This: Hyde Park’s isn’t just any tower. It would be one of dozens across the state, said my friend, funded by Homeland Security grants to the Vermont Communications Board (VCOMM) to aid first responders in a terrorist attack.

Read more at Seven Days.

But whether or not that catastrophe is averted, the main event is already under way: a radical right-wing coup d’état.

This takeover is abetted by a Democratic president either too deluded to see that his adversaries are a horde of gray-suited Huns or too weak to hold the barbarians from the gates.

(Just to be clear, because the rest of the media is not: The debt ceiling is not related to current budgeting. The law requires the federal government to raise the ceiling whenever necessary to meet obligations that have already been incurred to pay for government functions that Congress has already approved and is executing. Months ago, the president could have refused to link the debt ceiling to budget talks. Needless to say, he did not. )

In an account pieced together from sources who, fearing retribution, have asked to remain unnamed, the scenario unfolded as follows:

John Boehner drove up to the White House in a Hummer with a toy gun and Grover Norquist in a ski mask. The president declined to ask the Secret Service to escort the visitors out. He did not text his lieutenant in the Senate, who at last report still controls the majority. Instead, the Great Compromiser handed over the hostage — the full faith and credit of the government of the United States of America — and asks Mr. Speaker if he could offer him anything else for the road.

The Speaker, wiping a grateful tear from his eye, thanked the president and told him he’d get back to him. But the president, gracious guy that he is, packed the Speaker off with a favor bag anyway. It included a few billion pretty green dollars clipped from the fixed incomes of elderly poor people, and other nice things. He asked Joe Biden to carry the package to the Speaker’s car.

Back on the Hill, House Republicans were already partying down, inviting their corporate pals in to loot the Treasury, plunder the nation’s natural resources and pillage its institutions.

Majority members on the House Energy and Commerce Committee were hauling buckets of pharmaceutical- industry-provided saline solution into the chamber to drown FDA regulations of potentially harmful medical devices.

The GOP was loading 39 amendments into the Interior Department’s appropriations bill prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from protecting the environment. Tea Party freshmen were tossing small endangered creatures onto the barbeque, while others danced the hora with coal industry lobbyists.

Members chortled as the Federal Aviation Administration sulked away unauthorized and the Treasury started losing $25 million a day in airline tax revenue. Nevada Republican Joe Heck volunteered a Las Vegas casino to take bets on the date and location of the first in-air collision.

Four days before a U.S. government default, the House deadlocked over Boehner’s slash-and-burn bill because it contained $9 billion of waste, fraud and abuse, in the form of Pell Grants for college students.

Naomi Klein calls this the Shock Doctrine: Take advantage of economic crisis, natural disaster or war to fundamentally rewrite the rules in favor of the wealthy and the powerful. If there isn’t a real crisis, create one.

True to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pledge, the GOP is ensuring that Barack Obama is a one-term president — by any means necessary.

If the country crashes, Michele Bachmann could be our next president.

Finally, the resistance mobilizes. A reported 200 protesters gather outside the White House and — I am not making this up — sing “This Land Is Your Land.” Moveon.com launches yet another emergency fundraising drive (the Shock Doctrine is useful for everyone).

In Vermont, agripreneurs keep the revolution going, plowing federal grants into biodiesel and cheese-aging projects. Small businesses pick up their flood-relief checks from FEMA, procured over initial agency rejections by a diligent Washington delegation. Drivers slow down at bridge-repair sites paid for by federal stimulus funds.

In Hardwick, a Transition Town meeting is called. But many regulars may not be able to make it because they are busy harvesting beans and berries from their bursting gardens.

On Vermont Public Radio’s “Vermont Edition,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Peter Welch recites actual facts and proposes actual solutions to the nation’s actual problems. Hearing this rational voice emanating from Washington (or is it a computer-generated facsimile?), listeners call in to express incredulity and exasperation that what is happening is happening.

Some callers respectfully allow that they didn’t vote for the congressman. How many of those FEMA grant recipients did? How many enterprising locavores — or any Vermonters — read a national paper, even once a week? How long do we think our Edenic way of life will endure without federal regulations and an influx of federal dollars to the state’s treasury?

