Disrespecting the Bing? POW Abuse Overshadows Fallujah Massacre

A few seasons ago on The Sopranos, Joe Pantaleone's character Ralphie beat a prostitute to death in the parking lot of the Bada Bing strip club, the mafia-owned hangout of Tony Soprano's crew. This, of course, caused a headache for the crew, and pissed off Tony mightily, since he had - in his mind - associated the girl with his own daughter. Ralph was in trouble, in other words, and he was forced to come to Tony and make an abject apology, much against his "proud" (that is, amoral) nature. Rather than apologizing for killing the girl, he apologized for "Disrespecting the Bing" - or not paying proper respect to and keeping his business separate from the club. Shortly after the episode aired in 2001, Slate writer Tim Noah attempted to popularize the phrase "Disrespecting the Bing":

http://slate.msn.com/id/1007576/

For Noah, "disrespecting the Bing" should become a way of saying that one acknowledges and apologizes for the lesser offense in order to avoid responsibility for the greater fault; or, as Noah has it, "the 'I disrespected the Bing' gambit is served up to avoid pleading guilty to committing a much larger and very real moral transgression."

One wonders if the POW abuse story is not, in effect, a "disrespecting the Bing" gambit that swerves around US responsibility for the Fallujah massacre. As the Marines move back and the true toll of Fallujah comes into view, all eyes are focused on Abu Ghraib. Needless to say, the actions at the prison are indeed terrible, and costly. But how much more costly would be the systematic destruction wrought by US forces in Fallujah? How much less can they be attributed to personal foibles and how much more clearly are they part and parcel of US strategy?

Is the POW abuse - and the publicity it is receiving - a case of Disrespecting the Bing? I do not mean this in a conspiratorial sense (that is, I do not mean that the media and administration are in cahoots to disrespect the Bing), but rather in a larger psycho-social sense, meaning that we can handle (even with difficulty) the abject apology for the POW abuse, where we cannot even see the collective culpability for the US Fallujah strategy, any more than the sociopath Ralph could see the moral wrong of murdering the prostitute?

All the other horrors such as the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Fallujah and the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib have arisen because of this one act. It is the people who decided to overthrow the sovereign government of Iraq by superior force of arms that are responsible for what has followed. The argument that they did not know what was being done in their name is not a defence. It was not accepted when the Nazi high command attempted to use it at Nuremburg and it should not be tolerated now.

I don't think that the prison-abuse story was planted to cause us to avoid seeing bigger stories. In fact, the story has more impact in the U.S., because U.S. soldiers are accused of torturing those in their control, while Americans tend to forgive and forget, or actually to ignore, the atrocities U.S. soldiers commit in war. But the torture story also has more impact in the Middle East, which is inured to war, and for that matter torture in prison, but which had hoped that it had put behind it the times that colonial powers would humiliate Middleeasterners. In effect, pictures of sexually-related torments and of naked Iraqis being taunted by female GIs DO have greater impact in the Middle East than the destruction of yet another city. Because of this, I don't think that even the incompetent US occupation authorities or the Bushistas in Washington would have planted the torture stories to distract from Fallujah. Instead, it's just one more thing that has piled onto the catastrophe.

That said, I think that the Bushistas will now to keep the attention focused on their spin of the torture stories -- because it is those stories that will play longer in the media, and any distraction from Fallujah will be latched onto. The important thing is to relate the stories, and to try to keep them both before the public's mind.

1) I don't think the story was planted, and I said so explicitly in the original post. The point is not that it is a planted story, nor even that it is meant as a distraction. Rather, it has achieved such widespread publicity (that is, desire) because it fills in for the horror of the Fallujah assault, an action that was producing tremendous unease, but that couldn't be explicitly responded to because its consequences would be too systematic and therefore too disquieting. Let me emphasize again: I am not talking about a deliberate action on the part of the government or the press. I am trying to account for the discrepancy in the reaction to Fallujah and Abu Ghraib ideologically. What is it about our preconceptions and desires that caused one to erupt into a major scandal while the other passes without explicit difficulty (but with what I take to be significant tension, dissonance, and unease). I'm arguing that the Abu Ghraib story is an ideological outlet for the unease of the Fallujah massacre, but it need not be planted or deliberate for all that.

2) I think you might be overestimating the extent to which the Middle East is "inured to war." I think the Fallujah story played very badly in the Middle East - perhaps evewn worse than the torture story. I don't think Americans have come to terms with the Fallujah story, so the torture story might be a vehicle (again, not deliberately, but ideologically, or psycho-socially) to approach the horror of Fallujah without accepting the consequences of that horror.