There is a fierce debate going on right now in the news media over whether bin Laden’s whereabouts were discovered through the use of what’s been euphemistically termed “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The Bush guys say yes, and all the Obama guys have been falling all over themselves trying to deny it ever since it was first suggested yesterday. This basically comes down to the old mean-spirited jingoist conservative vs. deluded pacifist hippie liberal debate over whether we’re allowed to be mean to mass-murdering terrorists, or if we have to be all buddy-buddy with them. You see, as everyone seems to want to declare to the heavens, America does not and will not tolerate torture!
But that’s not exactly true, now; is it? If America doesn’t torture, or tolerate torture, then how do explain women’s shoes? Honestly, if walking around all day on 4-inch (or higher!) spike-heels with little straps of leather squeezing, bulging, chafing, and contorting women’s feet until they produce corns, bunions, hammer-toes, etc., isn’t torture, I’m not sure what would be. And what about wearing jeans that are so tight that their flesh bulges out in all directions at the edges like a microwaved marshmallow peep on Easter? And how about body piercings all over the place that get all infected and stuff? Yuck! All this stuff seems like torture to me. Hell, it’s even torture to look at it on someone else sometimes. Eek!
And what about all this crappy music we’re subjected to these days? All this auto-tuned excrement that sounds like Hell’s Muzak unwelcomely raping my ears all the time is surely violating some international anti-torture treaty if there is any humanity left in the world. And then there’s stuff like the Chipmunks and Bratz movies, Jersey Shore, The Octomom, Barney & Friends, TV shows about Bigfoot, etc. Honestly! It was considered “torture” when our military played some of our popular music for detainees (!), but they’re allowed to completely fill the airwaves with it over here all the time! “America does not torture”, huh? My ass, it doesn’t! We have to be subjected to this stuff all the time, but we’re not allowed to be mean to terrorists? Hilarious! We’ve probably got sleeper cells here being exposed to more unbearable stuff just on television and the radio than they’d ever encounter in a place like Gitmo. And seriously, there are people on reality TV shows who, for our entertainment, are regularly forced into enduring worse things than have ever been used on terrorists in US custody.
Oh, and look at some of our most popular entertainment in movies and video games! There’s a whole sub-genre called “torture porn” (movies like Saw, Hostel, Captivity, etc.) where people just get tortured the whole time! And then there’s the huge popularity of the television series 24, where they just seem to beat up and interrogate terrorists all the time. And what about our video games? The video game industry is even bigger than Hollywood nowadays, and the most popular stuff seems to be all this brutal fighting, dismembering, torturing stuff. I mean, really! We don’t torture? Well then maybe we ought to so we can get it out of our system and make some more meaningful and artistically satisfying art and entertainment.
