The Ewgrossorcist

One of the fascinating things about the same-sex marriage cases before the SCOTUS this week is that the anti-gay marriage crew isn't using the old-school arguments of "Ewww, gross" and "As it is written in The Book of Hezekiah, Chapter Seven, Verses Eighteen to Twenty..."  I guess those arguments don't have as much currency as they once did.

"Ew, gross" has, at various times, struck me as a robust argument regarding such topics as homosexuality, girls, and vegetables, so it's time to declare disgust and revulsion to be unreliable moral guides.

I don't want to wade into religious arguments, but I would note that the story of Sodom and Gommorah, often cited as an anti-gay narrative, is a deeply weird and difficult story that doesn't leave anyone except maybe Abram looking good.  It's kind of like a Golan-Globus movie, an overwrought caricature of the big bad city, with abject, comically demonized villains   Homosexuality sure doesn't get a clean bill of health in it, but the residents of the Twin Cities are also rapists and murderers who have ceased worshiping God.  It's disingenuous, or just stoopid, to say (as so many do) that it's the homosexuality that forced God's hand.

 So what kind of arguments are they making, there at SCOTUS?  Arguments that may seem to have that New Talking Point Smell, but if you look up any article by Maggie Gallagher from 2005 or so, you'll see the current anti-gay marriage case has been copied and pasted wholesale from there, or from wherever she got it.  Still, the fixation on procreation as the be-all and end-all of marriage makes me think the Maggie Gallagher argument on this subject may be like The Exorcist or stuff about nuns... If you're not Catholic, and I'm not, it's hard to see the point.  I think this is gonna be a win for same-sex marriage, and I'm pleased, both for the right reasons (people I care about will be able to formalize their relationships) and the wrong ones (apoplexy looks delightful on my ideological opponents).

Speaking of The Exorcist, I finally saw it, but (as I've suggested) I couldn't give myself over to it.  I can accept pretty much any narrative premise, no matter how goony, as long as the storyteller doesn't go bananas trying to persuade me that it isn't goony.  The filmmakers practically grabbed me by the lapels, screaming "No, the demon possession isn't a narrative device gesturing towards parental anxiety about their children's' pubertal misbehavior... it's about REAL DEMON POSSESSION, which is a real thing that happens!"  C'mon.  I saw a recently redone cut of the film; I understand the original release was more ambiguous.

The Only Thing I Intend To Write On This Unless I Think Of Something Good

When I was in high school I had some friends who were Communists, outspoken Reds who enjoyed shocking people (this was the late 80s, early 90s, when Communism was a much spookier thing to many people) with their scandalicious stance on political economics.

Last I checked, they grew up to be committed Republicans.  Having tried on a pose to see if it fit, they retained the interest in politics while discarding the elements they had come to regard as unsuitable.

So let's talk about Holmies, the teen girl fans of James Holmes, the former grad student who shot up the movie theatre and rigged up bombs in his apartment.

Like most people who've thought about the situation, my first, second, third, fourth and fifth reaction to this particular fandom was YUCK.

And it's fair to say that if James Holmes had been a 50-year old black guy, the Holmies wouldn't have looked twice at him.  But some of them might grow up to be people who will.

Maybe some of them will grow up to work with Amnesty International, or domestic Prisoners' Rights groups that strive to ensure prisoners have access to legal recourse, counseling, education and employment.

They are practicing love for the despised and unloveable.  They are prepping to be angels of mercy for people the rest of us would just as soon bury.

They Heard the Call

So a religious group is predicting the immanent end of the world. I used to hear Harold Camping, the worldly head of the organization behind this Neo-Millerite message, on a religious radio station in Birmingham. He has an idiosyncratic voice and lumbering speech style that I found hypnotic; I barely remember any of what he had to say, except that events in the news tie in with scriptural prophecy, plus dancing is bad because you could cut in and hold his wife in your arms, which ain’t how Harold Camping rolls. Maybe he should try salsa.

I bring this up not for cheap yucks but because I wonder if some part of his mind is already working on a rationalization for if and when the Rapture doesn’t happen on his schedule. He says on NPR that there is “No plan B.” Does that mean Camping doesn’t have a Plan B, or God doesn’t? Can Camping tell the difference between his plans for God and God’s plans for Camping? Can anyone tell the difference between their plans for God and God’s plans for them?