When I was in my twenties, I used to wish for an overthrow of the state. In its place would rise a million workers’ collectives, which would put the bosses on the assembly lines, eliminate profits and reduce the workweek to about six hours. In the towns and neighborhoods, people’s councils would teach nonviolence and dispense compassionate justice. Kids would collaborate with teachers to run the nursery schools and universities. The troops would come home and their swords would be beaten into ploughshares, which would be distributed to community gardeners. Contraceptives, bicycles, housing and ice cream would be free.

It was called anarchism, a socialist dream of a stateless state governed directly by the people. I still hold it in my deepest fantasist’s heart.

But now we are staring into the face of anarchy, and it is funny how good that square old U.S. Constitutional system — compromised, corrupt and corporatized as it is — is starting to look. Things will not be better if it falls. Do what you can to save it.

The patient — we shall call him “Barry O.” — is not easy to diagnose with the level of confidence expected of our profession. His demeanor is reticent, even flat (he may suffer from minor, well-managed social anxiety disorder); he gives away nothing. We must guess at his motivations. That said, his pathology so threatens not only him but also millions of others (the number of potential casualties suggests a sociopathic aspect of his psychopathology), it behooves us to try to understand him, even if we cannot cure him.

Before I make my remarks, I must disclose a personal interest — you might say bias — regarding this patient. While we can agree that analytic neutrality does not preclude human sympathy, the magnitude of my affection for this man, which persists in the face of all contrary evidence, can only be characterized as a countertransference ruled by florid fantasy. Yes, material for my own psychoanalysis. (Might I interest one of you in a session before cocktails?)

But enough about my neurosis. Let us discuss the neurotic at hand.

Barry O. is an ambitious, attractive and extraordinarily intelligent man occupying an elite position in national and global politics. At 49, he is in excellent physical health, careful about diet and exercise, meticulous in grooming, a devoted husband, a loving and attentive father, and a practicing Christian.

Barry’s own father abandoned him when he was small; unsurprisingly, the boy idealized this absent progenitor and only later discovered that the man’s charm and accomplishment were marred by alcoholism and violence. But if the boy lacked paternal protection (which Freud named as an unsurpassed childhood need), he was blessed with an abundance of maternal adoration and disciplined encouragement.

In short, Barry looks like a man with a strong, intact ego ruled by a powerful superego.

Unfortunately, however, as Freud reminded us, the ego is not master in its own house. Unconscious desire — the id — sits at the head of the psychic table. Or it tries to. Thus, in Barry we see titanic domestic battles between ego/superego and id: the conflict between loyalty to an unflaggingly loving and principled mother and the longing for the unattainable love of a dissolute, punishing father. The apparent desire and talent to win and the unconscious commitment losing.

What are Barry’s presenting symptoms?

Barry’s symptoms arrange themselves in a pattern whose predictability is matched only by its destructive and self-destructive sequelae. So predictable — and so often repeated — is this pattern that we could safely diagnose obsessive and compulsive elements. The pattern proceeds in three stages.

Stage 1: Self-Protective Paralysis. Exhibiting an acute, even phobic, antipathy toward conflict (unsurprising in the child of this pair of parents), Barry avoids engagement in the debate that is a crucial, daily part of his job. He stays out of the fray, sometimes for months; he has been known to travel to other countries to avoid facing his opponents at home.

Of course, conflict does not go away simply because one goes away from it. In fact, Barry’s absences allow the conflict to intensify; they also cede advantage to his adversaries. This behavior is the first evidence of his delusional ideation — even a sort of infantile grandiosity: Barry believes he can stop the world by getting off. He also believes — “wishes” might be a better word — that by hiding his face, he will be safe from criticism.

Stage 2: Symbolic Matricide. This stage is far more self-destructive than its passive precedent. In it, Barry acts out the unconscious instinct to kill the mother in order to free himself of her voice, his superego. In this phase, Barry goes further than avoiding his foes. He actively rejects his friends, excluding them from his confidence, ignoring their advice and publicly denouncing their beliefs, which were, only recently, his own beliefs. The irrationality of this behavior is most pronounced when the majority also shares those beliefs, on both sides of the debate. (I betray no confidences in noting the latest example: the correctness of raising taxes on corporations and the rich.) In fact, like a toddler saying “No” to mommy, Barry boasts that he is incurring the wrath of his allies but that he can do it, whatever it is, all by himself.

