Theater of The Absurd

I remember when Czechoslovakia had their "Velvet Revolution" there was a lot of talk about the protest leader and soon to be President Vaclav Havel and how he had been an imprisoned political writer. I learned he wrote "theater of the absurd" and I never quite could figure out why a political writer would choose that way of expression. Why absurd?

I think the Bush administration is helping me out. As it was with Communism we have a government that makes insane choices-choices that are not really questioned by anyone in the mainstream press. Watching any major TV news broadcast one would think our government is functioning pretty normally. However, one only has to scratch under the surface to see how f$%#ed things really are.

Exhibit A: Kevin Drum from Washington Monthly quotes from the Washington Post's review of Ron Suskind's new book The One Percent Doctrine:

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered." (emphasis mine)

If that would not inspire some "theater of the absurd" nothing would.

Seems like Suskind's new book is very similar to the excellent Frontline documentary, The Dark Side, that I just finished watching. Suskind was actually interviewed in the documentary.