January 21, 2007

On occasion, we hear the slurs: "They're savages. Let's pull out of Iraq and let 'em at each other." The evidence of savagery? Hostage-beheading videos. Cheers and jeers during primitve hangings, recorded on cell-phone snuff films. Sunni and Shiite militias attacking and counterattacking innocent civilians, even blowing up each others' mosques. What to expect from the land that brought us Saddam Hussien and his long, dark reign of torture and terror?

Now come reports about al-Zawra, the "pirate" Iraqi television station (purportedly operated with embezzled funds) that has been airing videos in support of the Sunni insurgency, with images of bodies of Sunnis allegedly slain by Shia death squads, secret militia maneuvers, bombed U.S. vehicles, and what The New York Times describes as "grainly clips of grisly violence, running in loops and sometimes in slow motion." The savages, indeed.

And yet, watching today's NFC Championship game between the Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints, I was reminded once again of the accelerating American obsession with torture-tainment. During one commercial break, I watched uneasily at the roll-out of the new DVD for Saw III, the third in the horror-film series (each more popular than its predecessor) in which people are tortured with ingeniously crude and painful devices. (In the first movie, a victim was forced to hack off his own leg.) This spot was immediately followed by a commercial for the upcoming horror film Hannibal (as in Lecter), due in theaters February 7. The ad flashed the words, "TORTURE...MURDER...EVIL IS BORN." And while I was watching the game, theatergoers were flocking to The Hitcher, which opened in 2,800-plus U.S. movie houses this week, grossing (and I do mean grossing) $8.2 million as the country's fourth most popular film this weekend. From the producers of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hitcher, touted in TV commercials all week long, follows the travails of a hitch-hiker who tortures and kills the kind, unsuspecting Samaritans who offer him rides.

These films amount to nothing less than pure, unadulterated torture-porn, with requisite humiliation and semi-nudity thrown in, which seem to appear in new incarnations weekly . (This past December brought us Black Christmas, about a sorority terrorized by a psycho-killer at Christmas-time.) These harem-scare-em's emerge from the same part of the American psyche that brought us the depraved Abu Ghraib abuses, the thrash-metal ethos, and the deafening silence among the U.S. populace toward wartime provisions that allow thousands of suspected enemy combatants, under Constitutionally-suspect edicts, to be held in military prisons for years without a chance for due process, habeas corpus, or the slightest hint of human dignity.

America is the place that invented democracy; Iraq, the land of the fertile crescent, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet, that brought forth civilization itself.

Who are we to say what's savage and what's civilized?

ELSEWHERE, SPEAKING OF TERROR & IMAGE...

...COPS' VOWS. There was a heart-warming image in the "Vows" section of this morning's New York Times, showing the wedding of Judith Hernandez and Christopher Castro, two police officers who fell in love after being caught in the whirlwind downtown of September 11. One picture showed the pair near the Ground Zero perimeter, covered with dust after the collapse of the Trade Towers.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT STOLARIK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

(Hernandez told the Times that on 9/11 she groped in the dark for her fellow officer and future husband. "The collapse," wrote the Times, "had thrown him down an escalator, where he was unconscious with severe back and shoulder injuries.... When she yelled his name, he regained consciousness. 'I crawled under him and carried him on my shoulders twolevels up the broken escalators,' she said. " The other photo (see link here) showed them blowing out the candles of their wedding cake this past December 30.

...BUSH'S ABOUT-FACE. PDN (Photo District News) reports that at last week's presidential address on the new plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq, White House image-handlers decided not to let still photographers into the room to shoot the president during the speech. Instead, the press office offered a handout headshot. Miffed, two wire services, the Associated Press and Reuters, declined to run the image, denying the president his face time.

....BARACK, WITH A SHMEAR. In a broadcast today, "Fox & Friends" spread the bald-faced, two-faced lie that Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama may have attended a madrassa (an Islamic religious school where jihad is often a part of the curriculum). The Illinois senator did no such thing and is, in fact, Christian, not Muslim.