While I’m picking on preachers, consider this guy. The story reminds me of the year I spent working at a factory in Chattanooga that made a point of hiring students from the local seminary. Many of them were inspiring guys; kind, helpful, scholarly and smart.

Others, I believe, were becoming preachers because it was the only way they’d ever get any respect. Goofy, slow-witted, mean-spirited people who wanted to don the mantle (or cloak) of goodness that preachers get by default. Assuming there’s something to my suspicions, it’s not surprising that some preachers would bark like a SEAL. Note what retired SEAL Don Shipley, who keeps track of retired SEALS for the Navy, says:

““We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It’s amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up.”

As long as you're disguising yourself for cheap validation, why not add a second layer of cloaking?

BTW one of these seminarians showed two very different sides of himself depending on whether he was talking to fellow students or civilians; once when his schoolmates weren’t around he boasted of getting kicked out of the local strip club for fistfighting. This wasn't before he was saved; this was the previous weekend. I later asked him what his plan for the future was. He wanted to be a traveling evangelical preacher, affiliated with a church but going from one church/revival to another. I like to think he’s out there in Tennessee or someplace, some small town, preaching the gospel under a white canopy, winning souls, while scanning the congregation for potential Jezebels…

Kitty!

The other day I was driving down South Concord, one of the main roads around here, when I saw a little orange critter trying to cross the street. It was a tabby kitten, nervously stopping and starting in the middle of the street, its round little head shifting as its big circle eyes tried to decide if my car was gonna hit it or not. I slammed on the brakes, of course; they say you shouldn't risk human lives to save an animal, but they say lots, don't they? I will cause a pileup to save a kitten. This isn't a gray area for me. Happily no one had to die that day, including the kitten, which made it to the relative safety of the McDonald's parking lot.

One of our neighbors sets out bowls of cat food and water for local strays, and many cats set up shop on her front porch. A birdwatcher friend of mine, who brings to the issue of cat vs. bird the same angry moral absolutism others reserve for Israel vs. Palestine, disapproves of this practice, but it's a practice that won points with me today. I was strolling by the cat-lady house when I noticed a new member of the kitty crew: a little orange kitten, playing with its new community of cats. Home at last.

See-Oh-Ehn Spiracy.

I'm fond of conspiracy theories as a sort of modern folklore, a sort of objective correlative by sleight of hand. I am, however, skeptical of real-world conspiracy theories, as my last post suggested, because of my experiences on the inside of situations that seemed conspiratorial on the outside.

When two students from my alma mater, Birmingham-Southern College, burned down a bunch of Baptist churches, I obsessively perused the blogosphere to see what conclusions people were drawing about the old school. Several bloggers found it suspicious that students from a Methodist-affiliated school (variously identified as "a Methodist College" and "A Methodist Bible College") only burned down Baptist churches. Some thought they'd uncovered proof of an interdenominational shadow war. I enjoy mentioning this to my fellow Southerners, most of whom are Baptist or Methodist, and all of whom regard it as a good joke. I can see how, given humanity's long history of sectarian strife, people who aren't familiar with the placidity of Protestant interaction around here might cook up such a narrative, but there's more animosity between Bama and Auburn fans than between Baptists and Methodists. Anyway, if you're ever in rural Alabama, pay attention to the churches you see. Chances are, most will be Baptist. I don't think the arsonists were picking and choosing. They shot a cow that same trip, on the pretext of hunting, so it doesn't seem like discretion was part of their thought process.

And then there's this obsolete old horror, posting from his cavern of Catholic kitsch about how the arsonists did what they did because they were Jewish.

They weren't, by the way, Jewish; they were typical Protestant-raised cultural Christians. One might think a barmy Catholoon would be only to happy to wail on them for being the spawn of Luther, but apparently his antiquated hate is too baroque for such linear proceedings.

