Devils Deal
Copyright 2015, by Jeff Suzuki
To the tune of "Chevy Chase"
The devil came to warring lands to find a soul to take
He made his way before the king to him an offer make
He said “You face a fearsome foe, made bold by his conceit,
So take my hand and let me ease your path to his defeat.
Or if you should reject my gift and so my help disdain
Your foe will surely welcome me and so my help will gain.
At length the king replied “No doubt, the help that you would send
will surely help our cause and bring this war to quicker end
And spare from pain and suffering the innocent and weak
And if I thought my men would fail, your help I'd surely seek.
But wars are won by skillful hands and hearts steadfast and true
My people have no lack of these, no help we need from you.
And think on this before you join together with our foe
That when they go down to defeat then all the world will know
The devil hath no pow'r to change the fate of man or land
The devil fled, and by this tale should all here understand.
The prince of lies cannot for long sustain a losing side,
Against a just and righteous host where virtue doth abide
By hand and heart and blood and sweat, a vict'ry you can paint,
But take the devil's help and your own vict'ry will you taint.
Notes
I had a bit of a bardic dry spell between 2012 and 2014. I'd attributed it to being involved in other projects (which was true...Constitutional Calculus came out in 2015), and that the amount of creativity a person has is finite (which I also believe true). But when the inspiration for this song hit, I realized the real reason for my dry spell.
It was Obama's fault.
If you look over what I've written, a lot of it coincides with the world situation, and in particular my dissatisfaction with it. Hence I wrote Fooling the People and My Son's Estate and Are You Patrons of the Megacorps? and Where Have All the Car Flags Gone? But while Obama's presidency has been a disappointment on many levels, it doesn't lead to the kind of anger that produces something like Fooling the People.
In late 2014, the CIA's report on torture enhanced interrogation came out. Now, I'm a quantitative rationalist, so my objection to torture enhanced interrogation is (mostly) based on the fact that every study prior to 9/11 indicated that torture enhanced interrogation is not a good way to gather reliable information: you're too likely to get what you want to hear, and not what you need to hear. Given this, I reject the use of torture enhanced interrogation on the grounds that it is inefficient. The CIA's report goes against 50+ years of studies on torture enhanced interrogation and suggests that torture enhanced interrogation is an efficient way of gathering information; one wonders what has changed since 9/11.
But I digress. If you can convince me that torture enhanced interrogation is an effective way to gather information, I'll withdraw my objections. The problem is that most people who support torture enhanced interrogation use an argument that comes down to “Radical Islamists did bad things to us, so it's OK for us to do bad things in retaliation.” In other words, it's not about efficiency, it's not about information, it's not about results...it's about revenge. And revenge isn't cost effective.
Here's an analogy you will either “get” or miss completely: Suppose you could win a game by cheating, in such a way that nothing bad would happen to you because you cheated. Would you do it? My response is that if you do this, you are acknowledging that you aren't good enough to win on your own merits (hence the king's point). But history shows us that by the time you get to that point, nothing is going to alter the outcome. The Japanese and Germans tried suicide bombers in World War II...because they were losing, and they knew they were losing. And guess what? They lost. Mass kidnappings and suicide bombers are symptoms of desperation: what fraction of the Islamic world wants a return to 11th-century traditional values?
By the same token, we can employ extreme methods to win. But when we do so, we dishonor our armed forces, our intelligence agencies, and our law enforcement official, because we are telling the world “These guys aren't good enough to do the job in a professional manner.”
We don't need to reject the use of torture to protect the civil rights of criminals and terrorists.
We don't need to reject the use of torture to protect our reputation.
We need to avoid torture to protect our self-respect.
Update
Due to a bizarre concatenation of circumstances, I became Queen's Bard in 2015, and ended up performing in a number of official venues at Pensic 44. One of which was the European Music expo, which was supposed to be an exhibition of period European music. I was contacted by someone associated with the event to do a piece, but I didn't check the program carefully, so I did this piece, which is an attempt at a period-style composition. I conveyed my apologies to the organizer afterward; she seemed fine with it, but I learned an important lesson: always check with the organizer directly.