Stage 2A: Paternal Idealization. Having dispatched the good parent, Barry now tries to emulate, and win, the bad parent. He parrots his adversaries’ worldview, undertaking to secure the love and approval of those who despise him so fiercely that they are willing to risk, literally, the world to defeat him. Here, I cannot help but reference Bion’s observation of his psychotic patients, in whom arrogance clusters with curiosity (one of Barry’s healthier traits) and stupidity.

Stage 3: The climax of Barry’s compulsive pattern — and by climax I am not denying the sexual connotation — is the enactment of his coprophilic masochism. Unable to continue avoiding conflict, yet still longing for the embrace of those who reject him, Barry finally engages. Once he is in the thick of it, though, his dead mother rises. His intelligence, competitive spirit — and morals — get the best of him or, rather, of his opponents, and he extracts some concessions from them.

At this point, he prostrates himself and begs them to defecate on him.

They oblige.

Compromised and humiliated, Barry evinces the first relief — one might sayjouissance — in this protracted anxious drama. He has united the split parental persona, the generous mother and the cruel father. His sadistic partner has given him his id’s desire.

Barry achieves a kind of resolution (until the next time, at least). And we as analysts are able to discern a coherence in this perplexing pattern — albeit the kind of deranged coherence that feels like sense to so many of our most gifted, yet troubled, patients.

Can I recommend a treatment for Barry? I must admit, as I rarely do, that the quaint medicaments of our apothecary seem absurdly unequal to the harm our patient may wreak on himself and others.

So I shall risk credibility and again depart from convention. My prescription: Speak to him, not as doctors but as Americans, in the strict, politically moral voice of his mother. Tell Barry what is right and what is wrong. Only such unambiguous direction will give him a shot at silencing the terrified and terroristic id and repairing the superego — arming the ego to do and say what, deep inside, he knows he should.

Our profession’s own demanding patriarch called America a grandiose experiment that was destined to fail. For the sake of sanity, let us hope he was wrong.

Thank you and enjoy your evening.

This piece ran originally in Seven Days.

Osama bin Laden’s death spells the end of jihad. His martyrdom infuses radical Islamists with new fervor. His death is irrelevant: He was already a has-been among a decentralized network of young terrorists.

The Obama administration embargoes the photograph of bin Laden with a hole in his head. LiveLeaks.com posts a photograph of a bearded man with a hole in his head. Hackers entice Facebook members to look at the photograph; the link unleashes malware into the users’ computer. LiveLeaks.com posts an update: “The Osama bin Laden death picture that is posted below turns out to be photoshopped and was not of Osama bin Laden.”

Conspiracy theorists claim the SEAL raid was a hoax — the CIA killed bin Laden in 2002 and froze his body to be unveiled at a propitious time. Other conspiracy theorists contend the SEAL raid was a hoax — bin Laden is still alive.

Sarah Palin calls for the photos: “No pussy-footing around, politicking,” she tweets. Ann Coulter tells Sean Hannity: “If Americans can handle Hillary Clinton’s ankles, they can handle this photo.”

The Left demands that Obama declare an end to the War on Terror, bring the troops home and disarm Homeland Security. The Right proclaims the War on Terror has not ended and probably never will.

“President Obama needs to go to the American people in the weeks ahead to explain plainly and forcefully why more days of danger and sacrifice lie ahead in Afghanistan and across the globe,” says Karl Rove.

Obama says: “We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

“Justice is done,” he says.

“Vengeance at last!” the New York Post blares.

The Daily News seconds the sentiment: “ROT IN HELL!”

Worldwide, sales explode of a souvenir figurine of Obama holding the head of Osama, like Judith brandishing the head of Holofernes.

The Vatican releases a statement: “In the face of a man’s death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion for the further growth of peace and not of hatred.”

In the streets and stadiums American crowds cheer: “USA! USA!” A Guardian blogger reminds readers that, of al Qaeda’s victims, only 15 percent have been Westerners, the rest mostly people living in Muslim-majority contries.

“Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people,” the president avows. “May God bless the United States of America.”

Former Bush administration officials boast that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” produced the intelligence that led to the raid.

