While it's more convenient, and reassuring to assume that the events in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are just the acts of random individuals, the 'bad apples', the testimony of Lyndie England suggests rather the involvement of psy-ops, the division of military intelligence dealt with by Ronson in his book. “There's the possibility that the acts committed were acts thought up on the spot by some one from Idaho, but when the photos emerged, psy-ops saw a useful product and said – keep doing it. That's what Lyndie England has said, that psy-ops said' keep doing it, it's getting us what we need'. I presume what they were looking for were really garish photographs, these sort of tableauxs that could be passed around to other inmates”.
Ronson returns to the subject of his writing style, as if sparked further, by talk of Abu Ghraib, to explain his use of humour: “What I hope is that the moments that become serious, become even more unbearable because of the humour that's come before. One example is that description of the guy being held in the shipping container, where I say he's screaming so hard it almost looks like he's laughing. I'd like to think that that line is more powerful because you've been lulled by a humourous mood. It kind of swipes you”.
The above episode deals with an episode of interrogation, discovered in Al-Qaim in Iraq where prisoners were kept in a disused shipping container, and subjected to repeated playing of the music from popular children's programme Barney. Humorist Ronson was one of the few journalists to see the unfunny side of the story. “The Barney thing was incredible. The way that it was covered by the media. Everybody treated it as a joke, even The Guardian. While in the end it's quite obvious that it wasn't funny. It was almost as if the western world breathed a sigh of relief that they could find something innocent and funny in the midst of all this”, Ronson suggests.
When the story about Al-Qaim broke, Ronson recognised traces of Channon's First Earth Battalion Manual in the use of music. He called up Channon to ask his opinion on the story. Channon was unfamiliar with the circumstances:
[Channon] 'They're obviously trying to lighten the environment' he said, 'and give these people some comfort, instead of beating them to death!' He sighed. 'Children's music! That will make the prisoners more ready to divulge where their forces are and shorten the war! Damn Good!'
I think Jim was imagining something more like a creche than a steel container at the back of a disused railway station.
'I guess if they play them Barney and Sesame Street once or twice,' I said, 'that's lightening and comfo
rting, but if they play it, say, fifty thousand times into a steel box in the deseert heat, that's more…uh…torturous'
'I'm no psychologist,' said Jim, a little sharply.
[Pg 133/4, The men who stare at goats]
In a review in The Observer, Ronson is likened to Joseph Heller crossed with Hanna Arendt, which isn't a bad description. Ask him about his influences though and he very answers immediately: “Kurt Vonnegut. I re-read Slaughterhouse 5 recently, and I was amazed at how much I've stolen from Vonnegut's writing style [laughs], because I hadn't really read him since I was 18/19 and just starting out in journalism, and I was flabbergasted by how much of the sentence construction, and things like the phrase 'And so on' that I've stolen. He's had a massive influence on me. Give me him over Norman Mailer any day. Mailer wants to dazzle you with the lengthily written severity of the situation, with the way the world is going. Vonnegut's books on the other hand are short, pithy, funny, and very, very, easy to read. Slaughterhouse 5 is a slapstick book about the firebombing of Dresden, and it's all the better for it in some ways”.
It will be interesting to judge the reaction when the book receives its American release, next April. His previous book, Them, Adventures with Extremists, came out innopportunely, he explains, “It was the worst time, it was just after September 11th, and it was in New York. No-one really wanted a funny, sweet book about extremists in the latter part of 2001”. The book though has, in a sense, found its place as a document in time. “I think Them stands up more now after September 11th, as things are starting to go back to normal, so you can see these characters as human beings again”.
Speaking about Them in an interview with Salon magazine, Ronson said: “in retrospect it does feel a bit like the book reflects a burgeoning pressure, a kind of pressure cooker situation, which comes to a head in the David Icke chapter — which is great since it’s such a kind of burlesque, absurdist chapter but at the same time that is what it’s about: The extremists are getting crazier; so are our responses toward them”. In some ways then, The men who stare at goats is the flip side of the story. While conspiracy theories flourished amongst the marginalised and unstable, so too within the halls of power similar extreme reactions were being produced. “I would love one day for Picador to bring out the two books as a single volume, because I do agree that in some ways there a flip side of each other. It's partly that move from the fringes of society into the mainstream, but it's also to do with the fact that the men who stare at goats deals with one of the maddest conspiracy theories there is – says Ronson – David Icke will believe that a crack team of special forces soldiers trying to kill goats just by staring at them fits entirely into the idea that the global elite stems from these reptilian bloodlines trying to harness Satan's power to control the people [Laughs]. In real life, it's fuckin weird that they try this, but in real life what it is is just a group of goats standing there, not falling over! The book is humanising the grandest conspiracy theory that there is, and saying it's true, but in a very different way”.
Critics might suggest that while Ronson talks about humanising the stories, that in fact he's patronising the characters at the centre of his story. It's a charge he's heard before, and is quick to refute: “A couple of years ago people would accuse me, like Louis Theroux I suppose, of setting ourselves aside from the people we were chronicling, because we considered ourselves somehow better than the crazy people. And I never thought that was true about myself – I can't speak for Louis – but it never rang true for me about myself. I thought it was implicit in what I wrote, that I was just as fallible as the people I was chronicling. So now, in the last couple of years, I've made a concerted effort to present myself in that way, because I don't want there to be this sort of moral distance between the people that I write about. The reason that I choose the people I write about is because I sort of identify with them”.
Indeed, speaking with Ronson, a genuine affection seems to come across when he talks about people like Jim Channon, despite the results that his outlandish ideas have had. He mentions how many modern day useful inventions have come from military research :“In some ways you have to respect it. There are some inventions out there that have a positive impact on all our lives, that originated with US military scientists thinking 'out of the box' as they call it. One is fluorescent jackets – they were invented because allied planes needed something to spot to avoid friendly fire in the second world war – so in a way you have to respect them for not being afraid to seem kind of hare-brained, but at the same time there's some fairly mad stuff”.
That Ronson knows how to tell a great, if outlandish, story is in no doubt. Both books look set to be turned into movies by Hollywood, which has Ronson genuinely excited.In the case of Them, the film looks set to be made by one of his favourite directors, who must remain nameless for the moment. On the face of it, to me, Them will be a tough project to bring to the screen. Ronson excitedly predicts that ”there's the idea of a nebbish guy, a liberal, getting sucked into the world of conspiracies, and starts to question his rationality. It begins to seem as if the crazy people were right. Kind of Woody Allen meets the Manchurian Candidate!”
He admits to scanning reports and testimonies from released prisoners from Guantanamo bay, searching for traces of First Earth Battalion ideas, and from there goes off on a tangent about “The Gay Bomb” – pulling my leg, I presume, talking about research done by the US military to develop a bomb that would release a chemical aphrodisiac producing widespread homosexuality amongst enemy troops. Some quick research later and, lo and behold, it's true – “The US military investigated building a 'gay bomb', which would make enemy soldiers 'sexually irresistible' to each other, Government papers say.”(source BBC News. Sometimes you just have to laugh…