tony Francis]

Buried in the arcane writings of state statutes regarding licensing of professions and technical practitioners, there is some language about "substandard care" or "misconduct". The Kansas Statute is typical:
http://www.kslegislature.org/legsrv-statutes/getStatute.do?number=33021
All it takes is an anonymous report of "bizarre behavior". The professional gets a notice to appear at the licensing agency. The professional hires a lawyer and appears. The state agency lawyer requests the professional get a pysch exam from an agency approved psychiatrist. After all, the agency has to protect the public. Outraged, the professional's lawyer demands an opportunity to get a second opinion from a "neutral" psychiatrist. The agency lawyer is agreeable, adding, "fine, then we shall have a public hearing concerning the sanity of your client. Now, here is what the agency wants your client to do.... Compliance will demonstrate restoration of the mental health of your client. Our psychiatrist will testify to the same." The "public hearing" becomes the wedge to coerce behavior. In other words, psychiatry becomes part of the policing power of the state. People can't believe this happens in the US.

[Justin]

Leaving aside for a moment the legal status of the 'enemy combatants' housed at Guantanamo and the moral justifiability of the interrogation techniques practiced there, I am baffled by the double standard applied towards Gitmo on the one hand and the Cuban government's prisons on the other. For decades Castro's regime has held hundreds, if not thousands, of political prisoners in conditions far more brutal (and far less open to international scrutiny) than those at Guantanamo. Yet I can't remember a single street demonstration (outside of Miami) designed to call attention to their plight. Of course, the U.S. government should be held to a far higher standard than Castro (FIdel or Raul). Still, the fact that the Cambridge academic community should take to the streets so readily to advocate for the rights of the 'poor thin creatures' plucked from Afghani battlefields (some unfairly, I will readily admit) rather than for the victims of Castro or Mugabe, smacks of selective outrage borne of a deep-seated hostility to all thinks American.

[abc]

And what becomes sad in psychiatry is when you see really able kids, who get 1sts from Harvard, for example, voluntarily admitting themselves with depression for a month or so because their employers have expected them to be automatically brilliant and ae they are not brilliant themselves they pour turgid bile on them and make these kids ill. That is happening all the time and young, able people are getting increasingly caught.

[abc]

On Tony's point, some people do need to be voluntarily admitted because they are that ill. It can be a bad latent condition, like schizophrenia or chronic anorexia, or it can be a more generalised depressive class (like PTSD) which is like needing care for a major cancer op. The symptoms for PTSD are psychiatric but the severity equates to a broken neck, two limbs and all the relevant consequences stemming from it. Those suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, for example, need all the care they can get and if that needs time "in" then there is no inhumanity in it. A victim of rape (to follow the example) may have to be an in-patient for a while.

[dr venables preller]

It's the reputed experimental behaviour modification or offender re-education at Guantanamo which should be of interest to those concerned with growing informality regarding law and order.

If being subjected to advertising-style jingles with modern popular music-style accompaniment conveying uplifting thought and restraint on behalf of the greater good is so effective, how come there's no call for such laundry of the brain to augment regimes at the existing university-of-crime prisons which currently ensure a thorough grounding and sometimes mandatory introduction to a criminal career which many first offenders never contemplated?

With the approximate annual £40,000 cost per UK prison inmate unfavourably comparable with that of different legitimate educational sectors, might there not be better cost-benefit and more satisfactory outcome?

[wavydavy]

I am continually amazed at the ignorance of the politically active. In fact, orange jumpsuits are a virtual uniform for ALL prisoners in the U.S. Ordinary offenders appear in court wearing them regularly, not least on TV. And they are also shackled while being led into court, though not in the Box. Similarly, in the comics of my childhood (which you TLS types are now trying to make me call "graphic novels"), convicts were always pictured in black and white stripes. And of course with ball and chain. Guantanamo is a bad place, and we would be glad to see it closed, but the prisoners were apprehended in circumstances which would lead rational people to suspect they may be bad lots. And they may be better off than,say,a Bangladeshi woman trapped into an arranged marriage in a Bradford sink estate.

[Tony Francis]

The history of Gitmo is interesting:
http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/funfacts/guantan.htm
During the Clinton Administration, Gitmo held up to 30,000 Cuban and Haitian refugees picked up sea, attempting illegal entry into the US:
http://www.american.edu/TED/guantan.htm
No doubt, the publicity surrounding Gitmo after 9/11 was a disaster. Despite wishful thinking, there is no reason to believe that any US administration will end the practice of secret detention. If Gitmo is closed, the activity will go underground. The political consequences of another 9/11 type attack are too great. No US politician is going to risk it.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site

[Fanny H]

Well done, Mary. It sounds a worthwhile action, even though the impact is hard to measure.

And, as a 60s student, I have to admit that demonstrating passed me by then. Now I would like to demonstrate for our right to demonstrate in Parliament Square.

[abc]

it's called the dull arrogance of the uninspired and quote that in Latin because i so desperately need to sound clever.

