Originally, Elvis Costello was to name his third album Emotional Fascism; when he chickened out and titled it Armed Forces instead, Greil Marcus called bullshit, noting that E.C. was onto something by directly suggesting in songs like "Goon Squad", "Green Shirt", "Chemistry Class", and, get this, "Two Little Hitlers", that fascism, a la Henri Bernard-Levi, had become the dominant political mode of the West: "If fascism now pervades our everyday lives and our interactions with each other, our whole understanding of social intercourse supports and ultimately affirms fascism. This makes it a more interesting and less fixed statement."
Peter Gabriel's "I Don't Remember" opens with the tell-tale lines "I got no means to show identification/I got no papers show you what I am", but where Costello can call his fears by name ("They'll never get to make a lampshade out of meeeeeeee..."), Gabriel is a tangle of confusion, paranoia, and recrimination. He is on the stool and under the hot lights, asked questions we never hear and he doesn't want to or cannot answer: "I don't remember/ I don't recall/ I have no memory of anything at all."
As with Costello, Gabriel's politics in the song are sexual; unlike Costello, whose thesis is the infiltration of the political into the realm of the sexual, Gabriel seems to believe that the two concepts are directly interchangeable. Interspersed between Orwellian imagery that has become shorthand for the twentieth century, hints surface: "I got empty heart and empty bed"; "With eyes on the sun and your mouth to the soda." When Gabriel's interrogator says "Tell me the truth, you've got nothing to fear," we hear both the secret policeman's voice and the woman's, offering the same hollow assurances and seeking similar ends. By this point Gabriel himself has moved from the selfless defiance of the first verse ("You'll have to take me just the way that you find me/What's gone is gone and I do not give a damn") to pleading confusion in the second ("I'm all mixed up/I got nothing to say"). Whether he remembers or not, whether or not there is even anything to remember in the first place, is immaterial; he's going to break sooner or later, and he's going to tell them what they want to hear.
In the August 13th edition of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer wrote extensively about the programs implemented by the CIA in the wake of 9/11 to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists abroad ("The Black Sites"). According to Ms. Mayer's article, the interrogation regimen that was utilized in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other locations, was developed by a group of behavioral psychologists who had worked on the Special Forces' SERE program - an acronym standing for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. SERE was designed to teach soldiers how to cope with the treatment they might receive if captured by a "torture regime"; the CIA essentially focused on perfecting the methods SERE training was created to resist. Steve Kleinman, a retired Air Force colonel who specialized in interrogation, elaborates:
It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.Col. Kleinman's comments above suggest he believes that by adopting the KGB's old interrogation techniques, our government is somehow missing the point. Perhaps, though, the truth doesn't matter anymore; it's the idea of confession, of self-incrimination that really counts. After all, the more intelligence, specious or not, that the CIA can claim to have extracted by its methods, the more justification there is to continue employing them. The mechanisms of torture are thereby self-perpetuating; they are not means to an end, but an end unto themselves - intended, like the accompanying War on Terror, to become a permanent feature of the 21st century.
For Elvis Costello and Peter Gabriel, none of this is remotely surprising: the doctors supervising torture, the secret prisons, the false confessions. Fascism never really went away, it was just silently absorbed into human consciousness, ripping open new seams of possibility and obliterating boundaries of conduct that can never be re-established. It has permeated every layer of our society, and if Costello and Gabriel are to be believed, even crept into our beds.
Asked once to compare the explicit politics of Woody Guthrie's music with the implicit politics of Elvis Costello's, Greil Marcus replied that
Woody Guthrie had a sign on his guitar that said 'this machine kills fascists.' That's just the kind of connection between music and politics that I'm arguing against. It wasn't a machine and it didn't kill fascists. It made Woody Guthrie and the people who listened to him feel noble. I'm not saying that he wasn't against fascism but to say that you could defeat it by singing songs is not helpful in the war against fascism...
Woody Guthrie says 'sing my songs and defeat fascism.' Elvis Costello says 'fascism exists- look around you.' Is that a stronger political statement? I don't know. It doesn't tell you what to do or promise any results. It's a stronger statement but I don't know if it's a stronger political statement.