***

Closer to home, my Dad is the Clay Shaw of Pinewood Derbies. Pinewood Derbies, for the uninitiated, are races that Cub Scout Packs hold once a year. Every scout makes a car from a standard kit. Block of wood, plastic wheels, pair of axles. Carve the wood, paint it, race it. Most scouts carved it to resemble the silhouette of a passenger car, which is not exactly the most aerodynamic shape. With my last Derby approaching I saw, in an issue of Boy's Life, a Derby design that looked more like a race car. Actually it looked like a doorstop on wheels, but I wheedled my Dad into helping me use this plan. He was uncertain because it was so off-model from customary design, but he went along. He even painted it really nice: black with crackling red flames; he was hoping to win the best-looking car contest, which we didn't.

But we did win the actual race. The judges scratched their heads over the unconventional design, but it didn't go against the letter of the rules; it wasn't a violation to look like the sole race car in a fleet of station wagons. A Pinewood Derby takes a while; there are many, many heats if you've got a big Pack. I think ours was over a hundred boys, but we won heat after heat, and our car took First Place. There was some grumbling about this, since the car had seemingly jumped the track a couple times and blocked other cars; probably just the result of being too light in front.

But it didn't pass the smell test. Because my Dad was the Pack Leader.

And the son of the Assistant Pack Leader won second place.

Imagine what a Truther or a Birther would make of this.

Now, anyone who knows my Dad and his Scouting Assistant knows that these are not people who would risk their good names, nor betray anyone's trust, over a Pinewood Derby. They know what a childrens' game is worth, and they know what a reputation is worth. But I can understand how, from outside appearances, this might look like a small-stakes conspiracy.

If I were an Ayn Rander I might argue that there's a correspondence between the leadership qualities it takes to be a Pack Leader and the Howard Roark qualities it takes to design an unconventional race-winning Pinewoodmobile, but I doubt my Dad would stand for it.

Note for the night.

If an argument on behalf of position X is just as applicable to positions like "The Jews killed the dinosaurs!" then it's time to reconsider arguments.

Color Correction and Incorrect Conning

Today I was strolling across the college campus where my Wife works when a dude in a car (I don't notice things like makes and models, but it looked pretty nice) pulled up by me, leaned out the window, and started giving me a spiel. Started with a very long, very rehearsed routine about how he was a data something-or-other-supposed-to-sound-technical-and-impressive, doing fancy-pants computer work for the college, but he was in Charlotte by mistake and needed to get to Charleston and was out of gas money and his phone was booby-trapped or something, so could I do him a favor and go to an ATM with him and withdraw some money, he'd pay me back honest, he makes $130,000 a year and is totally good for it if I'd just help him out here.

Although one fantasizes about telling off con men, I slipped into my default response to such routines, which is a sort of counterspiel, a "huh, whu, I don' geddit, no speekie de engwish, duh der diddle doo, oh look a sunbeam."

He said "Sorry to interrupt you," and sharked off.

Thanks to my wife I know a lot of people who actually do work with technical stuff, actually do travel around, and actually do make a lot of money.

Item 1: They have better problem solving skills than the kind of shmoe who stops random people on the street to get help. In a jam they'd find campus security or whoever was arranging for them to be doing a job in the first place. They have connections, and even if they are desperate for money, they don't get desperate about the money, at least not in front of strangers.

Item Two: They don't lead with a Life's Work infodump. People who do sophisticated work, like people of breeding, communicate who and what they are with their bearing first and foremost. They don't bling it, they just are it. They'll bring up specifics when specifics are called for, but if they need a stranger's help they don't start with "Hey buddy, I do XYZ and I gotta favor to ask," they start with "Can you direct me to Campus Security?"

#

The other night we saw a cheezy 80's movie; what I think of as a time capsule movie, where you're not there for the narrative or whatever, you're there for clothes, hairdos, cars, all the cultural bricabrac. And we were satisfied customers. I bring it up because, in paying attention to the bright colors of the film, I noticed something you won't see in newer films.

The heroine was outdoors on a sunny day, and the different planes of her pale-skinned face were reflecting various colors, including green and blue. She really looked like a Fauvist portrait, but one would never notice it if one weren't contemplating the color scheme of the image, because our eyes harmonize this kind of thing all the time in real life. Without looking like amateurish filmmaking, it gave the picture a little reality.

