Deliverance Comes To Iraq

By an odd quirk of fate, Fort Ashby is at almost the same latitude, and about 150 miles east of less mountainous Palestine, the hometown of that other rural West Virginia army girl whom the Iraq War brought to the headlines a year ago, but as a passive heroine during the war's apparently successful first phase. Lynndie England, by contrast, comes across as Jessica Lynch's evil and much more active twin: a female incarnation of the rural sadism depicted so effectively in the film Deliverance, and darkly hatched as a public figure, it would seem, only when the war itself had entered a more uncertain and darker phase. Ms. England's own least appealing traits appear to have thrived with stunning perversity on the lingering energies of Abu Ghraib prison, such that she and her friends succeeded in bringing American pornography's abiding concern with a visual record of degradation, to a role reversal of what George W. Bush claims went on in Saddam Hussein's prison "rape rooms." But in giving an American female face to the legacy of Saddam?s male torturers, she and her friends seem to have brought some "backwoods world" twists that would have done the mountain men in Deliverance proud. According to the Telegraph's Sharon Churcher, "the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population" of Fort Ashby "talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence." And indeed the iconography of the hooded prisoners recalls precisely -- but again indulges through projection in reversal -- the spooky anonymous hoods of the Klan. What's more, though, another local woman, Colleen Kesner, explained to Churcher why Lynndie England is locally seen as a hero: "A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq. To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis."

It sounds as though "the country boys" from Deliverance had no shortage of relatives.

In the film, the characters played by Voight and Beatty are rescued from their tormentors by the silent arrival of their two companions in the other canoe, and by a well-aimed arrow from the bow of survivalist Lewis (Burt Reynolds), that kills the rapist, and drives away his leering companion, at least temporarily. But then the four run into problems about what to do in regard to the law. Afraid that even an argument of self-defense won't work with a local court, they take a vote and opt to circumvent what is ostensibly law-in-the-public-interest by simply burying the dead man, in anticipation that his grave will soon be covered by the lake. As they continue downriver, though, it's the gentlest among them (Ronny Cox), and the only one who had argued for telling the truth to the authorities, who is shot from a distance by the surviving hillbilly, who in turn is killed by an arrow dispatched by Voight. Eventually, the three remaining men slink out of the valley, and back to civilization. But the passage has been a harrowing downward spiral of degradation, with the mysterious wilderness of the river given a parallel in the mysterious brutality of the mountain men, and with the technology-friendly message that maybe the whole mess is better covered up by a dammed lake after all. Which at the very least -- the implication seems to be -- will produce enough electricity to keep the hillbillies watching TV, and which seems to offer the only non-ironic way of reading the title "deliverance." Though even this suggestion is ambiguous, in that the film ends (thanks Cathrine) with Lewis' nightmare of a grasping hand breaking the surface of the lake from beneath.

So is 2004 the year in which this grasping hand has finally broken not only the surface of the filmed lake in Deliverance, but the limits of an onscreen narrative that now looks not so much fictional as frighteningly prescient. At the very least, the United States of 2004 cannot look to rising waters to obscure so strange a melding of "backwoods world" values with the legacy of Saddam's most notorious prison in Baghdad. Nor can its leaders afford to ignore -- as the canoeists in Deliverance do, to their expense -- any voice that pleads for the entire mess to be brought before the law for a thorough airing. But in another twist, the residents of Fort Ashby Appalachia certainly these days do watch TV. And when they do, they see one of their own who has gained the notoriety that, sadly, now so often equates in the United States with fame: a sort of international and unrestrained projection of the sideshow antics which are indulged by the Jerry Springer Show. As articulated to Sharon Churcher, their views are themselves an indictment of an America where the gap between rich and poor hasn't narrowed since 1972, but got only wider, leaving many "backwoods worlds" festering in neglect and bigotry. In this case, though, courtesy of an already illegal invasion, the views have made their way as actions to a worldwide screen, leaving little optimism about "deliverance" either for Iraq, or for a United States where a culture of vulgar brutality has been no more improved by the Bush administration's contempt for international law, than it has by the damming of rivers to make for more TV.

So the question possibly does become, or will become soon: who exactly does speak for the United States of America? The lawmakers with their respect for the constitution, and their general horror at what has been perpetrated in Iraq in their country's name? Or those multitudes of "folks," both rural and urban, who still think that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11th; that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and that the four "civilian contractors" ambushed and butchered in Fallujah were just innocent "civilian contractors": "our boys," as they were described by a man interviewed in the southern Pennsylvania hometown of Jeremy Sivits, the first of the MPs to be court martialled for the brutality at Abu Ghraib. Would it matter to such Americans that the four "contractors" -- more accurately described as armed mercenaries employed by Blackwater Inc. of North Carolina -- were killed after, and not before, the photographed abuses took place in Abu Ghraib prison, and that "civilian contractors," working this time as interrogators, are likewise being implicated in the scandal? Just possibly making the ambush in Fallujah not an act of gratuitous terror, but one of retaliation for terror inflicted already.

It's an ugly cycle. Do most Americans want to understand it? Or jaded as they are by network television's 24-7 fostering of an almost psychopathic dissociation, would they rather just see it all as an extension of Reality TV?

Or maybe even as Deliverance: The Series.

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Douglas Ord is a novelist and historian whose most recent book is a critical history of the National Gallery of Canada, published by Mc-Gill-Queen?s University Press in 2003. He also produces the website Lear?s Shadow at http://home.eol.ca/~dord

Note: http://home.eol.ca/~dord