The idea arises that Osama bin Laden won the War on Terror. He turned the U.S. into a police state and a torturer, its riches and moral prestige squandered in endless, boundless wars. Those wars in turn have impassioned new generations of terrorists to martyr themselves in endless, boundless war.

Camus wrote:

People like myself want not a world in which murder no longer exists (we are not so crazy as that!) but rather one in which murder is not legitimate. Here indeed we are Utopian — and contradictory. For we do live, it is true, in a world where murder is legitimate, and we ought to change it if we do not like it. But it appears that we cannot change it without risking murder. Murder thus throws us back on murder, and we will continue to live in terror whether we accept the fact with resignation or wish to abolish it by means which merely replace one terror with another.

It seems to me every one should think this over.

The passage comes from an essay published in 1946. World War II was over; 50 million to 70 million dead. The Cold War had already begun, its weapons threatening to annihilate everyone left standing. Camus had grown to despise violence.

The piece is by turns idealistic and pragmatic, like most pacifist arguments. It calls on Europeans to “grant to each side the right to affirm its truth but refuse it the right to impose it by murder, individual or collective.” The title rejects the only two stances Camus’ contemporaries seemed capable of imagining: “Neither Victim nor Executioner.” This strikes me as an excellent oath for a new resistance.

This piece first ran in Seven Days.

Read more at  Seven Days.

Last week I was hungry. I’d joined the Fast Against the Budget Cuts, launched by former U.S. Ambassador Tony Hall and other food-justice advocates in protest of what one of those advocates, theologian Jim Wallis, called the “selective cruelty” of the GOP budget.

The action drew more than 36,000 participants, who were invited to design their own fasts: forgo food from dawn to dusk, Ramadan style, or fast on juice or water for a day or a week, or until a decent budget is passed. Now that Washington has agreed to slash $38 billion mostly from social programs, the last option amounts to death by starvation.

I undertook a policy-specific, fast-like activity: trying to subsist on food stamps — now called SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or, in Vermont, 3SquaresVT. I took the average benefit for a single adult in Vermont, $5 a day.

Here’s what I learned by 8:30 the first morning: It’s hard to live on food stamps. My usual breakfast — whole-grain cereal, banana, two cups of coffee and about three-quarters of a cup of milk — set me back about $2.25. I could have saved with nonorganic food, but organic was in the larder. I could have drunk one cup of coffee, but then I would have had to kill someone, maybe myself. So I used up nearly half my daily allowance with 14 hours to go.

If House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan succeeds in turning federal entitlement programs into block grants to the states, then food-stamp allocations, which now expand or contract with need, would get even smaller. I asked Angela Smith-Dieng of Hunger Free Vermont what that would mean for Vermont. “Vermont would either have to decrease the benefits or create a waiting list,” she said, “because we wouldn’t be able to serve everyone.”

My quasi-fast was an interesting exercise, bearing little relation to real hunger — particularly real hunger with no end in sight. Mostly, it reminded me that I’m lucky.

But a public fast is not a personal consciousness-raising experience. It’s a symbolic act, an act of self-inflicted weakness meant to shame the powerful into behaving morally. The Democrats have agreed to more than half the cuts the Republicans wanted.

In the current moral climate, can even a 36,000-person fast shame the powerful?

The fasters would first have to shame the people — John Boehner is fond of calling them “the American people” — who sent his party to Washington much as Grant sent Sherman to Georgia: to burn the place down. Preliminary research suggests there is not much shame in that constituency to be mobilized.

To gather intelligence, I turned to thehill.com, a Washington news site favored by the most radical of the radical right; the site’s comments section could serve as the spleen of the hyperconservative body politic, so prodigiously does the bile flow. The Hill was one of the few outlets that covered the fast — as a humor piece, perhaps.

Some of the responses, maybe all, were predictable. There was liberal bashing (“Liberals starving themselves to death, I just can’t get the smile off my face”) and sissy-liberal union bashing (“Don’t tell me, you’re a white girl or a feminine guy that became a teacher and you believe the crap that the union tells you”), fast-specific fat-liberal bashing (“Some of those pot bellied Wisconsin protesters should go on fasts. They could stand to drop some tonnage”) and fat-liberal union bashing (“Fat Slob Richard Trumka”).

