AMC In Breaking Bad, Walter White starts off as the most sympathetic of all possible meth cooks. A brilliant chemist, he is stuck teaching bored students at an Albuquerque high school. He does his best to support his pregnant wife and their partially disabled son, but earns so little that he must work night shifts at an area car wash just to make ends meet. Despite it all, he soldiers on dutifully until he is unexpectedly diagnosed with lung cancer. That trauma changes him. Suddenly he confronts the prospect of dying penniless. He doesnt want an impoverished widow or two kids without a college fund or even a small savings account. So he resolves to cook (and later sell) just enough meth to give his family a middle-class existence. Of course, his plan from the start is to manufacture a dangerous narcotic. His profits will come from addicts whose lives are being ruined by his product. But we still begin in his corner. We see White as an unlucky man playing the hand hes dealt in a fallen world, where drug addicts will get high with or without his blue meth. Isnt it better, in a way, for him to manufacture Albuquerques choice high? At least he isnt going to accidentally blow up his lab during a cook, or put out an impure product. Surely its better for a dying, middle-class family man to be enriched than Tuko Salamanca, the cartel-backed sociopath who White and his product displace. Thats what we told ourselves. * * * Reuters America sometimes reminds me of Walter White. Not in every way, of course. There isnt anything like a perfect parallel between the plot of Breaking Bad and the course that the U.S. has taken since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the unexpected trauma that made us look at our place in the world anew. I certainly dont think Breaking Bads writers were attempting an allegory. But I submit that the shows arc (especially Walter Whites character arc) imparts lessons about moral logic and its consequences that the U.S. ought to heed. White starts off with everyones sympathy. But as soon as the writers have us rooting for him to get rich (and get out) before he gets caught, they produce five seasons that amount to a slowly unfolding rebuke to everyone who felt any investment in his success. The source of our moral discomfort? White has cooked crystal meth in bulk, hooking addicts from his native Albuquerque all the way to Prague, Ross Douthat explains. He has personally killed at least seven people and is implicated in the deaths of hundreds more. He has poisoned an innocent child, taken out a contract on his longtime partner, and stood by and watched a young woman choke. Every season is more riveting than the last, in part because having bought into the logic that prompted White to start cooking, we are implicated in the predictable consequences, and they just keep getting more gruesome. Of course he wouldnt be satisfied with the initial, relatively modest sum of money that he sought. Of course he would become implicated in the violence of the black market. Of course lying to his wife and son would be corrosive, and of course exempting himself from core mores and norms would put him on a slippery slope, where the prospect of being caught or killed keeps helping him to rationalize one last horrific moral compromise, even when there are alternatives. At some point, White crosses a line. Breaking Bad fans may not agree on the particular moment, but he eventually does something that causes a given viewer to think, Thats unforgivable. But as abhorrent as we find his worst transgressions, as much as we tell ourselves that we could never condone them, we cant help but see how they flowed logically, if not quite inevitably, from the initial course of moral compromise he chose. It causes us to reflect on the earliest episodes and to reconsider our initial judgement. Is the lesson that it was always wrong to grant White any license to break bad? Or is there an alternative trajectory in which White could have cooked for a while without becoming a moral monster or doing much harm? Either way, viewers cant escape the fact that White rationalizes even his worst atrocities with logic not unlike what viewers condoned when he first cooked. Im not a bad person. Im just trying to fulfill my responsibility to provide for my family. Bad circumstances forced me into these compromising positions—when I do bad things, it isnt the same as when other drug dealers do them. After all, I am not a criminal. Implicit all along is an unspoken rationalization. Walter White is a man who believes in his own exceptionalism. Thats how he manages to think of himself as a good person, even as he orchestrates the death of an innocent man and poisons a child. As chilling as most viewers found that self-justifying quality, how many forgave him lesser sins early on in part because they saw him as an exceptional case? * * * Jesse, you asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. Im in the empire business. Americans are, like Walter White, a self-justifying sort. We see ourselves as exceptional. Often times we behave as if the rules that apply to the rest of the world, rules we want constraining them, dont and neednt really apply to us. Were not a regular nation, not like the Chinese or the Brazilians or even the French . Take it from The New York Times , our paper of record. Other nations forcing water into a prisoners lungs is torture. When we do it? Enhanced interrogation. America doesnt torture. Were the good guys! After 9/11 we wanted national-security officials to provide for our safety. Understandably so. They felt tremendous pressure to fulfill that responsibility. Couldnt they have done so without transgressing against basic laws, mores, and norms? Many in the Bush Administration didnt think so, but they didnt fully share that with us. They decided on what they thought was best for us, but thought telling us would be a bad idea: We might not go along with their plans for torture, indefinite detention, or warrantless spying. To be honest, many of us didnt really want to know the details of policy, or to follow the ideas of those making it to their logical conclusions. What scary implications! Over time, the consequences of the moral license that national-security officials granted themselves after 9/11 became impossible to ignore. Different Americans awakened to reality at different times. Some became apologists for the people in charge. A word or statute could always be twisted to launder their actions into