You won't see that in modern films. We watched some Lost Sseason Two) the next night, and I looked for any stray bits of reflected color on peoples' faces.

Fergit it. One thing future generations will mock about current movies and TV is that they color-correct everything to death. Got a face? It'll be beige, chocolate or orange. So will the background, if it isn't blue.

That's one reason I find myself drawn to older films (okay, it was Teen Witch, pure schlock but wonderful Eighties duds and 'dos.) Whatever may be phony or false in them, the reflections on the actors' faces have some bearing on reality.

I Don't Wanna Go Back

I've written before about weirdoes at the laundromat, but as I sit here doing laundry in our own household machines I recall there were many as-yet undocumented but unsettling encounters. It was a 24 hour place, open to all, so all kinds of people showed up. If you were there in the early morning and wanted to have a sexual encounter with a sweaty trembling tweaker you were usually in luck. Not that I ever availed myself, you understand, but they made their presence and their proclivities known.

If you went on a Saturday afternoon you'd always have to contend with the big ruddy guy in the muumuu who didn't wash his clothes in the machines. There was a large sink the custodian washed his mop in; it was always kind of cruddy. And Muumuu Man would dump his laundry in there, pour on detergent, and turn on the faucet. He'd also smoke inside even though there were No Smoking signs everywhere. Once he stood right in front of the only exit, blocking the path with his big circus-tent-looking body, smirking as people tried to get around him. Oh, Muumuu Man.

One night was particularly noteworthy. I put my laundry in the machines and went for a little stroll around the nearby park. It was dark out, and I heard a howling that I took to be a dog. Eventually, though, the howling resolved into a phrase: "I DON'T WANNA GO BACK TO PRISON," over and over again. I went back inside. A bunch of cute college kids were doing their laundry and chatting. They were mostly white females and black males, and clearly very happy to be together. It was nice to be on the periphery of such a warm crew; like sitting near a campfire.

Then a scraggly hillbillyish guy came in, looked at them with a manic grin, walked all around the room, loudly slammed a top-loader lid, and stormed out.

Light nervous laughter. "That was random," one of the kids said.

Then the guy came back in the door with a thick branch in his hand.

"Now yew all get on out of here," he said. "We don't want yew messin' with our women."

One of the young black men said something appropriately inappropriate. The ridiculous person left. One of the kids called the police, who drove around but didn't find the guy. I wonder if he ever went back to prison.

Watching the Eggs

A bird has built a nest on a beam sticking out from the back of our shed. She's laid several beautiful blue eggs. Every time one of us passes through the back yard the mother bird flies from the nest and settles on a nearby branch.

Imagine her situation: children to incubate, but terror of these enormous creatures that occasionally lumber by. When the creatures arrive she is compelled to flee, yet compelled to stay near and watch over her eggs. Of course my wife and I are no threat to her eggs, but we know of no way to reassure her.

Afraid to stay, unable to leave. I'm incubated from such fragile circumstances, but I suppose it's the norm for most creatures, including many humans.

Healthy Living, D. C. style

We just got back from Washington D. C. One of the big differences between D. C. and the Southern towns I've lived in is that hardly anyone in The District is overweight. It's not hard to figure out why. Let's compare the average day of, say, a person from my town to that of a typical D. C. person.

A person from around here gets to work by getting in the truck and driving there. Then goes to lunch (BBQ or burgers) by getting in the truck and driving there. Then goes shopping by... getting in the truck, driving to Wal-Mart, HEAVING his/her bulk out of the cab, maybe waddling a block or two during the whole shopping expedition, then getting back in the truck, driving home, parking the truck in the yard by the front door for minimum walking.

Compare this to a D. C. resident. Our D. C. person leaves home, walks a few blocks to the Metro, moves quickly and efficiently through the rushing crowd, hops the right train, takes a breather for a few stops, hops out, catches the next train, hops out, walks a few more blocks to the front of The White House, one-handedly HOISTS and SUSTAINS a large sign reading

"Who destroyed Pentagon on 9-11?

