Where Have All the Pariahs Gone?

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

27 August 13

Contemplating the American way of shame, guilt, and penance

f you Google "people who are pariahs 2013," the first result is concert dates for the band Pariah, which on further inquiry turns out to be the name of more than one band (as in www.pariah.nl), as well as the name of a 2005 album by Naglfar, a Swedish melodic black metal band formed in 1992, none of which actually addresses the question prompting the inquiry.

The second result is more on point: an article from The Guardian in January 2013 about an evangelical minister calling on his fellow Christians to stop treating gay people as pariahs. Even though this minister is a Baptist in Britain, it's not as though treating LGBT people as pariahs is a phenomenon that's hard to find in contemporary America. But it's arguably no longer a majority attitude that defines the culture as it once did.

The third search result shifts focus to future pariahs, linking to an Iranian PressTV article by a British professor of binary economics in Jakarta, who is also a qualified UK barrister and founder of the Global Justice Movement. He also chairs the Committee Against Torture in Bahrain. He argues that the real Axis of Evil in the world today comprises the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and he concludes: "They are becoming something else as well - pariahs, as they'll find out one day when even their best friends will buck up the courage to tell them."

Apparently that hasn't happened yet, or there would be considerably more "friends" objecting to attacking Syria for whatever.

This search for contemporary pariahs was prompted by the September 2013 issue of Vanity Fair, in which Graydon Carter's "Editor's Letter" is titled: "The Pariah Shortage."

What Does It Mean to a Culture to Have a "Pariah Shortage?"

According to the Canadian Carter, 64, the United States used to treat its miscreants quite differently and more punishingly. "Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs," Carter argues, and Watergate produced "resignations, imprisonments, and an all but certain impeachment."

Well sort of, but not exactly. The real pariahs of the Vietnam war were its veterans, abandoned by their government and too many of their complicit countrymen, while the "architects" went unpunished beyond exclusion from a Georgetown party or two. And Watergate may have brought punishment, but no lasting shame for many - certainly not for Richard Nixon, Chuck Colson, Gordon Liddy, and others. These non-pariahs made out like bandits.

Carter goes on to remind us that the mass looting by deregulated S&Ls cost taxpayers $124 billion and led to thousands of criminal convictions, but he doesn't cite a single pariah - certainly not the presidents (Carter and Reagan) or the Congresses who all thought it was a fine idea to open the banks to the predatory capitalists among their pals. They were not shamed at all, so far as one can tell, and their successor presidents (Bush, Clinton, and Bush) and other Congresses saw fit to commit the same offenses all over again on a larger scale without even blushing.

That's what sticks in Graydon Carter's craw, that: "The deregulation-fueled subprime mortgage explosion and crisis of the past decade wiped out nearly 500 banks and ... will end up costing taxpayers at least $21.8 trillion."

He goes on to fulminate at length about malefactors like Dick Fuld, Angelo Mozilo, and James Cayne who helped to wreck the economy and got to keep hundreds of millions of dollars for their trouble - not a pariah in the bunch. And Carter bitterly points out that "the Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has brought just two criminal cases against senior executives ... [and] lost one of them." Maybe Holder should be a pariah?

Carter's final point is that no one has been held accountable for the Iraq fiasco - military, economic, political, medical, and environmental - the criminal destruction that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and their cohort perpetrated not only on their own country, but so disastrously on Iraq. Worse, for Carter, these perpetrators still say, knowing what they know now, that they would do it again - at a cost of 4,500 dead, 35,000 wounded, and more than $3 trillion.

You Can't Expect Shame from People Who Are Not Held Accountable

But by the end of his "Editor's Letter," he's long since lost track of the idea of turning those who fail with such enormity into pariahs. He fails to note that shame and contrition are not required of banksters and war criminals in America. Just mentioning shame and contrition sounds naïve even to consider in our post-modern hipness, where the rich and powerful too often seem shamed by nothing, unless it's not being more rich and more powerful.

One of America's less attractive qualities is its longstanding, widespread, reflexive impulse to turn so many victims into pariahs, most effectively with Native Americans, but equally with African Americans, Latinos, rape victims, and so many of the people of other countries who dared to want to have some say in their own destinies (Cubans, for example, or Venezuelans and Bolivians and Bahrainis, among others). This is a tendency of collective blame that, in other circumstances for Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, turned into the Holocaust.

In America today, there's no shortage of efforts the powerful to create useful pariahs. The pattern of blaming the victim is manifest in the way the trial of Chelsea (Bradley) Manning proceeded. The mainstream media's dismal coverage of Manning's trial for revealing war crimes appeared a deliberate effort to turn Bradley/Chelsea into a pariah for daring to reveal some truth about Iraq. Worse was the way the trial ended, not only with an unjust conviction and an unjust sentence, but with the terrible spectacle of Manning feeling the need to apologize for her heroism.

What is it about American culture that pariahs are less likely to be murderers or thieves than people who try to tell the truth? In a long list, these come quickly to mind:

• CBS News made Dan Rather a pariah after he exposed a bit of the truth about George W. Bush.


• The Obama administration is trying to turn Edward Snowden into an international pariah for revealing some of the truth about federal spying on Americans.


• The United States tried to make Cassius Clay a pariah for exposing some of the truth about racism in America, but he became Muhammad Ali instead.

Pop Pariahs Serve to Distract Us From Real Pariahs in Hiding

Popular American pariah-making is, more typically, a short-term staple of infotainment shows, where the stakes are low and the titillation factor is high. A recent example: Mika Brzezinski (46) on Morning Joe demonizing Miley Cyrus (20) for her dirty dancing at the Video Music Awards, while hypocritically omitting the adults who choreographed and rehearsed the "offensive" act for hours. Sexual pariahs have been with us since the Puritans, for real and imagined offenses.

As a country, as a culture, we don't lack for people who actually deserve to be pariahs for committing profoundly offensive acts. In part, we don't notice such people because we lack the information that would allow us to see our would-be pariahs clearly for who they are. More importantly, too few of us want to look, or want to see, or want to act on what we see.

It's not, as Graydon Carter suggests, that we lack sufficient pariah candidates. Creating new pariahs might not be as difficult as it seems. A change of public consciousness would help, assuming our underlying values remain as we publicly profess them. In that case, all that's really necessary are a few honest investigations, taken to their logical end point, wherever evidence and integrity take them.

What investigations might those be? It seems likely that any serious investigation of 9/11, or torture, or the Iraq war, or banking practices, or drone killing, or depleted Uranium weapons, or any other outrage that goes unaddressed, would produce pariahs aplenty.

In Vanity Fair, the editor does not follow his argument to its logical conclusion - that we have become collectively incapable of imposing even the limited sanction of the Vietnam/Watergate era on our public criminals, that American culture is corrupt beyond even sincere lip-service to basic morality. Perhaps he's right to duck the question, because perhaps it's true.

But none of us will know for sure until we publicly confront unpleasant truths.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.