what passed as legal, and it was easy enough to conflate legal with morally defensible. Yet many others grew morally uncomfortable. Why? Over 12 years, the United States has rounded up an unknown number of innocents and held them alongside terrorists at an island prison, without evidence, charges, or trial, keeping some for years even after deeming them no threat . The U.S. tortured an unknown number of prisoners in an official torture program, then destroyed evidence of it. Americans ran a prison at Abu Ghraib where many others were tortured and abused in the most disgusting ways imaginable. The Iraq War implicates us in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents. Successive presidents set precedents such that American citizens can now be put on a secret kill list on one mans orders and killed without any due process. A 16-year-old American was killed in a drone strike with no explanation given to this day; scarcely no one in power demanded one. With the blessings of the White House, the New York Police Department has ethnically profiled and spied on innocent Muslim Americans who were deemed suspicious for no reason besides their religion. The NYPD failed to apologize, even after that destructive surveillance program sowed anxiety and mistrust in the community and produced zero counterterrorism leads . Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family. Americas drone program has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocents and nightmarish living conditions for Yemenis and Pakistanis under regular flight paths. Whats more, the U.S. doesnt apologize, explain itself, and compensate the families of the dead when it inadvertently kills innocent people with drones. Instead, we do our best to pretend that we had no role in the killing, leaving impoverished survivors to bury their own dead, to repair their own homes, and to wonder if seemingly arbitrary death from the sky will take them next. As well, weve built a global surveillance apparatus unprecedented in human history, one so unaccountable that Americans only found out about violations of the Fourth Amendment and data collection on tens of millions of Americans because a contractor gave up his comfortable life in Hawaii and risked his freedom to tell us about it. If not for Edward Snowden, even the blatant legal violations of the NSA would still remain completely unknown to us. The United States is also violating the privacy of hundreds of millions of innocent foreigners, including leaders of close allies; intentionally undermining the security of global IT systems to facilitate spying; and doing great harm to American companies whose security weve breached. Looking back, this shouldnt surprise us. On 9/11, innocents of all races and religions were murdered en masse. Additional attacks seemed imminent, and it wasnt long before anthrax was sent through the mail and snipers terrorized the Capitol. The shock changed our national-security officials. In secret memos and rushed legislation, they resolved to transgress against moral and legal norms just enough to keep us safe, and the public started off in their corner. Of course, almost from the start they were plotting torture, spying on innocents, exploiting the terrorist attack to push an invasion of Iraq and detaining the not guilty. But the U.S. public was still sympathetic. They saw America as a target of terrorism playing the hand it was dealt in a fallen world, where innocents were hurt and killed regardless. Wasnt it better, in a way, for America to maintain its role as benevolent global hegemon? We werent going to start a nuclear war, as North Korea or Pakistan might in our absence. Better for America to assert itself overseas than to cede the Middle East to al-Qaeda, Saddaam Hussein, and Hezbollah. It was a self-justifying kind of illogic with conclusions that seldom followed from the premises. Even today, national-security officials tell themselves that everything theyve done has flowed naturally enough from that initial recalibration of their moral decision-making, their repudiation of a pre-9/11 mindset, which Americans happily endorsed as the cancer of al-Qaeda filled the lungs of New Yorkers with black smoke. That is exactly right: We got it wrong from the moment we declared that everything changed, and it has stayed wrong. L ots of old rules did still applied, or should have. Flouting them has proved corrosive. Of course this is what happens when a traumatized nation gives its leaders license to hastily rewrite laws, reinterpret others in secret, and wield unaccountable power across the globe. Of course we invaded a country unnecessarily. Of course weve found self-justifying ways to torture illegally and kill innocents without taking responsibility for doing so. Of course were still holding some innocents at Gitmo. Of course our civil liberties are being shredded and Muslim Americans are hit hardest. The world dealt us an unfair blow, and we used it as an excuse to break bad. We permitted who knows what to be done in secret. What did we expect? We became inured to the selfishness of our actions. We slid predictably down the slope upon which we stepped, and the farther we go the uglier it gets. We havent hit bottom yet or anything close to it. You clearly dont know who youre talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. National-security officials still insist all their actions are taken for the sake of their country. Dissenters cant help but suspect that, at least sometimes, thats just something they tell themselves as they enjoy wielding extraordinary power and making their own rules as they go. In any case, their actions have done more to harm than help the United States, just as Walter White did more to harm than to help his family. Thats what happens when people decide they need no longer abide by civilizational norms. Core values are there for a reason. What Americans have seen more clearly with every year are the consequences of granting ourselves extraordinary moral license, as if American exceptionalism means that anything we do is justified so long as theres a chance defensible ends will be advanced. Its Walter White logic we embraced—and it enabled morally monstrous behavior. Many legal and moral constraints serve as vital checks on human nature, and that doesnt change when you hire Saul Goodman or John Yoo to get around them.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 22:32:40 +0000
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