Barack Obama

Saddam Hussain

Marion Barry

in Crack Cocaine Conspiracy with Zionist Jew Israelite Homosexual

Child Sex Slavery for Hillary Clinton Reptoid Jew Homosexual"

for the rest of the day. Beaming with vitality, the picture of health.

So get in step, Southerners! Move around a little.

(I'm scared to see what kind of Google hits I'm gonna get from that sign)

Graves and The Golden

Passed a favorite graveyard today (it has family crypts like mini-temples amidst the headstones; very horror movie-riffic) and like most graveyards in town it's actually a churchyard. Anyway, someone had knocked over and broken some of the headstones. In a city I would just write such events off as inevitable urban vandalism, but in a small country town I grasp for specific socio-economic explanations of such activity, just as I assume aggressive driving in a small town is connected to economic frustration, but in the city it's just inevitable that dense populations mean more jerks. Only today does it occur to me that I'm applying different expectations to different environments. It's irksome that some stupid person besmirched some grave markers, but it's fun to imagine the aggrieved dead rising to haunt our anonymous defiler.

* * *

Reading The Golden by Lucius Shepard; it's a political thriller set in a Gormenghastly vampire palace. The vampire stuff is used as metaphor and MSG. Shepard's short stories are more subtle, but he lets the Gothiness of it all justify some extravagant excess; then he finds the nuanced shadings within the excess. Ken Russell should make the movie.

Scattershot

Once you've posted cute cat pictures on your blog, you can never go back. A boundary has been crossed. So where to go from here?

Weeell.. I recently saw the movie Immortal, directed by respected European comics artist Enki Bilal. It's adapted from his Nikopol Trilogy comics (out of print, and a used copy costs more than a new Chrysler, BTW). The comic is sci-fi nonsense poetry, a sequence of tableaus on the subject of urban decay and disaffected Euro-glam. I hoped the movie would also be a sequence of tableaus, like Peter Greenaway remaking Blade Runner, but for the movie Bilal seems to have plugged into more conventional Tinseltown action vocabulary. The blend of live actors and low-grade CGI has a clumsy Song of the South vibe... the whole thing seems like an exercise in trying to pacify an oddball aesthetic for Hollywood sensibilities, and failing to please fans of either approach.

* * *

One nice thing about Kannapolis: the farmers' Market is packed with organic free-range grass-fed meat. Laurie and I have heard too many horror stories about factory farms and their Cheneyesque approach to animals; we don't object to slaughtering animals for food, but we think the critters should be have good lives right up to the final hour. Best sausage we've ever had.

The Cel Phone and the Self

Once upon a time Andy Warhol did a series of polaroid photos and exhibited them with ZERO SHAME for the low-end nature of his selected medium. Perhaps if he were with us today he'd do a series of phone-camera shots. Take these snapshots of my cel-phone-enhanced life for what they are.

Accidental self-portrait; or, how I appear to the 25-year-old white boys who serve as North Carolina's casting directors... a nondescript blur.


Forest Park


D2


D2 IN ACTION

The Backyard

One of the most awesome things in walking distance of my home although another thing that leaps to mind is the shop Southern Charm (not pictured). If I had the spending money I'd buy every Christmas Cottage in the joint, then experience a massive dose of buyer's remorse.


'Ham.

The Ghost of Trane


Forest Park...

...and Kannapolis

Parents' home
Sloss
Artificial London
DC Metro

Cute Kitty, Fluffy Bunny, Buzzing Flies

Ever since we moved here our cat, D2 a.k.a. Mr. Two, has been stalking backyard critters.

(A note on D2's name... this is what happens when you let research technicians name cats. He was part of a breeding experiment, his brother was D1, he's D2. At least he's not named after R2-D2. We also call him Mr. Two, Two, Toober, etc. etc.)

So Mr. Two likes to skulk around the backyard, menacing birds, bunnies and squirrels. But he never seems to catch any, and we liked to refer to his hunts as photo safaris.

Well he sure showed us.

The other day I was in the backyard reading when I heard a piercing squeal. I looked up to see a striped kitty galloping top speed to the open back door with a writhing bunny in his jaws.

Head twist, cracking sound, limp bunny.

Running fat bald guy, trying to shut the door in time. Failure to achieve stated goal.

Cat dragging bunny corpse all over the house.