This being a piece about government handouts, the racism was thick. Some was coded: “our oppressed urban underclass.” Much, explicit: “[It’s] a cultural problem of blacks having children when they cannot afford them, always assuming the government will pay for their kid’s breakfast, lunch, daycare, and education.”

The writer of this last quote concluded, “We can’t afford to do all that anymore and the black people need to get their act together.”

On the one hand, this is vintage conservative, antiwelfare ideology: Never mind recessions and other natural disasters in the cycles of capitalism. Welfare is the cause of poverty, not a response to it. The unemployed — lazy, dependent and passing on their pathology to their children — cause unemployment. I take care of mine. Let them take care of theirs.

But this comment reveals the clever way the Right has turned the myth of economic scarcity into a rationale for white, nativist supremacy. “We” — which doesn’t include people of color — can no longer afford the poor. The “economy” — which does not include the poor — has only so much to go around. The deficit is proof.

The deficit, immense and threatening, is the metaphor for the human surplus — poor, black, immigrant, jobless, elderly, sick — that must be off-loaded so America can soar. The connection between racism and economic conservatism, so fiercely denied by the Tea Party, is plain.

It also runs deep in American history. This struck me when I caught a rebroadcast of Ken Burns’ The Civil War during one week of the budget battle. The series offers a rebuttal — largely articulated in the demurely devastating language of historian Barbara Fields — to the notion that the Civil War was essentially an economic and political battle and only secondarily about slavery. The Civil War was about slavery, the film says.

But it wasn’t a matter of economics first and morality second, or vice versa. Racism cannot be disentangled from the American idea of prosperity.

The Confederates were explicit about it. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” read Mississippi’s declaration of secession in 1861. “[Slavery is] the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”

Theirs was not simply an excuse, in the name of economic survival, for a distasteful, maybe even immoral, system. No, it was a proclamation that prosperity for white people, a purportedly global good, made slavery moral.

Today’s radical Right advances a similar argument: It is all right to let poor, black and brown children go hungry so long as the deficit is reduced. Which is to say, so long as wealth stays with its “rightful” owners.

As I looked at the paintings of white Southerners hurling themselves into cannon fire to defend the ownership of human beings, I wondered if we might be witnessing not just the end of U.S. global hegemony but the end of the United States. Might the moral values of the red and the blue, like those of the gray and the blue, be so different that this divided house can no longer stand? I wondered, too, whether that might not be a bad thing.

This column originally ran in Seven Days.

In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, a train tank car derails, releasing its contents — a chemical called Nyodene Derivative, or Nyodene D — in a black, billowing cloud.

The narrator’s son Heinrich reports that Nyodene D has been found to cause “urgent lumps” in rats. As for humans, no one is sure. The authorities at first warn of skin irritations and sweaty palms. Soon they issue a correction: Nyodene D doesn’t cause skin irritations and sweaty palms. It causes nausea, vomiting and shortness of breath.

They also give the cloud a name: a “feathery plume.”

Later, Heinrich tells his family the cloud is no longer a “feathery plume.”

“What are they calling it?” asks the narrator, Jack.

“A black, billowing cloud.”

Searchlights scan the site. Helicopters hover. Fire engines, police vans and ambulances arrive. Men “in bright yellow Mylex suits and respirator masks [move] slowly through the luminous haze, carrying death-measuring instruments.”

On the radio, a “consumer affairs editor” discusses the effects of Nyodene D contamination: convulsions, coma or miscarriage.

The feathery plume/black cloud is again renamed: “the airborne toxic event.”

People are evacuated. It begins to snow. They wonder if the snow contains Nyodene D.

More updates arrive. The airborne toxic event doesn’t cause nausea, vomiting or shortness of breath. The symptoms of contamination are, instead, heart palpitations and “a sense of déjà vu.”

Vermonters who are watching Japan’s nightmare — Chernobyl, anyone? Three Mile Island? — might have felt a scintilla of hope when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission postponed relicensing Vermont Yankee, Fukushima Daiichi’s equally evil twin.

Unsurprisingly, the delay had nothing to do with caution.

The commissioners, it turns out, had just had their hands full chiding the Japanese for underestimating the radioactive contamination and insufficiently protecting their people’s health and safety. Then NRC chair Gregory Jaczko came home and declared before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that “U.S. nuclear facilities remain safe.”

