http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/05/11/notes051204.DTL&nl=fix
Genital Torture For Dummies
Hey, it's a war -- what did you expect, flowers and bunnies and
hopscotch in the Baghdad streets?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
©2004 SF Gate
URL:
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/05/11/notes051204.DTL
Just in time for your morning breakfast sausage, it's all-American
rape and torture and rampant entirely condoned military sadism. Mmm,
patriotism.
The pictures are worth a thousand disgusted moans. It's all
flag-draped coffins and dog chains and forced masturbation and pistol
whippings and miserable bloody hooded Iraqi men -- not terrorists, just
men -- with wires attached to their fingers and genitals and made to
stand up for hours and days on end until their feet swell and their
lungs collapse and their livers fail, and you can hear our stunned
death-drunk nation cry: Hey, whatever happened to our nice, clean little
war? How did it get so ugly and out of hand? And isn't the "Frasier"
finale on soon? Sigh.
Isn't the nation just so very outraged -- outraged! -- over the
nasty rogue's gallery of photos gushing forth from the stunned media of
late (with frightening promises that the worst is yet to come), all
those snickering U.S. Army guards and sickeningly abused Iraqi POWs and
dead U.S. soldiers and scowling generals.
And there's BushCo blaming Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld blaming the
military and the military blaming miserable 21-year-old female
trailer-park scapegoats and once again there stands Dubya, looking angry
and baffled, like a kid who just got grounded for getting another D on a
spelling test.
Did you really think war would be all light spankings and fur-lined
handcuffs and afternoon tea, George? All happy giggling soldiers
blasting each other with squirt guns and playing jacks in the streets of
Fallujah?
Did you really believe your second war in as many years would be all
neat and tidy and bloodless and gift-wrapped and lacking in gruesomeness
and bile and disfiguring genital mutilation? What are you, a puppet? Oh
wait.
This is the thing about wars, Dubya. They are worse than a fresh cow
pie on the heel of your shiny Tony Lamas. They are bloodier and uglier
and nastier and more heinous and more over budget than your worst Texas
oil deal (and you had plenty of those), and that's before you even press
the Start button. As the saying goes, You want to make Satan laugh? Tell
him you're planning for a polite, orderly little conflict. Watch him
blast oil through his nose.
But let's not be too hard on the least articulate, least
intellectual, least accountable president in U.S. history. After all,
Dubya's just like much of America. He is the prefect embodiment of our
world-famous myopia, a selective type of dangerous tunnel vision whereby
if we don't see it and don't really feel it and the media doesn't splash
it all over us, it must not be true.
And, really, what Bush-votin' flag-wavin' God-numbed patriot wants
to hear that the U.S. is a world-class hypocrite, committing many of the
same crimes and tortures, rapes and humiliations that Saddam himself
did, in the very same prison? Who wants to hear that, in many ways,
we've done no better by the Iraqi (or Afghan) people than their former
leadership, and in some ways have made things far worse?
And who wants to know that we have become the violent, unwanted
clown on the global stage, justifiably ridiculed and thoroughly
unsympathetic, as the world boos and hurls rotten foreign policies? Who
wants to know that we are, in short, losing the war? Look there, isn't
that ***** Cheney, hiding behind an American coffin, fondling his
Halliburton portfolio and snickering quietly? Why yes, yes it is.
The Powers That Be know one thing: This lack of perspective, of the
gruesome details of war, keeps the nation stupid. It makes us compliant.
It makes us all go, well sure, I know war is heck and all, but we're the
good guys therefore any bloodshed is in the name of democracy and any
rapes are necessary evils and all those dead Iraqi women and babies are
unfortunate casualties in the quest to protect our president's corporate
interests and life goes on and hey "American Idol" is down to three
finalists! Woo!
Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also Bush. This is a man who goes
on Saudi television to claim rape and torture and sadism is not the
American way of conducting a war (but not, actually, to apologize --
never that), that such behavior is contrary to our God and our
principles and our morals and our happily imbecilic black-and-white,
good-versus-evil worldview.
Good one, George. Here's some words to stick in your craw, Dubya:
Vietnam. Guantanamo Bay. Somalia. El Salvador. World War II. Show me a
U.S.-led battle, Shrub, and I'll show you some nifty n' horrific
American-made abuses of prisoners and detainess and innocent civilians
that would makes your skin peel. Hey, it's war. You asked for it. You
don't invite the Devil to the table and not expect him to spit in the
mashed potatoes, you know?
By the way, Dubya, why have you never attended a single funeral
service honoring any U.S. soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan? Why
have you distanced yourself from the war dead like a snake avoids
roadkill? Sorry, is that an inappropriate question right now?
Look. Everyone knows the Abu Ghraib nightmare isn't an isolated
incident. These pictures merely stir that sickening, deep-down feeling
that the atrocities are far worse than you can imagine and far more
widespread than anyone wants to admit and they happen during every
single war and Rummy and his crew not only knew it was happening but
they also condoned it, promoted it, never made a move to stop it. So?
Standard operating procedure, baby. It says so all over Rummy's pinched,
sour face: It's an ugly, savage world, people. Now please just shut up
and let us devour it in peace.
Even the Red Cross is coming forth and saying, oh man, you think
those Abu Ghraib pictures are bad? You think it's just that hideous
little nightmare prison where American soldiers and American-funded
commandos and mercenaries are torturing and abusing and grinning for the
camera? You have no idea.
Cut to a close-up of Jack Nicholson's beady eyes, boring straight
into the smirking simpleton that is Bush, and then scanning over the
pro-Bush American voting public, so inured and sheltered and flag waving
and sucking down SUVs like baby seals. You want the truth? You can't
handle the truth!
And what is that truth now? What have these photos, these glorious
wartime atrocities, accomplished? Why, nothing short of guaranteeing
that the United States has never been so violently hated among Middle
Eastern nations as it is right now.
Nothing short of massacring any last vestige of remaining 9/11
sympathy. Nothing short of supplying a whole new generation of enraged
terrorists with all the proof they need that their cause is entirely
valid and just.
And nothing short of proving, for the 10,000th time, that BushCo has
dug us a grimy, violent, blood-soaked hole so deep we may never fully
emerge.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and
Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it
never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.
©2004 SF Gate
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
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