Finally Two dropped the bunny and patted it quizzically. Get up and play! It's not naptime till I say it's naptime!

I put on some rubber gloves (I'm fastidious about some things, like raw death) and tossed it out by the thicket. The next day I went out to bury it... flies were already hunkered down on its pelt.

Since then the cat has been energized and emboldened, chasing down prey with fresh expectation.

I choose to see it as a good omen for my upcoming auditions. After multiple rejections, maybe I'll catch a bunny.

And then it'll die and be buried. Stupid omen!

Stop Snatching

I hope to have a few photos of our Washington D. C. trip up soon, but I'm feeling a bit of an inferiority complex over Kannapolis/Charlotte's lack of a Metro system or excellent, or merely good, or even tolerable, restaurants. So, here's one area where Washington falls a bit flat: purse snatchers.

When my family and I visited in the Eighties, a guy waltzed up to my Mom, wearing IIRC a sharp suit and sunglasses. He said something to the effect of "Ma'am, may I ask you a question," bumped into Mom, said something like "I'm sorry," and waltzed away. Mom later explained that the guy made a grab for her purse, but Mom held on and foiled him.

And this trip, someone seems to have hacked at Laurie's purse strap in an effort to snag it, but didn't cut all the way through.

What up, D. C. purse snatchers? Twenty years later and you guys still suck.

Thicket

Our back yard is bound by a chain link fence, and behind the back fence is a thicket of brush and trees. It's close to our garden, and sometimes when I'm out weeding I'll hear a tumbling ruckus in the thicket. I'll look deep into the branches, and see that one little bird hopping about is setting off a chain reaction of noisy friction and vibration. One little bird. As I type this I'm gazing out the kitchen window at a chubby bunny on the visible side of the thicket. The bunnies were thin last year; they disappeared for the winter, and are back, plump and plush.

One can see chimneys peeking over the treetops, and it was fun to imagine they were the tops of ruins buried in a forest... I was reading the fantasy novel Mythago Wood around the time I moved in, and its story of a mysterious forest probably shaped my way of looking at the thicket. Recently our cat escaped from the back yard and I went stomping around, trying to find him. I'd avoided the thicket, largely because I didn't want to see the other side and have my Mythago Wood daydreams scuttled, but now I waded in. Of course the other side of the thicket was almost a mirror image of our side, and the chimney-topped houses on the other side don't look much different from ours.

As it happens, all the chimneys in this town are non-functional relics of a time when they were important parts of the residents' heating system. They're all plugged up now. Every house has a fireplace that has been stuffed closed.

Anyway, the cat is home safe, and the springtime greenery of the thicket seems as lovely and haunting as ever, despite my glimpse of the other side.

Intelligences Flat, Crude and Unsympathetic

The Mars Institute, a non-governmental organization, wants to drive a Humvee around on Mars. I suppose the thinking is that if there really is any kind of life on Mars, it's vitally important that Humanity render it extinct with pollution, habitat destruction, and tread marks. In order to assist in this process I suggest we send everyone with a Hummer to Mars.

Our haste from hence is of so quick condition, that it prefers itself, and leaves unquestion'd matters of needful value.

-Measure For Measure, Act One, Scene One.

I voted for Obama and I'm rooting for him, but I'm unnerved by two things:

The economic crisis is to Keynsians what 9/11 was to Neo-Cons: a chance to test their pet theories on a mighty, costly scale.

And on a cheezier level, the recent Democrat-led attempts to position Rush Limbaugh as the face of the Republican Party resembles the greasy game-playing that was Karl Rove's weapon of choice. I had hoped that Rove's crapola had worn out its welcome...

Let's build a Snow Squid!

It snowed quite a bit the other night. I can't decide which I like better: the Currier and Ives view out every window, or the concert of eery dripping, slushing, sloughing sounds I hear every time I step outside... the gentle harmonies of melting and sliding snow.

* * *

And the nerd grapevine tells me SPOILER WARNING that the squid isn't in that Watchmen movie. I don't know whether to commend the filmmakers for shaking things up or wag my finger at them for dropping one of the elements of the story that I found most distressing on my first reading. Aah, their checks will cash the same either way. I suspect they didn't wanna give aid and comfort to the 9/11 Truthers.