That, Jaczko explained, is because the regulators calculate the risks by plumbing the geological and meteorological history of a reactor’s region for the worst natural disaster that could occur there, and require that the facility be able to withstand such an assault, and then some.

Gazing back so many billions of years, perhaps the commission can be excused for forgetting more recent history — which essentially teaches us that history teaches us only so much. Of the nuclear accidents so far, notes George Mason University anthropologist Hugh Gusterson in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, each “was unique, and each was supposed to be impossible.”

Typical of pronukers’ Monday-morning head slapping, Vermont’s former techie-in-chief, Tom Evslin, blogs that “it seemed like a good idea” to store the spent rods at the plant temporarily. But now, “with hindsight, it’s clear that a catastrophe which threatens the reactor may well also threaten the spent rods.” Who woulda thunk?

The horror of an unprecedented event is not always the unpredecented part, though. The 1957 accident at the British Windscale reactor — where the graphite core melted and contaminated the region for miles — ranked 5 on the 7-point severity scale, just like Fukushima.

The NRC remains confident. It has not yet conducted its 90-day investigation of the events in Japan to gather intelligence about U.S. nukes, many of which are in their dotage and similar, if not identical, to Fukushima Daiichi. Yet the commission has already concluded that the crisis in Japan does not signal the need for any major changes in regulatory practice here.

As a gesture of kindness to the American people, commission inspectors are currently checking plants to see that temporary hoses and other emergency backup equipment are in place and workers know where they are. R. William Borchardt, NRC executive director for operations, helpfully clarified the goal of this exercise: “to make sure [the measures] haven’t fallen into disuse because they haven’t been used.”

I have read the NRC’s 2001 Vermont Yankee safety evaluation supplement, the document that grants Entergy permission to work the 40-year-old horse for another two decades. A former English major, I do not claim to understand much of it. But I can read dates, and I noticed that the plant’s safety inspection was completed in 2008, two years before those tritium leaks — and the company’s cover-up — were discovered.

Revisiting that issue in 2011, the commission was satisfied with Entergy’s plans to inspect underground pipes more thoroughly and frequently in the future. There is no written commitment that company representatives will cease lying under oath.

But white lies and short memories seem to be common in this industry’s culture. On November 22, 2009, after a radiation leak at Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 containment building, the NRC said the unit was slated for decommissioning when its license expired, according to CNN. Joining Unit 1 would be Unit 2 — scene of the 1979 meltdown — which had already been permanently shut down and emptied of fuel, the NRC said. This statement was odd, as Exelon, TMI’s owner, had applied for a license renewal for Unit 1 in January 2008, and the commission had approved it on October 22, 2009, one month before the article appeared.

These are the people, both industry executives and regulators, in whose hands lies the survival of the planet as we know it.

In White Noise, the workers overseeing the evacuation during the airborne toxic event wear armbands bearing the word SIMUVAC. Jack asks one of them what it means. “Short for simulated evacuation,” the man replies. “A new state program they’re still battling over funds for.”

“But this evacuation isn’t simulated,” says Jack. “It’s real.”

“We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.”

To watch the smooth-talking, extraordinarily smooth-headed NRC commissioner Jaczko insisting that we are perfectly safe is to wonder if any of these guys knows we are witnessing the real, apocalyptic thing. How much closer to Doomsday do we have to get before they — and we — stop trusting the massive tin cans of combustible death littering our landscape? When, I ask you, are policy makers going to evidence a modicum of appropriate dread?

Perhaps the nuclear club simply has a robust appreciation for the absurd. For instance, a large portion of the NRC’s 2011 Vermont Yankee report concerns a category of regulatory review called, with DeLillovian resonance, Generic Aging Lessons Learned.

Throughout the document the term is referred to by its acronym: GALL.

This piece originally appeared in  Seven Days.

The result: They underestimate the suffering and don’t call torture torture.

Psychological research shows that we can’t appreciate any affective state — desire, fatigue, pain — if we’re not experiencing it. For instance, Donald Rumsfeld’s notes on a Pentagon memo regarding “stress positions” during the Bush administration’s discussion of the legality of “enhanced interrogation techniques”: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”

This phenomenon is called the “empathy gap,” and it has been on stark display in recent days. It is obvious that many people, men especially, do not get it that rape is a species of torture — terrifying, painful and humiliating.