[Jay]

I applaud your orange day effort although the « tone »,from your post, I found a little too bon enfant for my taste. The carnavelsque approach for such demonstrations may have an impact but having visited death row in the USA, where the inmates also wear orange jump suits and shackles on their feet I would prefer a more ‘serious’ approach.
I do not believe that people are apathetic it is just how best to get one’s voice heard and many Americans, right from the beginning have sought to close Guantanamo they found another way to « wriggle » out of their orange jump suits, a solution that a lot of my colleagues chose was to join the ACLU.
(I do enjoy your blog)

[Tony Francis]

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p001001b.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3882/Exs_200401/ai_n9383805

[abc]

so being out of prison isn't amazing and i haven't spotted anyone with a similar mind yet

[anthony alcock]

I seem to remember a good deal of political apathy in the mid-sixties. I only went to Grosvenor Square in March 1968 because I fancied a politically motivated girl who dragged me there.
On the same subject, this year is going to be a fairly horrendous one in Germany because of all the romantic garbage that will undoubtedly be spewed out in various bits of the media by those who can still remember being an "Achtundsechziger".

[Hannah Perry]

I have a series of photos of Paul Cartledge wearing his jumpsuit during our lecture yesterday! I'd be happy to pass them on.

[Xjy]

A bunch of acquiescers led by people acquiescing to the real powers that be - wealth and weapons. And all lying to themselves and others all the time. (What, me misanthropic?!)

Even though shit floats, neither universities nor students are all bad. Sometimes they can tip the scales, although most of the time they only indicate which way the wind is blowing. I think the intellectual winds are probably blowing fresher in the States than the UK right now - remember the fiasco of Madeleine Albright's Town Hall confrontation in Columbus Ohio, ten years ago already!

But the underlying tensions of all our imperialist metropolis states are near breaking point now - the total lack of control in Afghanistan is the main symptom, and the million strong anti-Iraq-war demo in London before the war even started is a good indication of the disaffection among the general public. The apparent lack of opposition combined with the complete insecurity of those in power (surveillance and security paranoia) create a false calm before the storm. A bit like the years following the 1905 Russian revolution, perhaps.

Demonstrators in times like these are really just the tiny tip of a huge and deadly iceberg - deadly for the imperialists and their willing flunkies.

A better image is that the lickspittle public defenders of actually existing capitalism are like a thick and smelly, but porous condom past its best-by date trying to contain the fiery seed of a throbbing adolescent entering his strongest period of growth.

Or perhaps a tired old elastic rope wrapped around the legs of Humanity trying to keep her from giving birth to our future, the bright twins of Creativity and Cooperation.

Me I'd rather be a pubic hair on Humanity than even the most visible designer label on a rope like that...

(Now maybe someone can put this into stirring Latin hexameters?? :-) )

[abc]

And the prison is like a disabled person having their own room in a library, except they do not project that they have their own room, they have it, nor do they say that they "need" it as they are probably pretty able. So then what happens. "Can I come into your room to watch you whilst you are working?" and the prisoner doesn't particularly want to shout or lock the door, so they say "Stuff prison. I'm jumping ship but may be I'll pay the prison a visit on the odd day as there are some good inmates inside of there."...and it all takes a little bit of time
...and the prison guard who sits in the chair growls and isn't very happy...

[Tony Francis]

http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/psyc/addington.htm

[abc]

And (having been to the loo myself) I kind of don't get why people who love the inmates have to pay for the prisons and the care.

[abc]

On the topic of cars and prisons (raised earlier): who would drive a car into somebody or project their image on to somebody else? Who would restrict the freedom of others like that, with their own reflections. No, Paul would not wear a suit, although it would go with his hair. I wouldn't also, unless of course made to by force. Library inside and mud pies outside, let's see...

[JJB]

Well I can't imagine Paul Cartledge in an Orange jump suit... Any photos?

[abc]

The loo thing sounds tricky but just the kind of thing my mum does, in her suit. At least it beats the travelling rug round my legs today at home because 1 - 5pm was spent yesterday flagging up references on my bed as numbness had stopping me from "running" into college.

[Emma]

This could have been better advertised to the world outside of the University, I spent a good portion of yesterday wondering why people were dressed up like American inmates.

[RichardH]

Good for you Mary.
I don't think you can be right about apathy in the 70s with the events of '68 then so much in the student mind. Think of the unprovoked attacks on perfectly decent dons who were deemed by some undergraduates to be producing insufficient research: no thought given to their other major contributions to university life.
Like you I remain astonished, and not a little alarmed, by the lack of concern about the growing 'surveillance state'. Perhaps one has to be older to remember fully those regimes that slipped quietly into place on the back of public unconcern.
As for Guantanomo Bay, and water-boarding, anything that can arouse real public fury is worth the attempt. I suppose it has been forgotten that a very similar technique to water-boarding was used by the Gestapo and, rightly, howled down as torture!