Politics & Power Quote by Jon Ronson

Ronson’s line lands with a quiet, journalist’s scalpel: the most unsettling thing about “Camp X-ray” isn’t only that it exists, but that its existence has to be translated across the Atlantic. He frames Britain as an audience missing key emotional hardware - the post-9/11 American appetite for narrative certainty, for clean roles, for a hero-shaped solution to a threat that feels both everywhere and nowhere.

The phrasing is doing double work. “Need for heroes” sounds almost quaint, like a comic-book craving, and that’s the point: Ronson is diagnosing a cultural regression under stress, a lurch toward simplified morality. Heroes require villains; once you admit that, “Camp X-ray” (the early Guantanamo Bay detention operation) reads less as an aberration than as a prop in a national story about righteousness and protection. Not justice, protection. The subtext is that the camp’s function is partly symbolic: it reassures “back home” that something decisive is being done, even if what’s being done lives in legal and ethical shadow.

Ronson’s outsider angle matters. As a British journalist embedded in American anxiety, he’s attentive to the gap between policy and psychology - how extraordinary measures become legible when a country is frightened and feels entitled to exceptionalism. His “don’t understand” repetition isn’t condescension; it’s a warning about empathy’s limits. If even allied publics can’t parse the logic, the logic may be less rational than mythic, less about security than about soothing a shaken identity.