Someone should make a buddy movie where the squid and Old Tom Bombadil go on a road trip to Hollywood, bent on vengeance.

Transcription (From Memory)

Page: You're listening to the Diane Rehm Show. I'm Susan Page, filling in for Diane, and our topic today is harsh interrogation tactics which the Bush administration has approved and defended, but which President Obama seeks to end. Our guests are Mike Posner, President of Human Rights First; Jess Bravin, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and Mark Thiessen, former speechwriter for President Bush. Mike, what's the story on harsh interrogation?

Mike: The Greatest Generation had a strict anti-torture policy, and they beat the Axis. We have a pro-torture policy, and we can't beat a bunch of scruffy cave dwellers.

Mark: We don't define it as torture if it works. Our interrogators tried going by the book and got diddly, but with harsh interrogation techniques we got info on all kinds of evil, and used that info to stop attacks on Americans.

Page: Such as?

Mark: Al-Quaida was totally gonna go ape all over us, but we got the info and stopped it.

Mike: Can you back that up with specifics?

Mark: I'm afraid I can't reveal the kind of high-level secrets that only speechwriters are privy to.

Jess: You know, I sat in on some Army interrogation training, and the by-the-book tactics aren't softball at all. They push people pretty far.

Mark: Nah, I've seen it. It's totally vanilla.

Mike: Vanilla?

Page: Let's take some calls. Hello Fred, you're on the air.

Fred: I'm a psychologist so I know what I'm talking about when I say that in Vietnam we learned that you do ANYTHING to get the information. You can't have your hands tied. You do whatever it takes to get the information. I can't tell you how many times I had to tie a guy up, slap him around, and press my genitals to his sweating, bristly face, just to get information out of him.

Mike: So those were the interrogation tactics used in Vietnam?

Fred: They were my tactics, and I find they're just as applicable to therapy.

Page: Really.

Fred: I've turned many a troubled teen around.

Mike: Say, didn't we lose in Vietnam?

Fred: Who's we, white man? Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn! He taught us how to win!

Page: And that's about enough of Fred. Here's Becky from Nashville on line 2.

Becky: Speaking as President and Founder of the Nashville branch of the Daddy Touched Me And I Liked It Society, I believe real American Christian Men are tough. and in my White Christian McMansion with Thomas Kinkade prints on the wall, tough means being strong enough to put panties on the head of a guy who's been tied to a bedframe.

Mark: Now you're talkin'.

Becky: Don't forget, Jesus was a torturer!

Jess: Actually Jesus was tortured, not a torturer.

Becky: Are you saying Jesus was a terrorist?

Jess: No, the Romans thought he was a terrorist, so they tortured him on a false pretext.

Becky: That never happens I'm not listening LA LA LA. If you drew a Venn Diagram of "People Who Get Tortured" and "Terrorists" it would show a total overlap. We are an exceptional, moral, blessed nation, and that means we can do anything we want without jeapordizing our exceptional, moral, blessed status. If that means torturing a few creeps, so what?

Mark: Wow, I usually have to pay $3.95 per minute for this.

Page: Becky, thank you for your keen insights. Mark, zip your pants back up.

Mark: Look, this word "torture" is getting thrown around too freely. It's not torture if they're HEROES.

Mike: Where I come from Heroes is a dopey superhero soap opera. Only Neo-Cons think it's a reality show.

Mark: Mike, why do you love 9-11?

Mike: Suck it, gnome.

Mark: Okay then, Mike, let me ask you something. If you could have prevented 9-11 by sticking bamboo shoots under a terrorist's fingernails, would you have?

Jess: If I may interject here, 9-11 didn't happen because no one in America had the moral courage to torture terrorists. It happened because the CIA and FBI were acting like middle-schoolers who think each other is too stuck up. If they had shared information that they already had, the whole thing could have been averted.

Mark: Where's the fun in that? I can't go back to highlighting favorite passages in Naked Lunch! Tormenting young Arabic men is too important for the imagination alone! It needs to be explored... in all its shiny, wet glory...

Page: My hand to God, we are never discussing this topic again.