They can’t even understand this when the victim is 11 years old and her victimizers number 18 or more.

I’m talking about the appalling response to the gang rape of a middle-school girl in Cleveland, Texas — most notably, the New York Times story by James C. McKinley Jr. In that piece, the reporter blamed the victim and her mother, noting that “residents … said [the child] dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s,” and quoting one neighbor who wondered, “Where was her mother?”

McKinley also quoted community members worrying about the trauma the perpetrators might endure. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives,” said one. The writer couldn’t scare up a single informant to speak sympathetically about the victim.

When outrage erupted — instantly, across the feminist blogosphere — the Times was unapologetic. “Those are views we found in our reporting,” a spokeswoman explained. “They are not our reporter’s reactions, but the reactions of disbelief by townspeople over the news of a mass assault on a defenseless 11-year-old.” As if the “newspaper of record” doesn’t select its quotes or tell reporters to do some more digging.

The Cleveland criminal justice community was equally clueless, even merciless. The police chief could not fathom why the girl waited three months to come forward. The attorney for several of the accused could think of no better defense strategy than the old “she asked for it.” On NBC TV — the attorney’s eyes straying from the interviewer’s, his lips suppressing what looked like a smile — he called the victim “a willing participant.”

These men are already proving what the girl must have sensed: that disclosing a rape leads first to humiliation of the victim. As for punishment of the perpetrators, we’ll see how this one turns out, but rape convictions are rare.

This empathy gap is so wide you can barely see across it.

Not everyone who got it wrong is male. The Houston Chronicle’s Cindy Horswell, to her credit, interviewed the girl’s mother, who cried, saying her daughter still liked stuffed bears. Horswell managed to find sympathy for the victim that the Timescouldn’t unearth. On the other hand, Horswell combed the child’s Facebook page for signs of mental disturbance, as if that explained anything. And, interviewed on CNN, she felt it important to mention the school basketball team’s declining performance, now that a few players have been benched due to gang-rape allegations.

Meanwhile, the critics of the coverage have been overwhelmingly female — and feminist.

The authors of the study on torture conclude that the only way to deal with the empathy gap is to ignore it; define torture broadly, beyond what may feel appropriate. We can’t trust our emotions on this, a researcher told me. We have to use our intellects.

Maybe it’s time to stop waiting for popular empathy about rape. If men — if anyone — can feel it in their viscera, great. If not, let them use their heads. These are the facts:Nothing justifies rape. Rape victims are never at fault.

The feminist activist Shelby Knox started an online petition to the Times demanding an apology. After nearly 40,000 signitures — which also went to the Times as emails — the paper’s public editor, Arthur Brisbane, conceded in his online column that “the outrage is understandable,” and that the story “lacked balance.”

Finally, some ironies deserve mention. Texas lists 63,000 people on its sex-offender registries and adds about 100 a week. An untold number (Texan sources believe it is a large number) of these are young adults and teenagers who have had consensual sex with other teens. The same is true throughout the nation.

Yet, when a child — did I mention she is a poor, Hispanic child? — is gang raped, neighbors, lawyers and reporters can’t shake the nagging feeling that she, or maybe her mother, caused it to happen.

Texas is also one of only four states that require parental consent — not just notification — for abortion; it allows no exception for abuse, assault, incest or neglect. The rape victim who gets pregnant is held responsible for the consequences. In practice, that’s not so far from holding her responsible for the assault. Talk about living with something for the rest of your life.

It appears that many Americans, or Texans, anyway, are more upset by adolescent lovemaking than they are by sexual violence.

One more irony: This story went national on March 8, the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day. From the White House, a beaming Michelle Obama proclaimed, “We’ve come a long way, ladies!”

Not long enough.

Here’s a cite for the study: “Torture in the eyes of the beholder: the
psychological difficulty of defining torture in law and policy,”
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, January, 2011, by Mary-Hunter
Morris McDonnell, Loran F. Nordgren, George Loewenstein. Another
version will soon be appearing in the Psychological Science journal.

This piece originally ran in Seven Days.