Iqra’i

Like Yglesias and Schwenkler, I find the fact that a supporter of torture would make a shirt joking about waterboarding to be viscerally horrifying. But I really don’t see the sale of a T-shirt on one of dozens of sites selling conservative memorabilia as tantamount to identifying support for torture with conservatism. Furthermore, I think that divorced from that context — as it would be when worn — the product itself is a perfect vehicle for the “coming to grips with the horror” that Yglesias discusses.

First of all, remember that almost 70% of Americans believe waterboarding is torture. The reason that this sentiment doesn’t metastasize into an opposition to American operatives using the technique is twofold: some of those who believe it to be torture also believe its use is justified on suspected terrorists; and public discourse centers on the concept and related legislation rather than the actual, current practice (which is deliberately quiet and remote, especially for Americans who don’t consume media compulsively enough to be intimately familiar of what happens in Guantanamo or secret prisons). I suspect that the latter is the more pervasive force: it’s easy to forget going about daily life that torture is something my government does. Being confronted with that fact unexpectedly is like taking a punch to the stomach.

And that’s what I suspect this T-shirt would actually end up doing. It addresses waterboarding directly, as a practice, not introducing the mitigating factors of terrorism or national security. A “You can’t understand a terrorist until you’ve taken him waterboarding” shirt would be a different thing entirely; that would in fact aid in the othering of “enemy combatants” and inculcate an embattled-but-triumphant mindset (two preconditions, in my opinion, for taking pride in the desecration of the human body to begin with). But a shirt that merely declares “I’d Rather Be Waterboarding” is likely to meet with vague curiosity as passersby try to figure out where they’ve heard that term before, followed swiftly by recognition and attendant revulsion. It turns the flippant euphemism of the word back on itself.

Maybe the shirt is, in fact, an illustration that you can no longer call yourself a true conservative without supporting torture — though, again, I don’t necessarily see why that would be true. I’ll take derision of those who find torture unpalatable over an attempt to make torture palatable any day. And if those who see someone walking down the street wearing this shirt are reminded of the fact that their government does things of which they don’t approve as a result, I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.

_{Admittedly, this is coming from someone who talked for a while about putting up recruiting posters for Club Waterboarding and seeing if anyone got the joke.}