pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WANT SOME TORTURE WITH THOSE CHEERIOS? (No. 297 � 12:10 AM � Saturday) So yeah I am sleeping on my sofa for the second night in a row because my sister Penelope is in my bed upstairs and my good neighbor Mr. Motorola is, at least for the moment, online (as I hope he will be by the time I finish this). Penelope and I went to dinner then watched a formulaic DVD�The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants�that she brought with her, and then she went to sleep and I started looking at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs. They are definitely worse than the previously released ones and now we know with certainty that American soldiers not only tortured but killed prisoners for What? Sport? Patriotism? Fun? This administration is so goddamn wrathful, so eager to humiliate then eliminate anyone who challenges it. (Witness the newest officials� statements about Cheney�s vengeance and Plamegate.) Such a sad testament to our nation that we keep churning out soulless privileged frat boys who torture small animals and the expendable poor and any real and perceived rivals, I guess because this makes them feel powerful. There is no John Wayne/Good-Soldier-Fighting-A-Noble-Cause bullshit anyone can use to justify us this time though fellas�just lies on top of lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of blood smears from one end of a cell to the other on top of Muslim asses with cigarette burns all over them on top of a president and vice president who authorize this shit. Nothing to hold your head up about or wave your flag about either, folks. I wonder how many of us have even noticed what�s going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo. These images are going to haunt us for a long, long time. And they should. It�s time to recognize the power�no, the necessity�of bearing witness to these events. They�re happening in our time. With our tax dollars. And now we are the people in that saying about the concentration camps,� First they came for the Jews but, since I wasn�t a Jew, I did nothing. Then they came for ...� You know, a hundred descriptions of abuse just cannot equal one sobering photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered body of chipped teeth and vomit stains and skin smeared with feces wrapped in plastic wrap to better What? Stew in its own blood? Yeah. Let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios. I downloaded some of the images�which means that anyone who sneaks onto my computer now might conclude that I enjoy fantasizing about torture. I don�t get off on these pictures though; instead I study them the way I study Coetzee�s Waiting for the Barbarians in an effort to understand the geometry of atrocity. I also firmly believe that artists must find a way to make such images even more powerful, to ingrain them into our collective psyche so vividly and in such an immediate way that humanity cannot repeat our spiritual mistakes. Huh ... it just occurred to me that these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors ... or that Vietnamese man one second away from getting his brain shot out by a soldier. Here�s what I believe: artists must walk into the fire with our own souls bared and find a way to use images, even horrific ones such as this, and our own creativity to make it impossible for people to hide in their iPods and ignore what�s going on. That�s the very definition of an artist really�someone who is willing and able to travel by soul into the heart of darkness, into the abyss, in order to shed new light on a universal truth.
Meanwhile, did anyone else make a note of the fact that our Outsource Everything administration that warns of terrorist threats whenever we question the legality of their shenanigans has now actually contracted out control of our ports to the Arabs? And did you know that this past Sunday was Evolution Sunday? This event is part of the Clergy Letter Project, a religious response to fundamentalists� insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion. Over 10,000 ministers disagree with these fundamentalists and have signed the letter stating that evolution is �a foundational scientific truth� and that rejecting it �is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.� It also says �We believe that among God�s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.� The bad news is that most of the signatories are from mainline Protestant denominations, which are shrinking fast as evangelical and fundamentalist churches grow. And here�s an interesting spin on a vote that actually endorses incorporating intelligent design into classroom materials in SC. John Drake opened his AP article thusly: COLUMBIA - The Education oversight Committee voted Monday to reject standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution and insisted the curriculum incorporate critical analysis. You�d think, with that �critical analysis� line in there, that they support using scientific theory, methodology, to back up what they�re telling children. But we�re talking about my backwards home state so, yeah, you would be wrong. Finally, I am worried about Tree, who found out she has a 69 percent rate of surviving five years if she has only radiation but an 81 percent chance if she also has chemo. (She elected for chemo, naturally.) But now her biscuit-sized wound in infected. I found out too late to call her tonight, but I�ll call tomorrow because I know her well enough to know that she�s probably decided that this is an omen.
Damn it. 12:46 a.m. - 2006-02-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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