Satire and Speculation

A few years ago, in my last album, right after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, I talked about how furious Senators and congressmen were, looking at such photos as a prisoner forced to wear women's panties on his head and a naked prisoner with a dog collar attached to a leash held by a woman who is pointing at the man's penis and laughing. Why were those legislators sputtering with such rage? Because THEY have to pay EXTRA for those services.

Now, I asked Sam Leff -- given his background as an anthropologist studying and writing about the hidden rituals of American sadomasochism -- for his take on the CIA's cover-up of torture videos.

"I have been watching with fascinated horror," he said, "as America's S/M patterns of culture have emerged into the open in the Abu Ghraib/Gitmo Bush administration. I've been flashing on some clear images of the fratboy reality underlying the White House torture tape controversy.

"Picture this. Bush and Karl Rove sitting around a big plasma screen (drinking beer?) and laughing their asses off watching helpless prisoners drowning under a waterboard, or naked getting cigarette burns, or maybe having analgesic balm applied to their genitals.

"Once the existence of the tapes became known, their cover story is that they were having a big discussion about whether or not to keep or destroy the torture tapes. Like that old pervert, J. Edgar Hoover, the reality is they were getting off looking at them as sadistic porn--over and over. Perhaps sharing them with the 'frat brothers' of their inner circle."

Indeed, in November 2005, Garry Trudeau was queried by Editor & Publisher about his Doonesbury strip the previous Sunday which had George Bush defending the branding of Yale University fraternity initiates with a red-hot coat-hanger in 1967, and Trudeau replied that it was "Totally fact based. Bush's commen in panel seven is a direct quote." He was referring to the collegiate Bush saying, "Insignificant! There's no scarring mark physically or mentally!"

Some pledges told the Yale Daily News that their branding was preceded by a physical beating. Said one: "By that time, my body was so numb [from the beatings] that the iron felt good, like a match was being held close to my body." Bush, who was president of the fraternity, said that the resulting wound was "only a cigarette burn." Or maybe enhanced pledging technique.

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Comments

[lezlie]

Once a frat boy, always a frat boy! For someone who likes to shove firecrackers up amphibians asses and blow them up, George was very restrained with the dark-skinned turban people!
If these are the "grownups", I want the pizza-eating kids back in the White House!!!

[Davis Sweet - Huffpost Blogger]

Admittedly, pledging at Yale in George Bush's red-hot impromptu branding iron '60s wasn't as brutal as it was in Bill Buckley's '40s. Back then, the secret brotherhoods routinely beat pledges to death with flashlights, drowned them, drugged and tortured them into insanity, and raped their children on video (or, you know, film). And no sane person would even think of doing that sort of thing these days.

[wilso127]

Paul, one of HP's readers who might also be a deft editorial cartoonist should do a panel based on your Bush-Rove scenario of getting their Frat Boy S/M rocks off by watching the now-missing torture tapes. I just watched "Animal House" for the umpteenth time last night on AMC, and was reminded of the sadism of the guys who were in the 'privileged sons' group. When I was in college, I was also a 'frat boy', but in a group that had had its foundation in returning WW2 vets. In 4 years, the influence of these guys and their mind-set set a pace that was more like the Delta House, and I've been thankful for that for over 50 years.

[Sundialsvc4]

The disheartening thing is to see how much spin is now applied even within the pages of Huffington Post. There is no real opposition here: a lot of angry talk from the outside, but not from within the content deciders.

Historians are going to look back upon this time, and pore through pentabytes of stored data, with morbid disbelief. "It worked. Again, just like in Nazi Germany, it worked. The people saw it coming, knew it was about to occur, and it just didn't matter. Hermann Goering was right. It does work the same in any country. This nation that once called itself 'the land of the free and the home of the brave' not only walked into World War Three but actually caused it."